The one destined for you is waiting for you in the future.

The one predestined for you is waiting for you in the future

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The protagonist in the legend must go through some twists and turns before they can regain love.

Destined love should come like a drama. Male and female leads usually start falling in love in their twenties, and not many are still dating in their thirties or fifties. Like delivering packages with awareness and perception, every time they want to give you something, they ring the doorbell as a prompt. So everyone’s stories often start with a fated opening: Du Liniang visits the garden and dreams of Liu Mengmei; Jia Baoyu first sees Lin Daiyu and jokes, “I recognize this girl.” Not only talented beauties, even adulterers and wicked women have destinies: look at Pan Jinlian’s life-and-death fate, isn’t it just a slip of the hand that hit the crossbar and struck the official’s head?

Because subconsciously, everyone feels they are not ordinary people. Fate doesn’t like ordinary lives; it also loves surprises, just like aunties love TV dramas from 8 o’clock. Fate won’t set your neighbor Zhang San as your ideal partner, nor will it treat your classmate Li Si from elementary school to high school as your destined lover. Fate requires you to investigate and inquire, like solving a puzzle, opening door after door with keys until finally seeing the one you love. Fate always gives you hints—you dream of someone; you meet someone on a romantic shooting star night, at a garden party, or in the rain—that’s the divine appointment—well, in these stories, God is a romantic screenwriter with a heart like a young girl.

Therefore, there must be more twists and turns. There should be setbacks, joys, partings, and reunions.

Ancient saying goes: men pursue women as if crossing a mountain; women pursue men as if crossing a veil. To prolong the plot, men are often forced to chase women to show that love is full of hardships; not enough, the two fight and misunderstand, with a jealous rival, some gossip from neighbors, brewing misunderstandings.

Occasionally, when love is harmonious, it shouldn’t be too easy. External obstacles, rivals’ provocations, male leads disabled, female leads poisoned, rivals molesting or forcing marriage, parting for sixteen years—yes, I mean Yang Guo and Xiao Long Nu. These stories are almost heaven and earth, with all kinds of obstacles—so “The Return of the Condor Heroes” in the novel is a love story that could have been resolved in seven or eight chapters but was stretched to forty to finally reunite.

Using Hollywood’s classic storytelling pattern—“static, raising questions to break the balance, solving problems to restore balance”—this is how everyone enjoys the drama. In short: when young, people tend to believe that life has a legendary, tumultuous love story that will eventually be reunited, waiting for them.

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Then, as time passes, everyone begins to feel something is wrong:

Why am I still single?

What about the legendary love?

Shouldn’t the male and female leads meet in their twenties, get married and have children by their thirties, and then live happily ever after?

People grow up. In fact, it can be said: the moment you realize you are not always the center of the world is when you truly grow up.

After growing up, everyone realizes: most people are not heroes or princesses, and cannot ask their girlfriends to turn the city upside down with a smile, or for their boyfriends to cross ten thousand miles of ocean to bring back gold and wool. Maybe we are destined, like others on Earth, to be like the neighbors who deal with garlic and MSG in the kitchen, looking at the bill to decide whether to cancel the wedding anniversary trip. In the end, love may be so plain, without a fleeting glance or instant love, just friends introducing, shy boys seeking marriage:

“Hey, I know a place where you can get a discount on honeymoon trips,” “Booking a banquet now can be cheaper.”

And so, people stop believing in fairy tales, stop believing in love.

But this actually takes another extreme.

From “God is like a romantic screenwriter, and I am very special, fate is a narrative work, though it pains my heart and strains my bones, as long as I hold on, I will eventually meet a prince or princess…”

To “Fate is truly cold and indifferent, deliberately playing with me, I can’t find true love anymore!”

Young people are easily conflicted: believing in some sacred things deep in their bones, yet mocking all sacred things on the surface.

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Let’s do a simple question.

Life is long, roughly eighty years.

Even from eighteen to forty-eight, during the peak of hormone secretion, it’s still the time to believe in true love. Thirty years.

If after eighteen, you can’t find true love in three, five, or even seven or eight years, should you be disappointed or accept fate? Maybe fate has prepared a vintage love for you at thirty, thirty-five, or forty?

Life is long, and many people spend less than one-tenth of that time waiting for true love. When they don’t get it, they resent or become prematurely cynical. In life, most people meet their lifelong love in their early twenties—dramatic, beautiful, but very low probability. When we hear stories of people finding true love in their thirties, forties, or fifties, we rejoice, but why do we lack the courage ourselves?

“Love in the Time of Cholera” is a novel, not a textbook, but Alisa did something extreme: I will wait, as long as I don’t die one day, I will have a chance to wait for true love. This is an extreme solution.

Why are many unwilling to wait? Because they’ve reached an age where they no longer believe in true love? Because family pressure forces marriage? Or because they think “those who don’t find true love by their twenties don’t count anymore”?

Or they simply believe, amidst the noise around them, that love is just what you do in your twenties, and by thirty, it’s time to settle down with chores and oil and salt?

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In narrative works, besides the routine of torturing the main characters’ love, there is another pattern: giving secondary characters a love story. This kind of supporting role marriage is relatively neat and straightforward, and often very comedic. Usually, a rough man pairs with a fiery girl, and they hit it off immediately, even for comic effect.

The love experienced by the main characters is tumultuous, with ups and downs, danger, flying on eaves, crossing mountains and seas—legendary love. Often, throughout the story, their lips never meet.

Supporting characters enjoy joyful, rough, lively, and colorful love stories. They often marry early, and maybe the main characters aren’t even together, and their children are just extras.

The question is:

Which is more interesting—main character love or supporting character love?

Most main character love stories seem to tug at the heartstrings from afar, but if you consider that these feelings are mostly due to fate’s cruel tricks, then the people involved may not be truly happy. Others enjoy the thrill.

The grandeur of drama is fleeting; roses laid on the ground last only one night, then only exist in memory. People used to walking on flat ground enjoy mountain rides once in a while, but you can’t accept a life constantly on a mountain. The hero Sun Wukong, riding a rainbow cloud, ultimately did not end up with Zixia Fairy.

Love is very personal; it’s not for acting.

True love exists not at banquets or parties, but when two people return home, take off their shoes and coats, turn on the lights, and only when they are alone, the real life begins. And that’s usually unknown to outsiders.

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The relatively happy supporting characters’ love stories have these features: their unions are mostly comedic; their personalities are more straightforward than the main characters; the author arranges them to be easygoing, less picky, and able to seize opportunities, thus completing their love.

In fact, such people are indeed more likely to be happy.

They never see themselves as the main characters, with the obsession that “my love must be tumultuous and I must fight the whole world for it.” Even if fate mismatches them, they remain calm.

In our lives, such couples are common. They may not be the most compatible on the surface, nor the most glamorous, but they usually have incredible tacit understanding and interaction. They are like partners, friends, lovers—making you feel they are perfectly suited. They laugh and joke, willing to treat their simple but sincere love as a warm joke, even hitting each other while doing so. They don’t seek to please the audience, hiding outside friends’ gossip, peacefully owning their own supporting-role, steady love.

Most importantly: they are willing to wait and seize opportunities. They don’t have main character syndrome, nor do they go to extremes.

They usually don’t face difficulties head-on like main characters, don’t be pretentious with themselves, and don’t ruin their good feelings into chaos. So they get a true love, cherish it, and live their days happily.

Fate is something that makes no sense. You never know when joy or disaster will suddenly strike at what age, then suddenly leave. But considering life is long, you don’t need to hold overly rigid expectations—like “finding true love at a certain age is a must, everything else doesn’t count,” or “there’s no love at all.”

Be patient and gentle, just accept it—everyone’s destiny is different. Don’t look at others’ paths; you have your own life. Some people’s love is at the starting line, others at fifty meters. Considering our age, it’s entirely possible that the best is yet to come, still waiting ahead for you. As for others’ legendary love stories, let them be.

If we treat each person’s life as a parallel line ending at a hundred years, the most ideal partner, if met at twenty, would be around one-fifth of the way through life, when the two lines meet and run together. What if you find true love at twenty-five? It’s at a quarter of life. It’s just a matter of timing.

Of course, some people are together from the start—that’s called an arranged marriage or childhood betrothal. You might not be happy about that either.

Fate doesn’t deliberately make things difficult for you, nor does it give you special favors. Be patient and wait, holding onto hope, and good things will come.

In my view, November 11th is not four separate ones, but four lines of people who haven’t found partners yet, four parallel lines. When you are lonely, your destined other half is waiting for you in the future. Of course, the one waiting for you in the future might make you wait for decades, which is a bit much, but young love is like a new marriage. Besides, if you’ve waited for ten or twenty years, what’s a few more?

Considering the long road ahead, there’s no need to worry too early—you wouldn’t resent summer homework halfway through the summer, right?

So, twelve weeks after November 11th, it will be February 2nd, the day of pairing up.

Even the “murderous lonely star” of November 11th has waited to find a pair. How about you, as a human? **$CUDIS **$AWE **$NXPC **