Around Valentine's Day, the production of a cover story about love has become our "rule" action for more than ten years. Many times, we feel that love has been exhausted, and we always think that it is the last time we will talk about love in a magazine. Every year, we repeatedly ask each other at the topic selection meeting: What else is there to talk about in love? Eventually, we slapped the table and agreed with a high degree of unanimity on the "breakup"; full of resistance and a little curious to experience the "blind date"; stared at the end of the epidemic and the appearance of love "for the rest of my life". Regardless of whether they are separated and dispersed, these topics always have their own clear and even strong emotions, which shows that we are still reluctant to stop fighting with love.
What about this year? When we sat around the desk again: "I'm bored, I don't want to talk about love." "Who is still in love now?" Let's talk about something else. "Yes, even if it's just as a bystander, even if it's just in those movies and literature that point to the present, how long have we not seen passionate love? Righteousness without hesitation, like glue Nowadays, when these words are paired with love, it looks like a hunt. In the current intimate relationship, more lovers are trying their best to protect themselves, without madness, without obsession, and staying calm or even detached. Those who have not yet or are not willing to step into a relationship are increasingly and easily accessing what in the past only love and intimacy could provide, understanding, companionship, sexuality, and other more subtle needs.
The project department of an enterprise in Huizhou, Guangdong Province held a friendship party (photo by Zhou Nan and courtesy of Visual China).
Wang Wenbo, an associate professor in the Department of Marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, observes that one of the ways "love is becoming less and less marketable" is through the association words provided by major search enginesFor example, when you type "more and more want", the suffix that automatically pops up in the drop-down position of the search box is usually the content that has been searched most frequently by everyone in recent times, in other words, the content that you care about the most. At the beginning of last year, once he searched for "more and more wanted" on Zhihu, the suffix he got was "more and more want to break up", "more and more want to divorce", "more and more want to get a divorce", "more and more want to go back to his hometown" The results given by various search platforms are not the same, and they change in real time, but the emotions conveyed are always very similar.
Wang Wenbo also used artificial intelligence to do a study, and summarized the 20 most popular songs per year from the major **lists or platforms** in the 30 years from 1990 to 2020 to chatgpt, and asked it to make a summary analysis of the lyrics of 600 songs, and came to the conclusion:Songs with love as a theme are clearly declining year on year. After 2015, the theme of love accounted for less than half of the top songs, a decrease of 20% compared with the previous 10 years, and more songs are describing life conditions, situations, sharing or venting emotions. At the same time, there has been a noticeable increase in songs from a female perspective. Since then, Wang Wenbo has published the research content into a short ** - why do girls just want to make money and not want to fall in love", which received a lot of emotional resonance on the Internet, and the ** volume of WeChat ** account broke through 100,000 in a very short period of time.
Stills from the Japanese drama "I'll Live Better in the Next Life".
In her book The End of Love, the French sociologist Eva Illouz, who has studied "how the culture of capitalism and modernity has changed our lives and romantic relationships" for more than 20 years, says: "It has become a norm for people to choose to withdraw from sexual and romantic relationships." ”
Isn't love fragrant?
Has love lost its appeal? The answer to this question was highly consistent:People always have a natural desire for love. Love itself has not changed. However, people's concept of love is constantly changing in different social constructs.
Dong Chenyu, a lecturer at the School of Journalism at Chinese University, believes that loving and being loved is a basic psychological need of people, and almost everyone is afraid of being isolated and hopes to receive social support - love is one of many supports. From the perspective of communication, any relationship is a kind of social exchange, and the relationship between people is essentially to take what they need, and if a relationship can be stable, it means that it must be mutually beneficial. So when we say we don't want love, it's actually because we find that the exchange in a love relationship is becoming more and more unstable and therefore afraid to invest. In this case, love gradually becomes like a luxury from a necessity, so people hesitate and try to find if there is something that can replace it.
Stills from "Blind Date in the Company".
There are many factors that make a love relationship more and more unstable, and one of them comes from our subjective perception, that is, the feeling of instability. Dong Chenyu for example, as long as you search for "online love" as a keyword, 95% of the information that appears is about online dating being deceived and scumbags cheating, etc., the more bloody things are, the easier it is to be enthusiastically spread, which is also in line with the law of communication. As a result, we are seeing more and more instability. Of course, it is undeniable that our lives are desperately accelerating, and all changes are accelerating, and we are inevitably suffering from a great sense of insecurity, which can permeate many levels, including love – in the constant flow of relationships, people tend to look for some unusual and unorthodox intimacy.
After all, long-term intimacy bound by love is not the same as long-term sweetness. Psychologist Li Xin, who focuses on the study of psychoanalytic intersubjective field theory, talks about the concept of "narcissism": everyone is narcissistic, and people's initial motivation for being together may be to satisfy each other. They themselves may not be able to realize and discern what you love when you think you love someone. Beauty, intelligence, money, or character, he is lively and cheerful, and you are introverted and dull, and he makes you happy because of this This satisfaction with narcissism is mistaken for love, and it is narrowed love. People often mistakenly think that love equals satisfaction and joy, and do not understand that widespread love contains frustration and pain, and even resentment and disgust, anger and hatred. These feelings are experienced in a long-term intimate relationship, because human beings are inherently in a constant state of flux, and when you feel sweet, it starts to become bitter. But then, the sweetness will resurface. The question is how to complete the flow of these experiences in a long-term interaction.
Stills from "Bouquet of Love".
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once said that true love is the elusive but indestructible happiness of "me and you" being one with each other, the joy of changing things that are not only important to you. It is a pleasant feeling to be needed, or even irreplaceable. This kind of happiness is hard to come by. If man is constantly in the solitude of an egoist who is only interested in himself, then it is unattainable. If the nature of love is to be willing to stand on the side of the object of your love, you must be prepared to put self-interest behind the beloved, and be prepared to treat your own happiness as a secondary issue, as an incidental problem to the happiness of others.
A still from "The Last Night on Earth".
In his opinion, the conclusion that "we are forgetting how to love" is based on the trend of finding a partner online has followed the trend of online shopping. In the same way that you get a catalogue when you want to buy a new outfit, if you want to find a partner, dating** will give you a similar catalogue option. "The relationship between consumers and goods is changing into a model of relationship between consumers and people. "What is the relationship between people and goods? People don't swear allegiance to a chair and buy a new one if they no longer like it. "It's not a conscious process, but we've learned to see the world and people in this way," Bowman said. What happens when we meet someone more attractive? It's like treating Barbie; As soon as a new product is available, we will replace the old one with a new one. He pointed out that we enter a relationship with the expectation of being fulfilled from it. If we feel that the other person will bring us more satisfaction, we end the current relationship and start a new one. This means that both partners will live in constant fear, since the beginning of the relationship requires an agreement between two people, and it only takes one person to end it. "You have more freedom, but you suffer because of the fact that your partner also has more freedom. This has led to a life in which people form relationships and become partners on a rent-to-buy basis. People who can lose relationships don't need to work hard to maintain relationships. People can only be considered valuable if they satisfy each other. Behind this is the belief that lasting relationships hinder people's pursuit of happiness. ”"People don't want to be alone, but at the same time, we're afraid of being engaged, we're afraid of being entangled, we're afraid of being tied down. We're afraid of missing out. You want a safe haven, but at the same time, you want to stay free. ”
The replacement of those loves.
Rationality mentioned that the reason why people like to get along with mobile phones is because the content conveyed by mobile phones seems to be changeable, but what remains the same is that it will not abandon you, criticize you, or directly call you stupid. On the contrary, there is often frustration in dealing with people, and the damage to narcissism can bring great pain.
Perhaps because of this, when people seek an alternative to love, it is easier to choose to enter through the screen rather than real life. In addition to the long-standing online dating, at present, live broadcast may become an important town for the production of "love replacement". Dong Chenyu told me that in the live broadcast of reality shows, there is a type of anchor called "love anchor". As a researcher, he found that the main work of these anchors is not in the live broadcast room, when you see an anchor receiving a "rocket" in front of the screen, in most cases it is not because he has just sung a certain song, but that he and the person who sent the "rocket" have established a deep enough emotion outside the live broadcast room, and the live broadcast room is just a change scene, which releases the economic value of emotional binding. In the live broadcast room, there is a word called "guard", which is roughly equivalent to hardcore fans. As long as the broadcast starts, they will definitely appear in the live broadcast room, and they are actually the people who have established an emotional bond with the anchor.
Stills from "Dear, Loved".
It is said that the existence of a guardian is an average of 1 2 months, and in terms of length alone, it is comparable to a short-term relationship in real life. According to Dong Chenyu's observations, most of the people who become "guardians" have a common characteristic: they are all marginalized people who feel isolated in their own life circles. The more this is the case, the more they invest in the live stream. It is worth mentioning that this seemingly fresh and abnormal intimate relationship is still essentially replicating the existing social power relations and gender relations: female users often do not easily support a male anchor, and once they have an emotional connection with a male anchor, the support time will be very long and the investment will be great. On the contrary, male users are usually easy to support a female streamer, but it doesn't take more than two months for them to be replaced.
In the live broadcast of the game, in addition to showing the game process, introducing the game content and explaining the gameplay skills, another important function of the anchor is to play with the game. Male anchors usually focus on technical streams and take you to the top of the score; Most female anchors focus on emotional companionship, and game platforms are just a basis for establishing so-called intimate relationships - those games that directly take love as the theme, game companies are now trying to recruit real people to directly play game roles in order to improve the user's sense of substitution and stickiness.
Stills from CrossFire.
According to the 52nd Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of June 2023, the number of online live streaming users in China has reached 76.5 billion people, an increase of 14.74 million from December 2022, accounting for 71 percent of the total number of Internet users0%。Among them, the scale of reality show live broadcast users is 19.4 billion people, an increase of 6.57 million from December 2022, accounting for 180%；The scale of game live streaming users is 29.8 billion people, an increase of 31.88 million from December 2022, accounting for 27 percent of the total number of Internet users6%。
All the abnormal relationships that we call "love replacement" have two characteristics in Dong Chenyu's view: one is that the cost of entry and exit is extremely low, ** or uninstall a game, or enter and exit a live broadcast room, compared to the pain of breaking up in real love, it is obviously much easier. The second is that they are more compatible with social morality, and at the moment when "** is still not fully accepted by social morality, the "sense of companionship" provided in the live broadcast is at least legitimate, and it will not be attacked on a large scale even at the moral level.
A still from the movie "The Beneficiary". tells the story of Wu Hai, in order to treat his 6-year-old son who suffers from asthma, and deliberately got acquainted with an online female anchor Miao Miao, who was also on the edge and bottom of the border, and decided to brew a marriage with ulterior motives**
Always substitution, is it possible?
Can't you not fall in love? When we obtain the companionship and pleasure that were originally provided by love through the establishment of other relationships, and thus bypass the thorns, quagmire, and dangers in love, will we still be obsessed with love? It looks like the logic between these two questions should lead to two answers: "No." I still want love", or "Of course." Let go of the obsession of finding love". But in reality, the answer I get is always that for some people, it's perfectly fine not to be in a relationship. But love, long-term intimacy, can't really be replaced.
Dong Chenyu feels that an unusual intimate relationship similar to the one established in the live broadcast is just an expedient measure. It's like everyone wants to have a big meal, but the only thing they can afford is instant noodles. Everyone knows that instant noodles are unhealthy, but they don't always take care of their health. He believes that both the anchor and the person watching the live broadcast are essentially wrapped up in a structure, and there are not as many choices as imagined. The ultimate problem is that almost all people who come to fill their loneliness feel more lonely and lonely when they return to reality, and become less loving. To put it another way, they can't go back to real life.
Stills from "Ode to Joy".
In the process of Dong Chenyu's research on the live broadcast industry, more than one live broadcast user said to him: "I can't tell what is an economic relationship and what is an intimate relationship." My values seem to have changed. "In an abnormal relationship, one-way economic effort makes it very easy for people to objectify each other – and when we seek alternatives to intimacy, substitutes become more and more like commodities. "On the surface, the commodification of intimacy is still the exchange and companionship of each taking what he needs, and the people in the relationship are roughly equal. But in fact, there is a very strong manipulation and manipulation in the commoditized intimate relationship, which contains a whole set of capital logic. Love is gradually turned into an industry by businessmen. Dong Chenyu said, "It magnifies the subjectivity of the self, while completely ignoring the subjectivity of the other party." I see it as the alienation of people. For example, the gifts of the live broadcast are highly gendered, for example, one of them is called "marry you home", and for example, the anchor is punished when playing PK, and the gift can be used to distort the face of others. "Essentially, that's SM. "An anchor once told him that what he was most afraid of was that as long as he swiped the gift, the other party would ask to add WeChat and make some requests, such as saying good morning every morning and being able to chat at any time. And this has become the underlying rule, with few exceptions. "Do you know what the difference is between us and live streaming? They have a shopping cart on their screen with paper and snacks in it We don't have that cart on our screen because we're in the car ourselves, and we're wrapping all our private lives, our relationships as love and sincerity.
What if the substitution of love happened in real life? For example, a partner, a playmate Is there anything irreplaceable about love in comparison? I also wonder if jealousy, possessiveness, the inferiority complex that comes from loving someone, the bad emotions that are usually more concentrated in love, are they just as much as pain and fear, and are they experiences that we should not run away from under the cloak of pain?
Escape is shameful but useful" stills.
Rationality tells me that seeking advantage and avoiding harm is an instinctive reaction, regardless of right or wrong, good or bad, and painful feelings are not necessary cultivation in life. It may not be necessary to experience instability in a long-term relationship, and to interact deeply with an existing person, to go through the transformation from instability to stability or then to instability, is invaluable, especially when we are surrounded by entertaining, superficial social relationships. He said that it is like diving into the water with a breath, if you only dive to 5 meters every time, and each time is a repetition of the previous time, you will never see the appearance of 50 meters or 100 meters underwater, even if the deep water is cold, terrifying, and deep, but it is always a worthwhile experience in a limited life. Moreover, human beings are inherently dependent on long-term relationships. Many times, people do not have some kind of clear purpose or goal when maintaining a long-term relationship, but they naturally make such a choice.
Stills from "Ode to Joy".
Towards the end of the interview, Dong Chenyu said: "The love substitutes we see are not ideal. But I'm particularly afraid that you'll ask me a question: what kind of alternative is ideal? ”