[Answer] Is It Possible That You Never Meet Someone You Truly Like, and Then, When You Reach a Certain Age, You Just Settle for Someone to Get Through the Rest of Life With?

[Answer] Is It Possible That You Never Meet Someone You Truly Like, and Then, When You Reach a Certain Age, You Just Settle for Someone to Get Through the Rest of Life With?

I think that, most of the time, we don’t actually know what kind of person we like, because it’s very hard to define. External, tangible conditions can be listed out and measured, but inner qualities are much harder to pin down. For example, do you like someone gentle, or someone brave? You may really like those traits when they appear in one person, but not feel the same when they appear in someone else. So it’s hard to say whether we like a person because of certain qualities, or whether we first fall for someone and then start attributing all kinds of virtues to them.

Also, unless we truly live with someone, you can’t really know whether you would genuinely like them. The way a person presents themselves in front of you may be completely different from how they are in private. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are deceiving you; it’s just that in a romantic relationship, people tend to hide their truest selves and show their best side, like a peacock spreading its feathers. When you finally open your eyes, no longer blinded by love, the other person may be nothing like the person you thought they were. Would you still like them then?

And the kind of person someone likes at 20 may not be the same as the kind they like at 30 or 40. Today, you may think someone is your perfect, flawless ideal. But ten years later, if their career has gone nowhere and they’ve started losing their hair, would you begin to see them as weak or disappointing, and no longer like them as much?

Of course, some of us may marry for love and believe we are not merely settling as we go through life. But more often than not, when faced with real life, we make compromises to some degree. This is not to say that a perfect partner does not exist, but rather that, most of the time, we have to accept the reality of living with someone who is not quite perfect—just as we must accept our own imperfections. To a large extent, both love and marriage are inherently blind. In the vast sea of people, to immediately find someone who fits you perfectly in both body and soul—even if such a person does exist—is extraordinarily difficult.

So I think that, as many people grow older, it’s not really that they simply pick someone at random to muddle through the rest of life with. It’s more that they come to feel that the difference between spending a lifetime with one kind of person or another may not be as great as they once imagined. As Xu Zhimo wrote about searching in the boundless sea of humanity for someone whose spirit and soul truly resonate with your own: if I find them, I am fortunate; if I do not, it is my fate. Perhaps that is simply how it is.