Walking on the sidewalk in the night after watching the movie - The Drama. 

Not a purposeful walk. Just the kind where you put on shoes and go, because there’s something sitting in your chest that needs a little air. There is a saying in Chinese, 人生如戲. Life is like a play. Our daily lives may not be as exaggerated as what we see on screen or on stage, but every piece of work actually carries a message it wants to convey.  I found myself turning the few plots over and over and trying to simulate it to our real life scenarios. The way we meet people. The way we argue. The way we convince ourselves we feel something we are not sure we feel anymore. 

The Hard Work We Intent to to Skip

I watched a reel recently about how we’ve all misunderstood dating apps ( or so as casual dating culture nowadays) . The point wasn’t that apps are bad. It was simpler than that. Meeting someone and building something with them are two completely different things. There is a difference between “creating an opportunity” to meet someone and “ actually meeting someone and creating a relationship.” The app helps us to create an opportunity and collapses that distance in a way that tricks people into thinking they’ve done the first when they’ve actually just skipped to the second. 

The whole sequence of the beginning of knowing someone like going to a bar, noticing someone, dancing with them, talking for a while, exchanging numbers, and after a few days texting to each other, you guys finally hang out. However, dating apps help us skip all of that because we have this false confidence and think “This is a shortcut.” that we don’t have to do the hard work of knowing people in the first place.

Actually I think the same impatience shows up everywhere in how quickly people decide they’ve found the right person, in how fast they exit when it gets complicated, in how rarely anyone seems willing to just sit in the uncertainty of not knowing yet. 

The getting-to-know-each-other part out of the curiosity that you just want to know him/her as a person is the relationship from the very beginning. 

I Don't Think You Find the Right Person

I think the relationship is not something you discover. A relationship is something you built, and keep building and sometimes have to rebuild. 

We’ve absorbed from films and songs giving us this paradox or the vague way that somewhere there was a person who is a good match for us, and the main task was finding them. As if they already existed in their finished form, and we just need to locate each other. 

What I think at the moment is that two people meet, and then over time through curiosity, through conflict, through the accumulated weight of showing up for each other, they gradually become the right person for each other. This kind of love takes time by definition. It can’t be rushed into existence. It takes the process of getting to know someone, not performing a way through it, not optimizing it, not deciding in the beginning whether it has potential. 

Just slowly, genuinely learning who this person is, and letting them learn who we are. It flows steadily and is the gentlest romance in the world. And if at some point it runs out. That’s okay too. Not every connection needs to become a relationship, and not every relationship that ends was a failure. Some of them were just exactly as long as they needed to be. 

What the Drama Actually Got Right

In the movie, Charlie spends a significant stretch of time performing certainty which is already wiggling. The harder he works to convince himself, the more hollowed out everything becomes until both of them have used up so much emotional energy managing and adjusting and performing that neither has anything left for the actual relationship. 

Rewrite the scene. 

From the moment Emma first met Charlie, to the worst point of their relationship, to the very end in that diner. Her response to rupture was always to offer a new beginning. A reset. Another first impression.And Charlie, clumsy as he was, showed up for it. That might be the most honest thing the drama said about love: that the willingness to play the scene again, even badly, even without knowing how it ends, is its own kind of answer.

Adjusting yourself hurts. Tying to rewrite the other person is exhausting. And the terrible thing is both impulses usually come from wanting so badly to make it work. But somewhere in all that effort, the thing you were trying to preserve gets lost. 

If life is a play where we must perform. I wonder …after the final curtain falls on “Contradiction,” will we wash away the makeup, sit in our most familiar restaurant with our unusual comfort food, and together, begin drafting the next act ?

After the storm, can we try to understand the same thing from each other's perspective? Every difficult conversation is a chance to know each other more honestly, and to know yourself better in the process. When we avoid those conversations, we assume the other person won’t understand or that it’s not worth the energy, we’re not protecting anyone. We’re just taking away the chance. 

Hungry Shopping

Here is the thing I’ve learned about being single, and about waiting. 

If you go to the market when you’re starving, you easily grab the wrong thing. The hunger makes all the decisions, you end up at home with things that don’t quite fit and no clear memory of choosing them. 

In an era that keeps telling us to move faster, match smarter, optimize the process, I find myself still drawn to the slower version that builds quietly. That doesn't announce itself but just keeps showing up, in small ways, over time.

How much someone can love you depends on how deeply they understand love itself. A person can't give more than their current comprehension allows. It mostly makes me want to be patient (with others, and with myself). We're all working with what we've learned so far.

I'm genuinely looking forward to the next relationship, with real warmth, real curiosity, real anticipation, and patience.

The Map That Isn't Drawn Yet

On my walk that night, I was somewhere else in my head.

I thought about the relationships that shaped me. The ones that ended quietly and left me with mostly fondness. The ones where I was the person who didn't show up fully, and the ones where the other person wasn't ready, and the ones where we were both trying our best and it still wasn't enough.

None of it feels like wasted time anymore. It feels like the part of the map that had to be drawn before I could get to where I am now. Now, I am just trying to be brave in expressing what you love, so the world knows how to respond to you. As for the parts of your heart that aren't yet clear, those are just the unexplored sections. 

I've heard that 3 is the number closest to God. These 2 years have been one of the most blessed times in life. I gradually learned how to anticipate and appreciate people around me. 

A life where you keep getting clearer on who you actually are.  I am looking forward to it. And so is the person who is, somewhere, getting clearer on themselves too.