I ended up watching a couple of episodes of the reality show Goodbye, Lover after some stand-up comedian friends would not stop talking about it. My wife and I gave in. It also brought back something I had said before: stand-up and the kind of narrative work I do pull in opposite directions. Stand-up builds a joke-filled story on top of a basic logic; what I do is keep taking events apart until the underlying logic shows itself. Watching the show from both angles is strangely entertaining.
Three marriages, arranged for tension
The editing is meticulous. It moves through calm-conflict-calm-conflict and gives each phase a beginning, turn, and resolution, so you slide into three shaky marriages without noticing the machinery. The couples are arranged with almost schematic care: one with a strong man and a weaker woman (the 'dad' flavor), one with a strong woman and a weaker man (the 'mom' flavor), and one built around confrontation.
Liu Jishou and his wife may have the most 'healthy' relationship of the three, because they can still fight, and they can fight about a specific thing. They do not spend every argument circling the philosophical accusation 'you don't love me.' Huang Shengyi and Yang Zi are another matter. They argue too, but whenever Huang tries to pin down a concrete incident, Yang escapes into an unrelated philosophical abstraction. He does not see other people.
The terrifying pair is Li Xingliang and Mai Lin. What makes them terrifying is the suffocation that leaks out of every corner of the marriage. It looks sweet, but the sweetness works like programmed bargaining chips. Every time Li and Mai travel to a new city, he proposes to her again. Why? Many people read it as proof of love, but no one asks Li why he does it—whether he genuinely wants to, whether he is a puppet completing a task, or whether the marriage would break if he skipped it once.
Mai watches Li all the time. Is his clothing wrong? Is there a problem with his gums? Why isn't he smiling? Is his finger dirty? When asked what she wants from the marriage, she says everything she does is for Li and that she hopes he will fulfill his music dream. Li cannot understand her 'frugality.' When he buys her a gift, she refuses it or even takes it back to the store, because she says she doesn't need it. The money should be saved for Li and his dream.
The motherly suffocation
This is where the suffocation spreads. How many people grew up inside this exact atmosphere? It is a deeply 'motherly' posture: always saying 'I'm doing this for your own good,' always suffering for the family, sometimes treating the suffering itself as a source of pleasure. I know a case involving my assistant's husband and his mother. They were coming home from far away. The son wanted to take a taxi. The mother insisted on the bus. So she called a taxi for her son and took the bus home alone. We all asked: is it illegal for the son to ride in the taxi with his mother? To prove how 'good' she was, she skipped logic and intelligence and chose the most direct way to show that her hardship was for her child's good.
Why? Let's get to the underlying logic.
A woman's primal drive, as I see it, is love and belonging. To secure belonging, she may test whether the man she has given herself to can take care of her—especially when she is pregnant, giving birth, and raising children—so that she will not be abandoned. Some women start 'acting up.' It is like tugging on a rope before climbing a mountain: you pull a few times to see whether it is tied tight. But some people are more afraid of abandonment and losing love and belonging, so the rope-tugging repeats and even intensifies.
Mai's acting up is not really distrust of Li. It comes from 'I don't deserve it.' From the fragments she lets slip about her background, she is from a rural family and was taught to serve her husband and raise children. Li is a music creator; he needs wild ideas and experiences to keep supplying him with inspiration. That spiritual mismatch is an absolute insecurity. In the traditional view of marriage in China, a wife should understand her husband, assist him, even obey him. If she doesn't know what he is thinking, the method becomes testing and demanding proof.
I don't want you to give me a gift—if you give me one, I know you still love me—if you take me at my word and really don't give me anything—then you don't love me.
I want you to prove you love me—verbal love no longer satisfies me—you start proposing in different cities—we haven't traveled for a long time—you didn't propose again—then you don't love me.
This distrust is internal. No external gesture will satisfy it. It only seeks a more 'sincere' proof—until she realizes that no matter how much proof she extracts, she cannot get the other person's true heart, or she gets it briefly and then he becomes uncontrollable again. Then she starts looking for a higher position in the relationship: moral sainthood.
Women have a natural power to judge men, and that judgment can produce a subconscious sense of superiority and control. When a woman holds an absolute upper position, whatever the man does can be wrong, because she is a black box that can adjust the rules at will. I'm sick and need you to hand me a glass of hot water, but you bring the wrong cup and the water by the bed goes cold quickly—that means you are not caring or attentive enough. Don't doubt it; that is a real case.
In Mai and Li's marriage, Mai uses soft moral blackmail to push their marital chips up to the highest point she desires. Then she waits for the day the marriage breaks so she can short the whole thing and walk away with the maximum amount of moral sainthood: I gave you so much, and in the end you never understood my love. This is a dictatorial clause. Even if someone points out that Mai's behavior is binding Li, she can find a perfect excuse: it's because I love him.
Toxic people come in pairs
The last piece of underlying logic is not pleasant: toxic people always come in pairs. Li accepted this kind of marriage, perhaps because he had never really been weaned and had gone looking for a mother.
Their marriage is not so much Goodbye, Lover as it is a project of saying goodbye to mother.