In mainstream culture, men who are handsome, sunny, healthy, and wealthy are the most popular — everyone knows this. Many people, worn down by the passage of time, wait for someone to appear, but really this is just obedience to mainstream culture, a choice made within its terms. “I searched for her among the crowd, a thousand, a hundred times” — and “crowd” means many. So accumulating as many mainstream-approved values as possible is the only sure way to raise your own value in the great army of mate-seekers.

Lately I’ve heard many people’s stories from the process of choosing a partner — stories about choices that left them deeply stuck, unable to climb out. And these choices turned what once counted as “added value” into useless scrap under a different kind of logic.

To put it simply: A has feelings for you, B has money. People often find it hard to choose — cultivate feelings with A, or build wealth with B? The dilemma this binary choice creates is like the philosophers’ endless, fruitless debate over matter and consciousness — vexing and inconclusive. The latter is often seen as worldly, materialistic, tasteless, without aspirations; the former, starting from nothing, is often daunting. With the latter you can slowly cultivate feelings on a material foundation; but no one can say for certain how much money it takes to buy love. Certain chemical reactions in the latter case can be regulated through cognition; the former seems to arrive as if by nature itself…