[Answer] What Should You Do If You Meet Your True Love While You’re Already With Someone?

[Answer] What Should You Do If You Meet Your True Love While You’re Already With Someone?

Perhaps the best beginning is no beginning at all: "You know I am already married, yet you gift me a pair of bright pearls." If one can truly make up one’s mind not to take that first step—not to offer those pearls—then no story will ever begin. Everything will remain like "If only life were always as it was when we first met": each person well in their own way, each privately holding a tender thought of the other. But that is only affection, not true love. When the heart is genuinely moved, it becomes very hard to restrain one’s eyes, ears, nose, lips—one’s hands and feet, one’s whole body and being. For a day or two, feelings may be hidden away, but if two people keep seeing each other, then day and night the mind fills with the image of "a face and peach blossoms glowing in reflected beauty." And if there is even the slightest mutual understanding between them, eventually there will come a moment when everything clicks into place. Yet even if one allows it, even if it begins with something as delicate as "You know I am already married, yet you gift me a pair of bright pearls," that foreshadowed beginning may still remain the most beautiful part of the whole story.

Among Buddhism’s seven sufferings of life, one is "to seek and not obtain." Oscar Wilde, however, put it differently: "There are two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." The best ending, perhaps, is no more than this: "I return your bright pearls, tears falling; I only regret that I did not meet you before I was married." And then the two part ways, forgetting each other in the world, never seeing one another again, letting the past dissolve like smoke and clouds. But more often than not, the ending is one of mutual hurt, filled with sorrow and resentment, as though everything that came before had been built on lies. And if, in the end, the two can become strangers without turning into enemies, that is already the greatest of good fortune.

But after all, nothing passes without leaving a trace. Haruki Murakami once said, "Visible things disappear; invisible things also disappear. In the end, what remains is nothing but memory." Wong Kar-wai also said in Ashes of Time, "When you can no longer have something, the only thing you can do is make sure you do not forget." And such not-forgetting, over the unbearably long years that follow, becomes both comfort and torment. You will remember the moment when fate first stirred—"Moved by your tender devotion, I tie it to my red silk dress"—a moment that might have become eternal. You will also remember the divide expressed in "I know your heart is as steadfast as the sun and moon, yet I have sworn to live and die with my husband." Time slips away like running water, but memory, like a stone worn smooth by years of polishing, gradually loses all the sharp edges of resentment, leaving behind only gentleness and beauty.

On a long, sleepless night, you may wake suddenly from a dream in some foreign country or distant city and realize, all at once, that ten years have already passed—and that you still miss him, or her, very much. Only time has worn everything down, people and circumstances are no longer what they were, and all that remains is sitting alone by a solitary lamp, wakeful through the night.