Text | Joy Liu
If you are single now and are particularly eager to find your partner, you have been in love before, but these people have not been able to get along with you in the end.
We assume that you are over 30 years old and become an older "leftover boy and girl" in mainstream culture. Parents and relatives are quite critical of your singleness, and friends around you are advising you to fall in love quickly, even when you reject your kind sister. When introducing to your partner, your sister said to you: "You deserve to waste your youth!". You have also tried a blind date software, but you have never met someone who really made your heart fascinate, and forcing yourself to get along with strangers again and again makes you feel tired.
You begin to wonder: how many more times do you have to fall in love before you can meet your "destined", meet your "true son/daughter", and meet a partner who can spend your life with you? Even when you think of this person you may never meet, you can't help shivering: "So will I end up alone? Or should I compromise with reality early and find someone to marry?"
If there is a magical app at this time , you can accurately calculate the probability that you and a person will be paired with each other, without having to endure all the anxiety caused by the unknown, without wasting time with "inappropriate" people, would you let the software do such a calculation for you?
The story in the fourth episode of the fourth season of [Black Mirror] recently was about such a software.
1. If you can find "true love" through a software...
Amy and Frank are both using the same dating software, but the difference with this software is that you need to go through many relationships first, and each time the object of the relationship is Assigned by the system, the system will collect your preferences every time you fall in love, how you feel when you get along with the other party, etc., and finally recommend your true love object for you.
Amy and Frank were systematically arranged to meet each other the first time they used the software. Apparently, they got along very well. However, it is up to the system to decide how long they can get along with each other, and two people have to let the system reveal how much time they have at the same time. So, the two people who had a good impression of each other looked at the time and found that they only had 12 hours to be with each other.
After eating, they were picked up in a trolley to a room set up for their date. 12 hours passed in a hurry, and the two said goodbye. After saying goodbye to each other, the system immediately arranged a new date for them. This time Amy is going to spend 8 months with the date. a man. And Frank might be even worse, spending a year with a woman who doesn't take any interest in him and treats him coldly.
During this period, they all did not want to obey the system, but each time the system told them: "Everything happened for a reason." (Everything happened for a reason.), and then persuaded them to continue to obey the system. During this period, they had a brief encounter, and they were obviously attracted to each other, but they could only continue to live with their date at the time.
After Amy ended her 8-month dating arrangement, she was constantly assigned new partners by the system. Each time she spent a few days together, and each time she completed the task as if only her body was left, with her soul beside her. Numbly watching everything that happened. And Frank was counting down the days he spent with each other, hoping to leave this year of purgatory as soon as possible.
After Frank ended the relationship, the system miraculously arranged for him and Amy to be partners again, and both were overjoyed and negotiated how long they could be together this time around. But one day Frank couldn't help but sneak a peek at the time the system gave them: 5 years. Just when he was very happy, he found that the time in the system began to decrease: 3 years, 1 year, 8 months, 3 months, and finally became a few days. The system explained to him that the time was starting to become unstable because he peeked at the time alone.
After this brief reunion, they have to endure separation until the system informs them that they will both pair up with their "true love" and leave tomorrow, and before that, they can choose to say goodbye to a person they have been with. They unanimously chose each other. As you can probably guess how the story goes, they finally decided to let the system go to hell and the two eloped away.
The twist in the story is that when they escaped, they found out that they were actually sims in the software, along with thousands of Amy and Frank, who were swept away by the 1000s of these trials that the system simulated. Rice and Frank have eloped with each other 998 times, so their match rate is 99.8%.
The camera quickly shifted to reality. In a small bar, Amy held her mobile phone and found that the person whose match rate with her calculated by the system was 99.8% was named Frank. Then she looked not far from the bar and saw Frank who was also holding a mobile phone... ...
would you wish you had such a piece of software in your hands?
2. How is "true love" calculated?
Seriously, at the moment of watching this episode of Black Mirror, I also secretly thought that if there was such a software, would our love be a lot easier?
But I soon discovered that there was something unsettling about the software itself. I'll use the following to address the unsettling part and invite you to explore the phenomenon of finding true love.
Many people say that big data will ultimately help us make almost every choice. Dingge software will recommend the types of songs we may like based on the songs we have listened to in the past. I have also seen many netizens say that daily pushes know more about themselves than they do. But can love really be calculated through data?
One assumption of the data is that we have our own likes and dislikes, our own emotional patterns, our preferred ways of getting along, and so on. And these things can be obtained through a sufficient amount of romantic relationships with different people. But an Achilles heel of this assumption is that we are not equal to all our past relationships, our preferences, and even our personalities, which are constantly changing.
So even if there is software that can simulate our personalities, then use these simulated personalities to fall in love, and we choose to elope with a person 998 times out of 1000 experiments, it does not mean that in the real, constantly flowing and changing Of the two, the other will be our true love.
I remember my counselor once said something very shocking to me, he said: "If there is a math problem in front of you, it says 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... The number goes all the way to 101, and then There is a blank space behind it for you to fill in the blank, how much do you want to fill in?"
He continued: "Many people may fill in 102, but who actually made such a rule? We grew up looking for rules in these questions and then following them. This rule is to write the next number. If you write it incorrectly, you will not get points. But is there such a rule in life? No, you can write 1000, you can write 55, you can also write 1. Maybe there are rules to follow in the past, But you always have the freedom to write any number in the next space."
This sentence particularly shocked me at the time: maybe I have made some very similar choices in the past, but it does not mean that I will definitely make such a choice next time. In each choice, there are countless possibilities for me, and I can choose a different trajectory to discover another self.
Some time ago, a best friend of mine went through a divorce and broke up with her husband who she had known for 12 years. She said that her ex-husband fulfilled all her fantasies about men at that time. When she met her ex-husband, what she liked was the kind of person who is professional, motivated, smart and very hardworking. But after experiencing the busyness of starting a business and studying with her ex-husband, now she prefers to find someone who is willing to accompany her and get along well. These changes in thoughts and feelings cannot be obtained through past data.
We ourselves are constantly flowing, changing, becoming and changing, and we are constantly creating ourselves in the process. The pairing of data and personality traits actually sees people as rigid, immutable, and fixed individuals. Even if the first 101 numbers follow a trait, we can still choose to fill in a number that has nothing to do with the previous law in the 102nd number. Here lies the vitality and creativity of life.
We can constantly create new selves, although few do. When you know that you have been working as an accountant for the past ten years does not mean that you must be an accountant next year, you may still continue to be an accountant habitually, even if you do not appreciate and like this job. Even when you've been a psychologist for 10 years and you enjoyed being a therapist during those 10 years, you can still choose to do something different in your 11th year.
Of course, not everyone can tolerate such an unknown. The unknown is exciting on the one hand and scary on the other. When we know that we can choose not to repeat past preferences, and even the values that are important to us can change, there are endless unknowns waiting for us.
We don't know what we will be like next year, we don't know what we will be like 10 years from now; if we are single now, we don't know when and how we will meet our partner, we don't know who our partner will be What kind of person, we don't know how long we can be with each other...
but the best part of life is hidden in all these uncertainties. We create new possibilities at every moment. Those of us who never had the opportunity to appear before, those who we dared not to realize before, may be created by us at these moments.
3. Can "true love" be "found"?
Once Disney's fairy tales were all about "happily-ever-after" (living happily ever after), now even Disney has begun to stage stories of imperfect families like [Fantasy Travels].
Many people say that if Rose and Jack in [Titanic] had come out alive and started a family, ten years later, their lives would have turned into two battered, middle-aged people in the movie [Revolutionary Road]. A couple with a crisis and anxiety (the male and female protagonists of both films are Xiao Li Zi and Fat Wen). Recently, everyone saw in a variety show that Chen Xiaochun and Ying Caier, who were so in love back then, are gradually cooling down.
Many people asked with a little emotion: So the people who were in true love back then might not be in true love 10 or 20 years later, right?
In a way, it really is. I remember that at an online group event, a girl asked, "I want to know, everyone here who has been married for more than 20 years, how did your marriage last for so long?" I remember most of the responses at that time were: It's not easy, it's been through a lot, and it's not perfect.
Like I said above, our thoughts and feelings are constantly changing, we are constantly changing, and so are our relationships.
In many cases, a decades-long relationship is actually several very different relationships. We are also very different selves in these relationships. In each of my counseling sessions, when a client tells me about a relationship with a long history, I ask her/him to describe to me how the relationship has changed. Many clients have told me that their relationship has gone through many turning points and has undergone many major changes. Now they are neither who they were when they first met each other, nor who they were in the first few years, nor who they were in the past five years. Own. They have become another selves in a way, and so has their relationship.
So are we really talking about whether two people are "right"? Discuss whether two people are each other's "true love"?
I think it's more meaningful than discussing who is more "suitable" for us and who is our "true love", but to explore the possibility of how we can create "true love" in "every relationship" with each other.
Yes, that's right, we need to co-create the possibility of being "true love" with each other.
When two beautiful people meet, the strong attraction and appreciation of each other just creates a possibility, maybe it is far from being called "true love", because you know that there are too many possibilities for each other, and in this process There are too many changes in the present, if there is no continuous creation and investment in the current attraction, it is likely to become something we do not like in the future.
I prefer to compare love to two people working together to create a work of art: two artists who admire each other but are very different come together and want to create a work of art together, but their encounter itself only provides In order to create the possibility of creating this artwork, the encounter itself cannot create anything, they are constantly working with each other, devoting their own efforts to this artwork, enriching it with creative ideas, and even in the middle. After many times of communicating with each other's different ideas, I finally completed a creation that both of them liked.
Many people think that when they are together, this artwork will be produced "naturally", but only they know that every detail of this artwork contains their joint efforts, cooperation and creation in the whole process. Every step is unknown to them, and only by pouring out their passion, ideas, meanings and attempts, can they give this artwork a soul. This artwork is called "true love" by the world, but only they know that the secret of true love does not stop at "encounter", it is more in each process...
Many so-called "right people" Becoming the "wrong person" in the process of a relationship is because they forget that relationships are fluid, changing, and for collaborating to create a work of art, artists can never be stuck somewhere, they also It is impossible to copy any previous works of art, every step of theirs is new and requires mutual exploration and cooperation. None of this is possible when they forget to collaborate, to explore together, and to invest and create together.
So does "true love" count?
So can "true love" be found?
What do you think?
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