Hello, I’m Xuemin.

Welcome to Episode 2 of Abnormal Relationships.

Today we discuss illusory love: a gray-area relationship that looks and feels like love but exists incompletely in reality, growing more in one person’s fantasy than between real people. Online romance, secret crushes, idealized first loves, unrequited love, and losing interest after success often accompany it.

 

First, three typical cases.

Case one: Xiaoyuan.

Xiaoyuan has secretly loved a middle-school class monitor for nearly ten years, daily recalling exchanged glances and once-touching fingers. Without that person, life seems meaningless.Their emotional world rests almost entirely on this distant, frozen object.

Xiaoyuan repeatedly wonders whether the monitor reciprocates and thinks so: they share parental control; despite several relationships, the monitor still replies and has sent restrained birthday wishes.

Asked what “restrained” means, Xiaoyuan says the monitor is not ready for seriousness and fears losing future possibility. Ordinary social behavior becomes a drama full of subtext.

Once, as Xiaoyuan despaired, the monitor unexpectedly called. Xiaoyuan believes the monitor sensed danger and needed them alive; each is the other’s destined unique person.

Asked about confessing, Xiaoyuan says anxiously: “The monitor is sorting out relationships and preparing the best self for me. We both know I am waiting. They will be ready.” Thusevery explanation protects a perfect script requiring no—and allowing no—test by reality.

Case two: Xiaoyi.

For three months Xiaoyi has been consumed by an online romance.

A pleasant-voiced gaming teammate became a WeChat contact. Casual chat deepened when work trouble brought immediate voice comfort. Daily calls rapidly intensified a bond stripped from reality. Even work grew interesting through anticipation and fantasies of meeting.

But Xiaoyi never lets it become real, fearing that asking location or proposing a meeting will destroy the beauty.They fear leaving the safe online bubble and exposing fantasy to reality.

Case three: Xiaozha.