The Distance Between Us and Love: Why We’re Afraid to Fall in Love
Time, space, morality, self. We can’t normalize love, and we can’t regard it as a part of our daily life. This is the distance between us and love.
I often discuss love movies with my friends, whether it is old movies like “Ancestor and Zhan”, “Hiroshima Love”, “Roman Holiday”, or contemporary movies like “Titanic”, “BJ’s Diary” and “Sweet Honey”, the love in the camera always has a kind of unreachable freedom. Love and abandonment are just a switch of one frame. Unforgettable is synonymous with love. Characters wander in love, and can also be independent after broken love. All complicated love has a literary beauty. The lingering and protracted reminiscence that breaks the taboo finally turns into a kind of envy in our discussion. Very few people, at least the people around me, have never really felt the so-called “vigorous”.
I once said boldly that romance films are actually a kind of falsehood. If you think in your heart what the ideal state of love looks like, you can write in that direction, and you can always write something good. In fact, I failed, and the love story is not as easy to write as I imagined, and it is even more difficult to write than I imagined. The core of a love movie is often not the story, not the relationship between the characters, or even the imaginary perfect state, but the choice of characters, the choice when love comes and leaves, from the inside out, a person’s attitude towards love determines the essence of this love story, and most of us can hardly enjoy the attitude of love. In love movies, people enjoy it, both happiness and pain, but in real life, we can only accept the joy of love, and pain is the antonym of love. Later, I didn’t write that love story well, and told my friends that I might really have never loved someone well.
In 2005, Chen Kexin finally handed over a satisfying romance film “If Love” after “Sweet Honey”. This is almost the most special romance film in the past two decades. Sun Na, played by Zhou Xun, is an ambitious woman. When ambition and love are on the same scale, she just seems to lean to one side, and she is greedy to have it together. Lin Jiandong, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, seems to be in love, but he is actually planning revenge while tracing back love. In the end, the men and women in the movie seem to be a little hideous, but they are actually the deep interpretation of love. They turn the sweetness of love into a kind of inner talent, and at the same time turn the pain of love into a pursuit of fame and fortune. In exchange for life, we can’t love, we will only feel sorry for ourselves, we can’t afford it, when we climb out of the mud, we just want to clean ourselves, start again, look, how timid, dare not mention the past, none of us dare to fight more and more bravely covered in mud, we only know how to recall the lost feelings.
It took Richard Linklater 18 years to film the “Love Is…” trilogy, and he really watched Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy from beauty to aging. At a certain moment, you will feel that they really have experienced 18 years together, from love to marriage, from thunder to fire to rice, oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar tea, which is so real and terrifying. From their encounter on the train to their separation, reunion is no longer the best time, but they still choose to get married, but they also fall into poor daily quarrels after marriage. Today, many young people’s incomprehension of love starts with this movie. They don’t even understand why the love that is married after cheating is regarded as a classic by so many people. I don’t know when we started to look at love in the framework of moral judgment unconsciously, as if our true feelings had to bow to the so-called “rules”. It seems that people can control the feeling of liking, suppress the nature of love, and truly live themselves as a saint. The most interesting thing about love is that it never follows the rules. It is not to promote love that is not recognized by the world, but to say that there are many forms of love, and it is impossible for us to allow only one kind of existence.
When we discuss the love on the screen, we can’t help but conclude that because no one has ever met love, contemporary people are afraid of falling in love. The distance between us and love is too far. It’s like standing on any corner of the earth. You can see the sun, but it never belongs to you.
The biggest difference from the characters in love movies is that they rely on love to understand themselves, reshape themselves, and let themselves grow, but in real life, we preach that we can understand ourselves, as if we don’t need anyone, we already understand ourselves.
But do we really understand?
It is impossible for a person who has never been in love to truly understand himself, and love is definitely not a part that ordinary social interaction can replace. Your friends will take care of you, take care of you, choose you, and leave you, but they will not really live with you and understand you in every detail. Only the other half in love can. People in love will have a mirror that no one else has. In the mirror, you will see your own strengths and weaknesses, and you will get the most authentic feedback.
In the past ten years, it has been difficult for us to see movies that truly dare to love and dare to hate. The love conveyed to the young people today has become two extremes, either sweet to the point of cloying, or regretful to despair. In fact, like in the movie “Love Like a Bouquet”, my favorite is the last scene of them raising their hands back to back. It is a kind of tribute to each other after the love is over. We have not suffered in vain. We have treated this relationship sincerely. Although it is over, we do not regret it.
A few days ago, I had dinner with a female screenwriter friend. She said that she was ready to have a child. I was surprised and said, are you getting married? She said, of course not! I am not married, but I want to have a child with my boyfriend, because I love him very much, but I am afraid that this love will disappear, so I will have a child while I still love. Marriage involves more family responsibilities, sour relationships, and possible property issues, but love doesn’t require these. After listening to her, I think it’s very cool. I don’t define love by relationship, but define love by love. I think it’s so rare.
Like another friend told me that he really thinks long-term love is too difficult, but every short-term love he will devote himself to, hurt many times, but also happy many times. While consuming, he is also accumulating and discovering his own greater energy. In the process of bleeding, he also enriched his life experience. Later, he said that the thickness of life is not how much you have really achieved, but how you dare to experience things that others are afraid of. Love is one of them. After listening to him say this, I suddenly felt that being in love is natural, but now it has become a kind of brave behavior, which is ironic and funny.
There was a time when I was crazy about watching love movies with my friends. When I rewatched “Zhiming and Chunjiao” at home, I sighed that Peng Haoxiang must have super experience in love to make such a movie:
Zhiming came in with a pack of haagen-Dazs, then carefully took out the ice cream, and then poured the dry ice in the bag into the toilet. When the dry ice meets the water, white smoke keeps coming out, and the white smoke gushes out along the toilet, like a cloud. Chunjiao couldn’t help sighing.
Chunjiao: Be careful it’s hot.
Zhiming: No problem.
Chunjiao: It’s amazing, like a fairyland.
Zhiming: It’s like shitting in heaven.
When I came out of a tavern in Maizidian after drinking with my friends, we chatted a long street about love again. He has not been in love for about five years, and he has almost forgotten the feeling of being desperate last time. Then why not talk about it? I can’t help asking. Talk, how to talk? Falling in love is much more difficult than finding a job. He said that if there is someone he falls in love with now, he would be willing to fly to the other city immediately, but where is that person?
I asked my friend, have you ever thought that our generation’s misjudgment of love is often persecuted by parents’ urging marriage? Because they are not ready to love someone and are blindly pushed into a relationship that is not sincere, many young people who have just graduated from college have to go on a blind date. It is obviously an era of free love. Once it becomes a certain requirement and task, you will be in conflict! Why do you have to become an order from your parents to connect with someone you like? Once the rebellious psychology kicks in, you won’t even want to fall in love, will you? This point of view has been recognized by him to a certain extent, but at the same time he said dismissively, but what does it have to do with parents? In the final analysis, love is still your own business, you can talk about it if you want, don’t always make excuses for yourself not being in love.
Later we started the competition, named out our favorite romance movies, and then searched Douban to see how many points the public had scored. Whoever lost would pay for the taxi ride home, but I didn’t expect that my “A Chinese Journey to the West” lost to his “Titanic” by 0.3 points. But I am still very unconvinced and say that the death of a person leads to the extra 0.3, but most of us still live like Zixia and Zhizunbao.
Probably because he was drinking, he suddenly expressed his feelings about love. Love is a feeling. Don’t think of it too great or powerful. Many people deify love, so they feel that love is not important. If love is regarded as just a part of daily life, like eating and sleeping, people will be much more relaxed. But it is precisely that we cannot normalize love and regard it as a certain link in our daily life. This is the distance between us and love.
For me, bravely accepting every inch of my inner throbbing, not excluding love from life, not fearing, not despising, not turning love into a seemingly brave (stupid) behavior, is the most important part of crossing this distance.
