This year's Tanabata Festival falls on a Saturday. Despite the fact that many marriage registries are "working overtime for love", the number of marriages registered in Guangdong, Guangxi and Inner Mongolia has declined to varying degrees compared to the previous year.
On social media, a netizen from Chengdu said that the dustbins on the street on the night of Tanabata saw not a single flower, and that he was about to doubt the solidity of the feelings of the people of Chengdu.
Indeed, this generation of young people seems to be learning to "evolve" love out. They have dug out many love-brain characters from classic films and TV shows, criticising love-brain as a contemporary terminal disease, and even love as a scam of patriarchal and consumerist society.
What's wrong with the love brain and why is it so disliked?
I. Young People Don't Want to Fall in Love Anymore, Not to Mention Marriage.
To talk about the love brain, we have to start with young people's view of marriage.
We all know that over the years, young people in China are less inclined to get married.
According to the 2021 China Civil Affairs Statistical Yearbook, since reaching a peak of 9.9‰ in 2013, the domestic crude marriage rate has been on the way down, and the marriage rate has been declining for eight consecutive years until 2021. Housing prices, work pressure, and the cost of childbearing ...... All of these have all become stumbling blocks for young people on the road to marriage.
Not only the willingness to get married became lower, but many young people don't even want to have a relationshiop.
In 2021, a study by Renmin University of China surveyed 9,775 college students in 22 provinces about their views on marriage and parenthood, and found that more than 40% of them had no intention of having a relationship.
Among them, girls' willingness to have a relationship is relatively lower, with only 54.42 per cent intending to have a relationship, lower than that of boys, which is 56.88 per cent.
Interestingly, the intention of getting married is very different between male and female students.
Among the interviewed female college students, only about 49% of them have the intention to get married, which is lower than the proportion of those who have the intention to have a relationship, showing the phenomenon of "marriage is cold and love is hot". Male college students, on the contrary, are "hot to get married and cold to fall in love", with nearly three-quarters of them wanting to get married, which is much higher than the proportion of those who want to have a relationship.
Why do these young people not want to have a relationship?
The three main reasons given in the study are respectively not being able to find a suitable person, enjoying being single, and being in a relationship consuming too much energy. Among them, boys also have a reason significantly different from girls. That is, there is too much financial pressure to start a relationship.
This is the case for college students, but how about the young social animals in the workplace? We have counted 4995 responses to the question "Why don't you want to be in a relationship?" from Zhihu Website and came to a similar conclusion.
Among those responses, the biggest reason people don't want to be in a relationship is that they don't have the time and energy.
This is evidenced by the working hours of young people. In 2019, a survey report on the use of time by Chinese people showed that young people in a first-tier city worked 10 hours a day, with a commuting time of nearly 2 hours. Under such a rhythm, feelings and other things have become a bubble, and it is more realistic to engage in money and career.
Secondly, they are lazy and afraid of causing trouble. To establish a close relationship, there are too many things to do. Knowing, understanding, and bonding, this process is already tiring even to think about it.
For some young people, unless there is a rich and handsome guy who is not troublesome and single-minded to love them, otherwise they will be too lazy to take the step of love. They would rather get high on CP and rely on other people's love to get dopamine, saving the trouble they have to encounter, which is also known as:
Do not want to have love, just want to get close to love.
II. Love Brain, A Terminal Disease in the Eyes of Contemporary Youth
Some young people's resistance to relationships goes beyond not wanting to or unwilling to have one, and escalates into a theoretical critique of relationships themselves. This is partly reflected in the all-out attack on the "love brain".
I don't know when the saying "Wise men don't fall in love, but fools are trapped by love" become a common refrain. As independent modern people, "being sober" is the goal of life, and the love brain is simply a relic of the old days of ignorance.
On many social media platforms, young people have expressed their disgust for the love brain, not only for their own love brain, but also for the love brain shown by others.
When it comes to love brain, the emotion that young people talk about the most is feeling difficult, followed by uncontrollable happiness, and some of them even feel disgusted and scared at the sight of love brain.
Among them, some are indeed "sunk" in an unpleasant relationship because of a heavy love brain, or even like Wang Baochuan, who lost himself for love, made too many unnecessary sacrifices and became a slave of love.
However, there are also people who are wavering in their relationships, or who blame their love brain for their negative emotions when they encounter unpleasant things in their relationships. If you can get rid of the love brain, then you will also be able to cut off the roots of love, not be sad or happy, and you will not suffer due to bad men/women.
Because they hate the effects of love brain on them, there are many young people who gather in online forums and groups waiting to "be waken up".
They listed a lot of "love brain diseases", such as emotions always affected by the other side, attention all on the other side, easy to forgive each other's faults, etc.:
Her every move, a little bit of change, a little bit of perfunctory, will be infinitely magnified by me.
This paragraph, in the past, may be as romantic as the "teenage Witt's trouble" narrative, and in the eyes of the person who posted, love brain disease is in a terminal period with no cure.
Not only are extremely irrational behaviours considered to be love-brain, but in the eyes of many, even the emotions that are prevalent in love have become love-brain manifestations.
With such a standard, many love-themed film and literature classics have become love brain samples: Lin Daiyu is always thinking of the philandering Jia Baoyu, love brain; Rose gives up the rich young master for the poor boy on the Titanic, love brain; Yuan Xiangqin doesn't do well in her studies and always thinks of Jiang Zhishu, love brain......
As a result, many young men and women facing a relationship in platforms such as Hupu and Douban, instead of opening their arms and experiencing the fluttering of love, are on guard to avoid any manifestation of their love brain for fear that as soon as they get serious, they will lose.
For many boys, the common discussion is to be alert to "fisher women", and to guard their assets well, so as not to become someone else's ATM machine due to their love brain.
For girls, they should be more alert to all the risks brought by the love brain, and should even advocate "to use male thinking to love": look down on love, pursue rationality, reduce paying, seek momentary happiness, and view friends as hands and feet and men as clothes ......
III. In a Relationship, Do You Really Need to be So Rational?
There is little point in abstract love; it is the practical usefulness of the relationship that counts, and relationships need to be more purposeful and self-interested.
This kind of judgement on love sounds reasonable at first glance, but it may develop into an over-rationalisation of love, viewing love as a tool entirety.
For example, over the years, the circle of the public examination and graduate school has a popular saying: "the first sword to go ashore is to chop the person you love." It refers to the fact that after the success of the examination, the original boyfriend or girlfriend should be dumped.
The implied meaning of this sentence is that the disembarkation of their own ascension to a new class will give one more negotiating capital in the marriage market, so you should give up the partner who has been unworthy.
This concept of choosing the right person for the right family and the right match may seem very old, but it has become more and more obvious in Chinese society over the past two decades.
According to a study on education-based marriages, compared to the pre-reform and opening-up period, young people nowadays are more concerned with the need to have a comparable level of education in their marriages, which is also known as "the right match".
In some cases, before the middle-aged and the elderly begin to praise the importance of a suitable relationship, the younger generation is already ahead of them. They accurately compare the conditions of both sides in the relationship, and scolded the relationship with lower-condition people is "poverty alleviation", "down-married", "self-degradation", and behind this, economic rationality is to blame.
In other words, some young people's anxiety about love brain and even relationship is not only a response to the tense gender relationship, but also a kind of fear of falling down the ladder, so it is necessary to resist the risk and protect the interests with the greatest degree of rationality.
Ultimately, there is no need to deify love, or to grovel and self-sacrifice for it. But in love, there is little point in emphasising rationality too much. Partners are our teammates who stand side by side against the futility of life, not opponents with whom you need to fight for every cent.
When love, and even life, falls flat in the day-to-day waste, we will know that a proper love brain is not a deluge, but a precious experience that evokes passion for life.