BK20 Choosing a Life Partner in the AI Age

BK20 Choosing a Life Partner in the AI AgeFrom the Justin Sun–Jing Tian Controversy to Love, Algorithms, Commitment and the Values We Cannot Measure.

BK20 Choosing a Life Partner in the AI Age

From the Justin Sun–Jing Tian Controversy to Love, Algorithms, Commitment,and the Values We Cannot Measure

Fang TianliangCivilization Reflections

Preface: When Love Starts to Calculate

From an Egg Cell to Fifty Million Dollars

In late August 2026, a long online essay titled “My Girlfriend Jing Tian” drew enormous attention across the Chinese-speaking internet. Its opening juxtaposed two measurements: the weight of an egg cell and the weight of US$50 million in cash. The second figure was quickly questioned. Fifty million dollars in $100 notes would weigh roughly half a metric tonne; a figure closer to 2.5 tonnes would require much smaller denominations.

For this book, however, the arithmetic is not the central issue. The image itself is. A tiny unit of human life and tens of millions of dollars were placed, rhetorically, on the same scale. That image captures a wider problem in modern intimacy: what happens when love, fertility, marriage, reputation, wealth, attention and algorithms are all pulled into the same system of valuation?

The controversy surrounding Justin Sun and Jing Tian contained nearly every ingredient that attracts online attention: celebrity, cryptocurrency wealth, private jets, luxury hotels, a reported RMB 30 million betrothal-gift dispute, claims involving a much larger financial demand, AI-assisted decision-making, and civil litigation. Yet this book is not written to decide the private truth of two living people. Many disputed details remain claims by the parties rather than judicial findings. The case is used as an opening lens through which to examine a much larger question: when money, attention, power and AI enter love, do we still remember what marriage is for?

The central argument of this book is simple. Modern tools can help us measure many things that matter. They can estimate financial risk, distance, lifestyle compatibility and even patterns in communication. But the qualities that determine whether two people can entrust decades of life to each other are often the hardest to quantify: honesty, kindness, responsibility, loyalty, restraint, respect, gratitude and the willingness to remain present when circumstances deteriorate.

AI can help us make decisions. It cannot carry the responsibility for the life that follows.

Chapter 1 · When Attention Becomes an Asset

1.1 From Elite Education to Crypto: Attention as Productive Capital

To understand why the Sun–Jing controversy became so large, it helps to understand the economic environment in which Justin Sun built his public identity. His career has repeatedly intersected with high-visibility events, from cryptocurrency entrepreneurship to headline-making purchases and encounters. Whatever the private motives behind individual episodes, one feature is difficult to miss: public attention has rarely been a meaningless by-product in his business world. It is an asset that can be converted into recognition, reach and commercial value.

This is not unique to one entrepreneur. The attention economy rewards people who understand how to become visible. Platforms quantify visibility through views, followers, reposts, search volume and engagement. A person who learns to operate inside this system can begin to experience attention not merely as social recognition but as productive capital.

1.2 When a Partner Becomes a Traffic Interface

In business, it is normal to ask what each side brings to a partnership: capital, technology, distribution, reputation or audience. The danger begins when the same vocabulary quietly becomes the primary vocabulary of intimate life.

If a partner is valued mainly for the attention, status, network or opportunity he or she can deliver, the relationship acquires an invisible exit clause. What happens when the audience shrinks, beauty changes, wealth falls, influence disappears or professional usefulness declines?

We cannot know another person's inner motives, and it would be irresponsible to reduce any real relationship to a single commercial calculation. But the public language surrounding the controversy raises a legitimate question for everyone: do I love a person, or do I love what that person allows me to become in the eyes of others?

1.3 When Being Seen Becomes a Way of Living

Social media has reorganized ordinary life around visibility. A restaurant is judged partly by whether it photographs well. A holiday can feel incomplete until it has been posted. Romantic happiness is displayed through flowers, rings, hotel rooms, anniversaries and proposal videos.

Sharing joy is not itself a problem. Weddings have always had a public dimension; communities witness commitments. The problem appears when the audience begins to shape the relationship from the outside. A couple may start producing images of happiness in order to prove happiness, hiding conflict to protect a public identity, or opening private boundaries because intimate disclosure generates attention.

At that point, the relationship acquires a permanent third party: the audience.

1.4 From Mutual Advantage to a Shared Life

A commercial partnership can end when its economic purpose disappears. Marriage is different because it is expected to survive precisely through periods in which one partner may temporarily contribute less. Illness, pregnancy, childcare, unemployment, migration, disability, ageing and care for parents are not rare exceptions to life. They are life.

The logic of a shared life therefore asks a different question. Not “What can you continuously provide me?” but “What are we willing to carry together?”

A useful test is this: if the most attractive external resource your partner possesses vanished tomorrow, could you still explain why you would want to live with this person? If the answer disappears with the resource, the issue may not be the partner's value. It may be the foundation on which the relationship was built.

Chapter 2 · When Love Becomes Due Diligence

2.1 Prudence, Verification and the Boundary of Trust

Modern marriage involves real risks. People may conceal debt, previous marriages, children, addictions, legal obligations or incompatible plans about family life. Confirming important facts before marriage is not a betrayal of romance. Trust is not the same as ignorance.

But there is a difference between informed transparency and surveillance. Asking direct questions, checking public information and making lawful financial arrangements together are not equivalent to secretly obtaining private data, tracking a partner or turning intimacy into an intelligence operation.

Due diligence can tell you what someone did in the past. It cannot tell you whether that person will remain beside you when you are lying in a hospital bed.

2.2 When AI Enters the Most Personal Decision

According to Sun's own public account, AI or algorithmic analysis was used in thinking through a major financial demand connected to the relationship. Whether one agrees with his account or not, the episode is a useful symbol of a broader trend.

AI can calculate what US$50 million represents as a share of someone's assets. It can model cash flow, identify contractual risks, compare scenarios and detect anomalies. But it does not know the moral meaning of a promise. It cannot experience the history between two people. It cannot carry regret, grief, duty or love.

The danger is not that someone consults AI. The danger is that people gradually outsource decisions that should ultimately be made through judgment, character and responsibility.

2.3 If Everyone Is Afraid of Losing, Who Builds Trust?

Men fear financial exploitation. Women fear wasting years on an unreliable partner. Wealthy people worry about asset exposure. Ordinary families worry about housing, children and social mobility. Dating advice increasingly sounds like risk management: identify red flags, protect your assets, test intentions, avoid being used.

Each defensive measure may be individually rational. Yet when all of them accumulate, a paradox appears. We may become the generation with the most sophisticated tools for screening risk and the least willingness to trust.

Prudence helps us identify a person. Trust determines whether we are willing to share a life with that person. Responsibility determines whether we remain serious about the relationship when difficulty arrives.

2.4 Is Premarital Investigation Wrong?

The right question is not whether we should investigate anything. It is what must be known, how it should be known, and whether both people retain dignity and agency.

Before marriage, couples should be candid about major debt, existing legal obligations, children, serious addiction, expectations about having children, location, work, care for parents and other facts that materially alter a shared future. Concealing such information deprives the other person of informed choice.

Healthy transparency says: “I will tell you what materially affects our common life because I respect your right to decide.” Surveillance says: “I need enough information and control to make you safe for me.” Those are very different relationship structures.

2.5 The Paradox of Risk Management

Financial risk can often be reduced through diversification, insurance, contracts and stop-loss rules. Marriage contains risks that cannot be eliminated. A prenuptial agreement cannot guarantee health. A background check cannot guarantee that a person will not change in ten years. An AI analysis of every message cannot guarantee that parenthood, bereavement or exhaustion will not transform a relationship.

Marriage always contains residual risk.

Maturity therefore does not mean pretending risk does not exist. It means reducing obvious risks while accepting that a meaningful life cannot be made perfectly safe. A promise matters precisely because the future is not fully known.

Chapter 3 · Love's Balance Sheet

3.1 The RMB 30 Million Betrothal-Gift Dispute

One of the most concrete elements in the public dispute is the reported transfer of more than RMB 30 million associated with a betrothal gift and the later civil claim seeking its return. The legal facts belong to the courts. The cultural question belongs to all of us.

Traditional Chinese marriage rituals included betrothal gifts, but their normative meaning was not simply the purchase of a woman. Ritual linked two families, marked seriousness and made a private intention socially visible. Historical reality was often unequal and far more complicated than ritual ideals, but the symbolic logic of a gift differs from the logic of a price tag.

Modern anxiety begins when the gift becomes a valuation mechanism: how much am I worth, how sincere are you, how much did your family contribute, who has gained and who has lost?

3.2 Fifty Million Dollars: What Is a Person Worth?

Money can compensate some losses. Medical costs can be calculated. Lost income can be estimated. Legal damages can sometimes be priced. But money becomes conceptually dangerous when we begin to assume that sufficiently high payment can settle the value of life, fertility, companionship, trust or love itself.

A person has costs. A person also has economic needs. But a person is not a price.

Once two partners begin to treat each other as objects to be fully valued, both can lose something that cannot be recovered through accounting: dignity.

3.3 Why Do We Use Money to Prove Love?

Luxury gifts can be genuine expressions of affection. There is nothing inherently false about a beautiful ring, an expensive journey or a comfortable home. The problem begins when expenditure becomes evidence: the more money spent, the more love supposedly proven.

A private jet can reduce geographical distance but cannot shorten the distance created by distrust. A luxury hotel can provide privacy but cannot manufacture emotional safety. An expensive ring can demonstrate purchasing power but cannot demonstrate what someone will do twenty years later when life becomes difficult.

Money can amplify the expression of love. It cannot substitute for the foundations of love.

3.4 Ordinary Couples Have Balance Sheets Too

The Sun–Jing dispute is extreme in scale, but the underlying calculations are familiar. Whose name is on the property? Who pays the deposit? How much does each family contribute? What are the salaries, degrees, heights, ages and family backgrounds? Who paid for dinner? Who sacrificed more?

These questions are not foolish. Some matter greatly. But modern dating often produces a visible balance sheet and ignores an invisible one.

The visible sheet records income, property, education, appearance and connections. The invisible sheet records honesty, responsibility, self-control, kindness, gratitude, diligence and loyalty. The first sheet is easier to measure. The second often determines what the marriage becomes.

3.5 If Nobody Is Ever Allowed to Lose, Why Have Marriage?

Long relationships contain periods of unavoidable imbalance. Pregnancy places unequal physical burdens on women. Serious illness can make one partner a caregiver for years. Career setbacks can change who earns more. Ageing parents can redirect time and money. No accounting system can make every week symmetrical.

This does not justify abuse, coercion or permanent exploitation. A healthy community of two survives temporary imbalance because both people trust that responsibility can move in both directions.

Marriage does not transcend fairness. It transcends instant settlement.

3.6 How Money Should Enter Marriage Without Ruling It

Couples should talk about money clearly. Income, debt, housing, savings, support for parents, spending autonomy, insurance and emergency planning are not unromantic topics. Avoiding them can be more dangerous than discussing them.

The distinction is between calculating resources and pricing people. A budget may be precise because money is measurable. Human dignity should not rise and fall with salary.

A healthy financial relationship usually needs three things: shared responsibility, personal space and transparent boundaries. Those arrangements ultimately depend on character. Honesty determines whether debt is hidden. Restraint affects spending. Responsibility shapes what happens after unemployment. Respect determines whether the higher earner uses money as power.

3.7 Gifts, Weddings and Rings

Ritual matters because it turns a private choice into a witnessed commitment. Rings, vows, ceremonies, betrothal gifts and wedding feasts can all carry meaning.

The danger comes when the symbol replaces what it symbolizes. A ring symbolizes commitment; a more expensive ring does not necessarily mean a truer commitment. A wedding allows a community to witness a promise; a larger wedding does not necessarily create a stronger marriage.

Years later, menus are forgotten and photographs fade. What remains is whether the couple carried the promises of that day into ordinary life.

Chapter 4 · The Spotlight Has Two Sides

4.1 Turning on the Spotlight

In late August 2026, Sun published a long account of the relationship while a civil dispute over the reported betrothal gift was also moving through legal procedures. Jing Tian's side rejected key allegations and stated that the matter should be handled through law.

This distinction is essential: online narratives are not judicial findings.

Whatever the motives behind publication, the consequence was clear. A private dispute became a public event. Once intimate details enter the attention economy, the storyteller no longer controls how they will be interpreted.

4.2 The Spotlight Turns Back

A public accusation invites scrutiny not only of the accused but also of the accuser. Readers begin asking about motives, past conduct, rhetorical choices, proportionality and privacy. This is one of the central paradoxes of online attention: you can decide when to switch on the light, but not where the light will finally point.

The lesson extends far beyond celebrities. Anyone who turns a private conflict into public content should assume that the audience will examine both sides.

4.3 When the Past Re-enters the Present

Once a personal narrative becomes public, people from the past may reappear with their own accounts. Those accounts can be incomplete, emotional or contested. Their existence nevertheless demonstrates a structural fact about public storytelling: the narrator also becomes narratable.

If you make another person's past part of the public record, your own past may also be reopened for examination.

4.4 CZ and the Question of Boundaries

During the controversy, Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ, publicly argued that aggressive marketing was one thing, while personal attacks and unnecessary disclosure that could damage another person's career were another. Sun subsequently indicated that the remaining dispute should be left to the court.

The significance of the exchange is not that one industry figure can settle a moral question. It is that even inside a world famous for aggressive competition and publicity, boundaries still matter. Legal conflict does not erase the value of restraint.

4.5 The Attention Paradox

Attention is seductive because it feels like possession. If I can generate attention, I may imagine that I control it. In reality, attention is a temporary current. It can be directed for a moment and then reverse.

The person who uses attention as a weapon must therefore accept the possibility of becoming its target.

4.6 When Cleverness Turns Against Itself

The controversy brings together due diligence, assets, risk, AI and publicity. It therefore raises a question larger than the individuals involved: does excellence in business imply maturity in marriage?

Not necessarily.

The ability to make money, compete, seize opportunities, manage assets and use AI are valuable survival skills. Marriage requires another set of capacities: honesty, restraint, respect for boundaries, responsibility, conflict repair and the ability to preserve another person's dignity even when the relationship is failing.

A useful question for the AI age is not simply, “Is this person impressive?” It is: “Is the way this person is impressive compatible with marriage?”

4.7 Character Is Often Clearest at the End

During courtship, people have strong incentives to behave well. The relationship provides pleasure, validation and hope. Separation removes those rewards and may replace them with anger, humiliation and financial conflict. That is why endings often reveal boundaries more clearly than beginnings.

A person has every right to protect property, reputation and safety. But self-protection does not automatically require humiliation. Legal evidence and public shaming are not the same thing.

In the digital age, restraint includes knowing what belongs with lawyers, what belongs in private conversation and what should never become content.

4.8 Reputation Is Not Fully Repairable

Money can often be repaid. Reputation works differently. A deleted post may have been copied. A disclosed secret may remain searchable. A later judgment may not reach everyone who saw the original accusation.

This is why intimate conflict demands special caution. The internet reaches conclusions faster than legal systems can examine evidence. The same principle applies on a smaller scale to ordinary families: group chats, mutual friends, workplaces and children can become miniature courts of public opinion.

A trustworthy partner is not only someone who treats you well while in love. It is also someone who knows where not to cross the line when love is ending.

Chapter 5 · Why Are We Better at Selecting Partners but Worse at Committing?

5.1 The Marriage Supermarket

Dating platforms make complex people legible through categories: age, height, location, education, income, profession, lifestyle, interests and family plans. This is efficient. It can prevent obvious incompatibilities.

But a profile is not a person.

The danger is not that conditions exist. The danger is that the logic of screening becomes the logic of the entire relationship. We become both shopper and product, evaluating and being evaluated in seconds.

5.2 Choice Overload and Commitment Paralysis

Algorithms create the impression that a better match may always be one swipe away. When options feel endless, a real person must compete not only with other real people but with an imaginary composite assembled from the best features of everyone else.

A stable partner may lose to someone funnier. The funny person may lose to someone wealthier. The wealthy person may lose to someone more emotionally attentive. The comparison never ends because the ideal competitor does not actually exist.

Choice is freedom. Endless comparison can become captivity.

5.3 From Social Compatibility to “Emotional Value”

The Chinese phrase often translated as “emotional value” describes something real: people want to feel understood, respected and supported. The problem begins when emotional care is converted into a continuous service metric.

No human being can provide perfect emotional output at all times. Illness, grief, work stress and family crises change what a person can give. A relationship that functions only while both partners remain high-performing providers of pleasant feelings may be excellent entertainment but weak preparation for marriage.

5.4 Why Is It So Hard to Stop Looking?

Past generations often suffered from too little choice. Many people today face a different problem: they cannot stop choosing.

AI and recommendation systems are designed to continue comparing. Marriage eventually requires the opposite: after sufficient knowledge and a mature decision, comparison must stop.

Stopping comparison does not mean ignoring abuse, addiction, deception or serious betrayal. It means that after a responsible commitment, a partner is no longer continuously placed back on the market against imagined alternatives.

Commitment necessarily closes some doors. If every door must remain open forever, no shared home can fully be entered.

5.5 Why Marriage Is Not Declining for One Simple Reason

Lower marriage rates cannot be reduced to dating apps or changing values. Housing costs, employment insecurity, longer education, urbanization, changing gender roles and lifestyle preferences all matter.

Yet one cultural change deserves attention: we are becoming highly skilled at filtering and less practiced at building.

We can screen for education, assets, personality and lifestyle. But marriage begins after the filter has finished. It asks whether two independent lives can learn to coordinate time, money, care, family, desire and sacrifice.

5.6 When More Choice Meets a Real Human Being

Imagine three promising people. One is stable but not especially funny. One is delightful but earns less. One is attractive but inconsistent in communication. A platform can always present another profile.

The mind then shifts from “Can I build something with this person?” to “Could I still do better?”

Real people cannot be purchased feature by feature. Stability, humour, beauty, ambition, family background and emotional sensitivity do not arrive as interchangeable modules. Every person comes whole, with strengths and limitations attached to the same life story.

5.7 Conditions Are Not Wrong; Treating Them as Everything Is

Income, health, education, debt, family plans and geography can materially affect marriage. Mature people do not ignore reality.

It is useful, however, to distinguish threshold conditions from decisive qualities. Whether both people want children may be a threshold question. Whether one person is honest when embarrassed is a character question. Income may affect the feasibility of a plan; it does not determine moral worth.

Conditions are useful filters. They are poor rankings of human value.

5.8 Three Composite Scenarios

Consider three fictional composites.

First, two highly educated professionals are perfectly matched on paper, but each expects the other to sacrifice a major career opportunity. Their problem is not compatibility data; it is whether they can think in terms of “our problem” rather than “my loss.”

Second, a charming partner provides extraordinary emotional attention during easy years, then withdraws when illness enters the family. The test is not whether fatigue is legitimate—it is—but whether the relationship can move from “How does this make me feel?” to “How do we face this season together?”

Third, a dating algorithm finds a couple with remarkably similar interests and values, but they discover that money means freedom to one and safety to the other. The algorithm did not fail. It simply could not encode the emotional history attached to money.

Marriage difficulty often begins where matching ends.

5.9 Five Common Misconceptions in the AI Age

First: if I find the right person, marriage should not require much work. In reality, even good marriages require negotiation, repair and adaptation.

Second: if someone truly loves me, they should automatically know what I need. Love does not create telepathy. Communication is not evidence of failure; it is a relationship skill.

Third: conflict means incompatibility. Some conflicts reveal incompatibility, but many reveal two different habits trying to form one shared system.

Fourth: keeping alternatives open protects me. Sometimes it protects against premature commitment; after commitment, it can prevent depth.

Fifth: the best partner is the one with the highest measurable score. The qualities that sustain marriage often become visible only under pressure.

5.10 From Finding the Best Person to Building a Good Shared Life

The most important shift may be from optimization to construction.

A marriage is not a product found in finished form. Two people bring personalities, histories, wounds, strengths and habits into a long process of building. Compatibility matters, but so does the capacity to create compatibility through communication, restraint and mutual adjustment.

The question therefore changes from “Have I found the objectively best person available?” to “Have I found a sufficiently compatible, trustworthy person with whom both of us are willing to build?”

Chapter 6 · What Should We Actually Look For?

6.1 Honesty: The Ability to Face Truth

Honesty is more than not telling obvious lies. It is the capacity to face uncomfortable reality without manufacturing a convenient story.

Watch what a person does after making a mistake. Does he hide it, blame others, minimize it, or admit it? Does she tell the truth only when truth is painless? Marriage requires repeated contact with facts neither person likes. Without honesty, every other virtue becomes difficult to trust.

6.2 Kindness: How Someone Treats the Weak

Charm is easiest when there is something to gain. Kindness becomes visible in interactions with people who offer little status or advantage: service workers, elderly relatives, children, animals, subordinates and strangers.

Kindness does not mean permanent softness. It means another person's vulnerability does not automatically become an opportunity for domination.

6.3 Responsibility: What Happens When Life Gets Hard

Responsibility is the habit of asking, “What is mine to carry?” rather than “Whom can I blame?”

A responsible person may fail. He may lose a job. She may become ill. The key is how the person responds: avoidance or engagement, excuses or adjustment, disappearance or participation.

Marriage amplifies consequences. A partner's way of handling responsibility eventually becomes part of your life.

6.4 Loyalty: The Meaning of a Promise

Loyalty is not the absence of every attraction to another person. Human beings continue to notice other people after marriage. Loyalty is the decision not to turn every attraction into a new possibility.

It means protecting the relationship when nobody is watching, and refusing to build secret alternatives while enjoying the security of an existing commitment.

6.5 Restraint: The Ability to Govern Desire

Modern culture often treats desire as self-validating: if I strongly want something, perhaps I should pursue it. Traditional moral cultures were more suspicious of this conclusion.

Restraint is not emotional deadness. It is the capacity to place a boundary between impulse and action. Money, sex, anger, status and attention all become dangerous when a person cannot tolerate the word “enough.”

6.6 Respect: The Floor Beneath Conflict

Respect is easiest to identify during disagreement. Does a person threaten, humiliate, expose secrets, use money as leverage, attack family members or weaponize private vulnerabilities?

Love can fluctuate. Respect should establish a floor beneath the relationship. Even if a marriage eventually ends, respect can determine whether the ending becomes painful or destructive.

6.7 Growth and Adjustment

No one marries a finished human being. Careers change, bodies age, parents become dependent, children alter routines, beliefs evolve and health can collapse.

A good long-term partner is therefore not merely someone whose current form fits your current life. It is someone capable of learning, apologizing, adapting and renegotiating roles without treating every change as betrayal.

6.8 How the Seven Qualities Appear in Ordinary Life

Character is rarely revealed by a questionnaire. It appears in small repeated moments.

Watch how someone handles being late, losing money, receiving criticism, dealing with a difficult parent, sharing household work, returning borrowed property, apologizing, keeping confidences and behaving when exhausted.

Grand declarations are easy to stage. Repeated small actions are harder to fake.

6.9 Small Experiences Worth Sharing Before Marriage

Before marriage, it is useful to experience some ordinary pressure together: plan a trip with a limited budget, care for someone who needs help, complete a demanding project, discuss a financial mistake, spend time with each other's families, and resolve a real disagreement without threatening the relationship.

The goal is not to manufacture tests. It is to allow real life to become visible before a permanent promise is made.

Chapter 7 · Before Finding the Right Person, Become One

7.1 Seven Mirrors

The seven qualities above are not merely criteria for judging another person. They are mirrors.

Am I honest when truth costs me? Kind when there is no reward? Responsible when I fail? Loyal when another possibility appears? Restrained when desire is strong? Respectful when angry? Capable of changing when evidence shows I am wrong?

A list used only to evaluate others becomes another consumer tool. Used on ourselves, it becomes preparation for marriage.

7.2 From Buyer to Builder

The buyer asks: What am I getting? The builder asks: What are we creating?

Dating inevitably involves evaluation. Marriage cannot remain permanently in evaluation mode. At some point, both people must become participants in the construction of a common life.

7.3 Tolerating Imperfection and Correcting Yourself

Accepting imperfection does not mean accepting abuse or serious deception. It means recognizing that every ordinary person will sometimes be tired, selfish, mistaken, insensitive or afraid.

A mature partner does not ask whether the other person is flawless. The more useful questions are whether mistakes can be acknowledged, repaired and learned from—and whether I can do the same.

7.4 Responsibility Is the Beginning of Maturity

A wedding changes legal and social status, but maturity is not produced by ceremony. It begins when a person understands that choices create obligations.

The adult question is not only “What life do I want?” It is also “What responsibilities come with the life I choose?”

7.5 Marriage Is Not a Rescue Service

A partner cannot permanently repair another person's identity, cure every wound, provide all meaning or compensate for a life one refuses to build.

Healthy marriage involves mutual support, but support differs from rescue. Two people should be able to lean on each other without requiring one person to carry the other's entire existence.

7.6 Family of Origin

Marriage joins more than two personalities. It connects habits formed in different families: attitudes toward money, privacy, conflict, holidays, ageing parents, childcare, gender roles and boundaries.

The task is not to erase either family. It is to form a new primary unit capable of respecting parents without allowing every parental preference to govern the marriage.

7.7 Ten Questions Before Marriage

Before marriage, ask yourself: Do I trust this person's honesty? Can we discuss money without manipulation? Can we disagree without humiliation? Do we broadly agree about children? Can we set boundaries with our families? What happens when one of us earns less? How do we respond to illness? Can we apologize? Can we remain loyal when attention comes from elsewhere? And am I prepared to offer the qualities I am demanding?

AI can help us organize our answers. It cannot tell us whether we are being honest with ourselves.

Chapter 8 · The Historical Echo: Why Chinese Tradition Spoke of Yi Between Husband and Wife

8.1 What Is Yi? A Lesson from Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Chinese word yi (義) is difficult to translate with a single English word. Depending on context, it can mean righteousness, moral obligation, loyalty to what is right, or the duty created by a relationship.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms made yi vivid for generations of Chinese readers through the literary brotherhood of Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. The novel is literature, not a transcript of history, and brotherly yi is not identical to marital yi. Yet the stories dramatize a moral intuition: once a meaningful bond has been freely accepted, immediate self-interest is no longer the only standard of action.

The Peach Garden oath represents chosen relationship becoming responsibility. Guan Yu's literary loyalty to Liu Bei represents remembering commitment after circumstances change. The Huarong Trail episode, shaped by literary tradition, dramatizes another aspect: remembering a debt of gratitude even when calculation points elsewhere.

Yi is not blind loyalty. It cannot mean helping a friend commit wrongdoing or abandoning moral judgment. In classical moral language, yi belongs beside ren (仁, humane concern), li (禮, proper boundaries and conduct), zhi (智, discernment) and xin (信, trustworthiness).

Applied to marriage, the central idea can be stated simply: love answers, “Why did I choose you?” Yi asks, “Now that I have chosen you, how should I treat you?”

8.2 What Did “The Yi of Husband and Wife” Mean?

The Liji, or Book of Rites, describes marriage as joining two family lines and speaks of establishing the yi of husband and wife. The ancient social world behind these texts was not ours. It contained hierarchies and constraints that modern readers should not romanticize.

Yet one insight remains useful: marriage was not understood merely as a private emotional state. It created a relationship with duties.

Modern romantic culture often places feeling first: because I love, I stay; when love disappears, the relationship loses its foundation. Traditional moral language asks an additional question: what obligations arise because I made a serious commitment?

This does not mean duty should imprison people in violence or abuse. It means that ordinary fluctuations of emotion need not automatically dissolve responsibility.

8.3 When Status and Fortune Change

History offers no perfect marriages, but it gives us useful tests. What happens when one partner rises in status? What happens when wealth disappears? What happens when ambition expands? Does the old relationship become embarrassing, or does shared history acquire greater value?

These questions appear across cultures because the human problem is universal.

8.3.1 John and Abigail Adams: A Marriage Sustained by Conversation

More than a thousand surviving letters between John and Abigail Adams allow modern readers to observe a marriage conducted across long separations, political upheaval and public responsibility. Their letters contain affection, argument, practical management and intellectual exchange.

The lesson is not that every couple should imitate eighteenth-century marriage. It is that sustained conversation can become part of the architecture of commitment. Distance did not eliminate the need to remain intellectually and emotionally present.

8.3.2 Abigail Was Not Merely “The Woman Behind the President”

Abigail Adams had judgment, opinions and moral force of her own. A strong marriage does not require one personality to disappear into the other.

Partnership can include disagreement. Indeed, a spouse who can speak honestly may be more valuable than one who merely confirms what the other wants to hear.

8.3.3 Ulysses and Julia Grant: Through Different Worlds

Ulysses S. Grant and Julia Dent Grant experienced military uncertainty, separation, war, national fame, the presidency and later financial catastrophe. Near the end of his life, Grant worked intensely on his memoir while gravely ill, in part to secure his family's financial future.

Their story illustrates a recurring marital test: can a relationship retain meaning as status moves dramatically upward and downward?

8.3.4 Success and the People Who Knew Us Before It

Chinese history preserves the story associated with Emperor Xuan of Han and Xu Pingjun, remembered through the phrase “the old sword,” a symbol of not forgetting a companion from humbler days after status rises.

Whatever differences separate ancient China from modern America, the moral question is recognizable: when success changes the market value of our options, do we also reprice the people who shared our earlier life?

8.3.5 Marie and Pierre Curie: Partnership in Work

Marie and Pierre Curie show another possibility: marriage as intellectual partnership. Their relationship was not simply emotional support around separate lives; scientific work itself became part of their shared world.

A good marriage does not require identical careers. But it can create a space in which two complete people strengthen each other's serious work rather than reducing one another to accessories.

8.3.6 Winston and Clementine Churchill: The Value of Saying No

Clementine Churchill's importance in Winston Churchill's life included support, but also candid correction. A spouse who never disagrees may be comfortable but not necessarily helpful.

Marriage at its best can contain a form of loving opposition: I am on your side, and precisely because I am on your side, I will tell you when I believe you are wrong.

8.3.7 These Marriages Are Questions, Not Templates

Historical couples should not be turned into saints. Their worlds contained inequalities and pressures very different from ours. Their value lies not in providing formulas but in posing enduring questions about conversation, gratitude, status, work, correction and endurance.

8.4 Emperor Taizong and Empress Zhangsun

Chinese historical memory often presents Empress Zhangsun as a partner who combined affection with judgment and restraint. The useful idea is not a romanticized imperial household. It is that a spouse can contribute to another person's moral and practical self-correction.

To “support” someone is not always to agree. Sometimes support means preventing ambition, anger or pride from becoming destructive.

8.5 Li Shutong: Spiritual Aspiration and Earthly Responsibility

Li Shutong, later the Buddhist monk Hongyi, is a far more difficult case. His life invites admiration for spiritual seriousness but also raises painful questions about the responsibilities left behind when a person radically changes direction.

The story should be approached cautiously rather than used as a simple moral verdict. It asks: when personal spiritual aspiration conflicts with obligations created by earlier relationships, how should responsibility be understood?

8.5.1 A Story That Must Be Told Carefully

The temptation is to turn complex lives into inspirational legends. But marriage ethics requires the opposite habit: do not erase the cost paid by other people in order to make one person's transformation appear pure.

Great ideals do not automatically cancel concrete responsibilities.

8.5.2 “For Better, for Worse”

Traditional Western wedding vows often include language about remaining together through better and worse circumstances, wealth and poverty, sickness and health. The precise wording varies across traditions, but the moral structure is familiar.

A vow is made before the future is known. That is exactly why it is a vow rather than a prediction.

8.6 Traditional Marriage Was Not Always Good

Traditional marriage systems included coercion, unequal legal status, restricted choices for women and social pressures that modern societies have rightly challenged. We should not romanticize the past.

The task is selective inheritance: preserve the insight that commitment creates responsibility while rejecting structures that deny dignity, freedom or safety.

8.7 What Should We Keep from Yi Today?

We can keep a modern definition:

Yi in marriage means that after a relationship has been freely chosen, I do not treat my immediate interest as the only measure of how I should treat you.

Love gives marriage warmth. Yi gives it moral weight. Xin protects promises. Li protects boundaries. Zhi distinguishes right from wrong. Ren prevents us from thinking only of ourselves.

This is one of the central “unmeasurable values” of this book.

Chapter 9 · AI Can Help You Choose, but It Cannot Marry for You

9.1 What Can Be Outsourced to Numbers

AI and digital tools are useful for practical filtering: distance, schedules, language, broad lifestyle preferences, financial scenarios, housing costs and other measurable constraints. There is no virtue in refusing useful tools.

Good judgment begins by using technology where technology is strong.

9.2 The Middle Zone: AI Can Assist, Humans Must Judge

AI can summarize communication patterns, help formulate difficult questions, identify possible inconsistencies and suggest topics couples have not discussed. But these outputs require context.

A delayed reply may signal avoidance, exhaustion, work pressure or nothing important at all. A model can identify patterns; people must understand meaning.

9.3 Decisions AI Cannot Own

No algorithm can take moral responsibility for choosing a spouse, ending a marriage, having a child, forgiving a betrayal or remaining during illness.

AI can offer reasons. It cannot become the person who must live with the consequence.

9.4 The Greater Danger: Losing the Will to Decide

The most serious risk is not a machine suddenly commanding our private lives. It is humans becoming so accustomed to optimization that they no longer want to bear uncertainty.

A life without responsibility cannot be created by improving recommendations. At some point, a person must say: I have considered the evidence, I know uncertainty remains, and I choose.

9.5 When Life Changes, Old Scores Expire

A compatibility score is a snapshot. Life is a moving system.

The couple who matches perfectly at twenty-eight may face infertility at thirty-four, unemployment at thirty-eight, parental illness at forty-five or disability at fifty. No initial score can settle every later question.

The durable asset is not perfect initial matching. It is the capacity to respond together when the conditions used by the original model no longer exist.

9.6 Four Changes That Test a Marriage

Four transitions reveal a great deal: loss of money, serious illness, major change in status, and ageing.

When wealth falls, does respect fall with it? When illness reduces one partner's independence, does care become resentment? When status rises, does the successful partner begin to treat the other as obsolete? When beauty and energy change with age, does affection have deeper roots?

These tests are difficult precisely because they move the relationship away from the conditions under which it was first chosen.

9.7 Seven Conversations to Have Before Marriage

Talk clearly about money, children, careers and location, parents and family boundaries, fidelity and digital boundaries, illness and caregiving, and the way conflict will be handled.

These conversations do not guarantee success. They reveal assumptions before those assumptions become crises.

9.8 The Proper Role of AI

AI is best treated as a mirror, analyst and question generator—not as an oracle.

Ask it to compare options, expose blind spots, organize facts and challenge inconsistent reasoning. Then put the machine down and look at the human being in front of you.

The decision remains yours.

Chapter 10 · Who Should We Marry in the AI Age?

10.1 What Kind of Person?

Choose someone whose character remains meaningful when the visible metrics change.

Choose honesty over polished self-presentation, kindness over charm, responsibility over promises, loyalty over constant optionality, restraint over appetite, respect over domination, and the capacity to grow over the illusion of perfection.

Income, education, health and family circumstances matter. They shape real life. But they should not be confused with moral worth or marital capacity.

10.2 Before Finding the Right Person

The standard must turn inward.

If I want honesty, am I honest? If I want loyalty, do I protect boundaries? If I want responsibility, do I carry my share? If I want kindness, how do I behave when I am angry? If I want a partner who can grow, can I admit that I am wrong?

Marriage is not merely a search for someone qualified to love me. It is preparation to become qualified to share another person's life.

10.3 In an Uncalculable Future, Choose Responsibility

At the beginning of this book stood a scale: money, measurements, assets and algorithms on one side; life, trust and commitment on the other.

The lesson is not that calculation is evil. Calculation is necessary. We should understand finances, identify obvious risks and use modern tools intelligently.

But calculation must know its jurisdiction.

The final question in marriage is not whether every risk has been eliminated. It is whether, after seeing enough reality, two people are willing to accept responsibility for a future neither can fully calculate.

10.4 Marriage Is Not Finding the Answer; It Is Living One Out Together

Young people are often told to find the correct person, as if somewhere in the world there exists a finished answer waiting to be discovered.

Marriage is less like finding an answer key and more like writing a long response together. The first choice matters enormously. So do the thousands of choices that follow it: how to speak after an argument, how to spend money, how to care for parents, how to respond to temptation, how to divide work, how to repair trust.

The marriage you have after twenty years is partly the person you chose and partly the life both of you repeatedly built.

10.5 When We Grow Old, What Remains on the Scale?

Imagine the scale decades later. Salaries have changed. Beauty has changed. Careers may have ended. The home may be larger or smaller. Public attention has moved elsewhere. Even health may have become fragile.

What remains?

Shared memory remains. The person who sat beside you in a hospital remains. The apology that prevented a family from breaking remains. The years of childcare remain. The decision not to cross a boundary during a lonely season remains. The ordinary meals and unrecorded afternoons remain.

Shared history cannot be bought quickly. A newly encountered person may outperform a spouse on some current metric, but cannot automatically possess the twenty years already lived together.

A long marriage is like a tree. The visible branches matter, but much of its strength is underground, in roots grown slowly beyond public view.

10.6 The Final Question: If Nothing Can Be Guaranteed, Why Marry?

At this point, a reasonable reader may ask: if marriage cannot guarantee permanent love, health, wealth, fidelity or even lifelong companionship, why marry at all?

More young people are asking this question. Some say a person can live perfectly well alone. Some say love does not need a legal document. Others argue that because marriage can involve divorce, betrayal, property disputes and family conflict, the rational choice is simply not to enter it.

I do not agree that this conclusion follows.

The meaning of marriage has never been to eliminate uncertainty. Marriage is what two people do in a world where uncertainty cannot be eliminated: they make a commitment anyway.

Chinese traditional thought often understands life through relationship rather than isolation. The language of yin and yang describes complementary forces that interact rather than exist as sealed units. The popular phrase often rendered as “solitary yin does not generate; isolated yang does not grow” should not be used mechanically to declare an unmarried person incomplete. Nor should anyone be demeaned for remaining single through choice or circumstance.

Its more useful reminder is that human life is relational. We need parents, friends, communities, love and care. Across civilizations, the union of men and women in families and the raising of new generations has been one of the fundamental structures through which human society continues.

Chinese speakers also sometimes make a cultural association with the written character 好, “good,” which contains the components 女, “woman,” and 子, “child.” This should not be treated as scientific proof or a complete etymological argument. It is better understood as a cultural image that generations have found suggestive: family, continuity and life were deeply woven into traditional ideas of human flourishing.

Respecting unmarried people is not the same as declaring marriage obsolete. Freedom is not merely keeping every option open. A deeper form of freedom is the ability to choose something worthy and then give oneself seriously to it.

Marriage therefore does not say, “I guarantee that the future will contain no storm.” It says, “I cannot guarantee that there will be no storm, but I am willing to promise that when the storm comes, I will not leave lightly.”

That promise is not proof of the future. It is a moral orientation toward the future.

To marry is to say: I know other possibilities exist, but I will take one possibility and live it as my life. I will not keep every door permanently open in case a more optimized human being appears. I will build a home, accept responsibilities, and allow shared history to acquire value that no market comparison can reproduce.

This is why uncertainty does not make commitment meaningless. It makes commitment necessary.

We do not marry because we have calculated the future correctly. We marry because, after enough knowledge and judgment, we decide that another person is worthy of trust—and that we are willing to become worthy of theirs.

Interlude · The 37% Rule and the Wisdom of Stopping

A popular Chinese story sometimes attributed to Socrates describes walking through a wheat field and trying to choose the largest ear without going back. It should be treated as an allegory, not as a securely documented historical episode.

The mathematical idea behind a similar modern discussion is real. In the classical Secretary Problem, or Optimal Stopping Problem, a decision-maker sees candidates one by one in random order. Each rejected candidate cannot be recalled, and the goal is to select the single best candidate. Under those restrictive assumptions, the optimal large-sample strategy is to observe and reject roughly the first 1/e of candidates—about 36.8 percent—then select the first later candidate who is better than everyone previously seen.

This does not mean you should date exactly 37 percent of the people you might ever meet. Real relationships violate nearly every assumption of the model. We do not know how many people we will meet. Human beings cannot be ranked on one dimension. Relationships allow learning, reconsideration and mutual change. There is no universally agreed “best” spouse.

The model is useful as a metaphor because it captures two opposite errors. Choose too early and you may not yet understand yourself. Search forever and you may keep rejecting good reality for imaginary perfection.

Dating apps intensify the second danger by making the next option permanently visible. The wisdom required in love is therefore not only the wisdom to search. It is also the wisdom to stop searching.

Algorithms can calculate 37 percent. They cannot calculate the chance by which two lives meet.

Song One · The Weight of Love AI Cannot Calculate

Houses, wealth, height and temperament,distance, age and time—all of them can be enteredinto a table line by line.

AI can calculate the weight of wealth,calculate how far two cities lie,calculate among ten thousand peoplewho most resembles whom.

But it cannot weigh a faithful heartwhen rain and hardship come;it cannot tell me, when I fall,who will still be standing there.

Honesty has no market price.Kindness has no weight.Responsibility does not fit a spreadsheet.Loyalty has no unit of measure.

If one day I am no longer young,no longer successful, no longer bright,will you still be holding my hand?That is the weight of loveAI cannot calculate.

She:I do not ask you to promisethat life will never bring a storm.

He:And I cannot promiseI will always look as I do today.

She:I only want to know,when darkness truly comes—

He:whether I will stay.

Together:We do not walk toward each otherbecause we calculated the future perfectly.We walk together because we knowthe future cannot be calculated,and still choose to carry it together.

What AI cannot calculatemay be the true weight of love.

Song Two · After I Stop Searching

We all walk into a field of wheat,hoping to carry home the finest ear.Some reach out after only a few steps,then spend the road ahead looking back.

Some keep believingthe next one will be better:this one is good,but perhaps the next will be perfect.They walk until youth has passedand discover even a wheat field has an end.

Mathematics says:observe about thirty-seven percent,learn the field,and learn yourself.Then when someone appearswho exceeds all you have known,perhaps it is time to stop comparingand make a real decision.

After I stop searching,I finally learn how to stay.Not because the world containsno other person who could move my heart,but because the crowded worldstill contains a thousand possibilities—and yet the chance that brought us togethermakes me choose to keep holding your hand.

Let the search that should endcome to an end.Let the person who should step awaylearn to step away.

Love is not keeping every door open,waiting for someone better.Love is knowing I still have choices,and choosing to leave my lifebeside this one person.

The days ahead will not all be romance.Bills and chores will dim the first glow.Someone else may understand your tiredness.Someone else may appearon a lonely night.

And for a moment you may wonder:did I choose too soon?If I had walked farther,would someone better have appeared?

But life is not an endless wheat field.Years already lived cannot be recalled.Not every new attraction is love.Not everyone who understands youbelongs in your future.

Because one of love's most precious giftsis the chance by which two people meet.In a sea of human beings,meeting at all is not ordinary.

After I stop searching,I finally understand staying.Not because no brighter personwill ever pass through my world,but because when temptation comes to the door,I still remember why I first held your hand.

Do not let a momentary flameburn down the lamptwo people kept lit for decades.Loyalty is not never feeling attraction.It is knowing, after attraction,where home still is.

She:What if one daysomeone understands you better than I do?

He:Being understoodis not a reason to cross a boundary.

He:What if one daysomeone makes my heart move again?

She:A moving heartis not the end of a promise.

Together:Thirty-seven percent is only mathematics.Life has no standard answer.It only reminds us:choosing too soon may bring regret;searching forevermay also make us miss true love.

We cannot make the world stop tempting us.We can decide where we remain.

After I stop searching,we finally begin to stay.Not because we foundthe best person in the world,but because after seeinga real and imperfect person,we still choose to walk together.

The meaning of commitmentis not that choice disappears.It is that while choice still exists—I choose to stop searching.

Song Three · What Is Yi?

What is yi?

Is it a cup of wine in the Peach Garden?A blade in Guan Yu's hand?Or the sentence two people speakon their wedding day:I do.

Ren. Yi. Li. Zhi. Xin.Five words Chinese children have heard for generations.But if someone asks,“What exactly is yi?”perhaps Romance of the Three Kingdomsoffers one long answer.

Three men meet.They are not brothers by blood.They choose a bond,and after choosing,responsibility begins.

Love may say:I like you.Yi asks:Now that I have chosen you,how should I treat you?

Yi is not blind loyalty.It is not helping a friend do wrong.It is not taking someone's sidewithout asking what is right.True yi needs principle.

Ren reminds methat other people matter.Li reminds methat boundaries matter.Zhi helps me distinguish right from wrong.Xin means my word should be trustworthy.And yi asks:when my interest and my responsibility collide,what should I still do?

Not everything I desireshould become mine.Not every attractionshould be carried home.

Yi means that when my interests change,I still rememberwhat responsibility I owe another person.

Love has warmth.Yi has weight.Xin guards the promise.Li guards the boundary.Zhi guards judgment.Ren keeps mefrom thinking only of myself.

The three men of the Peach Gardentaught generations to remember yi.Their story was about brotherhood.

Marriage has another form:the yi between husband and wife.

The relationship is different.The responsibilities are different.But one principle remains:

when circumstances change,I still rememberthat I once gave you my word.

AI can calculate compatibility.It can calculate wealth.It can calculate risk.

It cannot calculatewhether, when the storm arrives,a person will still remember:

I once promised you.

Closing Reflection

Attention can be counted. Risk can be modeled. Wealth can be priced. Conditions can be compared. AI can even estimate compatibility.

But a person worthy of a shared life cannot be reduced to a score.

The final question is not: Who maximizes my advantage?

It is: Who is honest enough to trust, kind enough not to exploit weakness, responsible enough to carry difficulty, loyal enough to protect a promise, restrained enough to govern desire, respectful enough to preserve dignity, and flexible enough to grow with a changing life?

And then the question turns back on us:

Can I become that person too?

Marriage is not the search for someone who maximizes my interests. It is the decision to find someone worthy of mutual trust, and then to accept responsibility for the life built together.

The meaning of commitment is not that there are no more choices.

It is that while choices still exist,I choose to stop searching.

Author's Note on the Contemporary Case

This English edition uses the Justin Sun–Jing Tian controversy as a contemporary case study in public narratives about love, money, AI, privacy and marriage. Statements about disputed private events should be read as claims attributed to the relevant parties or as reported public allegations unless and until established through reliable evidence or legal findings. The purpose of this book is not to adjudicate the private dispute, but to examine the broader social and moral questions it raises.