Throughout history, there has been very little that could truly be called love. Of course there’s no shortage of people who speak of “love,” but I suspect what they’re talking about is rarely love at all. Sometimes I envy those who are capable of loving — envy the earth-shattering, the die-for-you, the everlasting, the sea-drying-up-and-rocks-rotting kind of love. I think about their love too, turning it over and over in my mind, turning it over and over — but in the end love is just love. It can’t be deconstructed, can’t be analyzed, and can’t be redone.

Li Longji loved Yang Yuhuan — he fell in love with incest. Zhuo Wenjun loved Sima Xiangru — she fell in love with rebellion. Rose loved Jack — she fell in love with his wildness… There are too many love scripts to count, exhausting to recount, and few people really understand them. But we can find one rule running through all of them: love always comes with an added condition. Perhaps incest wasn’t the sole reason Li Longji fell for Yang Yuhuan, but it was undeniably present — you can’t say incest had nothing to do with why he loved her.

Put simply: suppose there are two events, A and B, and they’re highly correlated. What can we conclude? Does A cause B? Does B cause A? Or do A and B simply happen to occur together, with no real relationship between them?

The process of falling in love is this: person A falls in love with person B by way of some added condition X. X can stand for many things — money, status, looks, star sign, blood type, personality… It might be a single factor, but more often it’s a composite of several. What’s certain is that X always exists. Person A might claim, in good conscience, that God made them fall in love with B — but that’s just a verbal sleight of hand, skipping over the existence of X. It’s like someone who refuses to touch money asking someone else to go shopping for them, just to preserve the appearance of never having sullied their hands.

This model of love isn’t a new idea — it simply illustrates that love requires conditions. Zhang Xiaoxian wrote an essay called “Love Is Always Conditional,” which interpreted this same model from an emotional angle. Setting aside the thick warmth and tenderness, if we examine the relationship between condition X and love, it’s not hard to see they’re highly correlated — we might even say it’s X that produces the love in A, not B herself. Between any two lovers there are always gaps and trenches that need filling in, and clever Huang Rong and honest, simple Guo Jing filled in each other’s gaps together — and so they fell in love.

Love may be a sublimated form of the barter system of primitive society. There has never been, in love, any single true destined other proclaimed by mystics — only the principle of matching supply to demand and the evaluation of a value curve. Person A and person B are nothing more than two parties who happened to meet in the long river of love and successfully traded goods. The loading scenes in so many films are interesting in this regard — and lovers are just like that too, bundled up together and loaded onto a truck, bound for the road of marriage, the road of reproduction, the road of aging, the road of death.

So: I love you — really, it has nothing to do with you.