“Friendship is perhaps the queerest form of relationship: it flows across gender, sexuality, age, and culture, unbound by matching labels or fixed identities. It remains fluid and unruly, free from bloodline and marriage, rarely disciplined by law, religion, kinship, or consumerism. It is wild, instinctive, and still uncolonized — a space that has not yet been domesticated. The more I think about it, the more miraculous it feels: friendship may be the most radical bond human beings — and all living beings — have ever invented with one another. “
Source:Â https://weibo.com/2142708050/PqBgeC84Z
What is often considered “impractical” is, in fact, the most pure and the most beautiful. The idea of “colonization” here is relative to love — for love is often tied to family, and within traditional values, the latter serves as the supposed destination of the former. Thus, love is frequently entangled with familial duty, reproductive expectations, and social order. Capitalism deepens this colonization: romantic love has been so thoroughly idealized that even Valentine’s Day has become a marketing spectacle, packaging emotion for profit.
In this light, I wish people would cherish friendship as much as, if not more than, romantic love. This is not to say the two stand in opposition. Yet some people distance themselves from, or even devalue, their friendships the moment they acquire a lover. Perhaps it sounds cynical, but some people are indeed painfully banal, intolerably ordinary, governed by convention rather than awareness. However, once you recognize this tendency and choose otherwise — to value your friendships with equal sincerity — then it ceases to be a problem.
Compared with love, friendship is profoundly revolutionary, though rarely celebrated. Its quiet endurance and understated nature may be precisely what protects it from commodification. Love and intimacy, on the other hand, are endlessly performed and romanticized — reinforced by social media, literature, art, and even state narratives, all in the name of “social stability,” with the family presented as the smallest “practical” unit of society. Yet very few people ever touch the essence of love itself.
Friendship, by contrast, can be something pure, profound, and even radical. Its so-called “impracticality” filters out the vulgar pragmatists; its absence of an easy dopamine rush excludes the dopamine-addicted zealots. Romantic love, in many cases, becomes a mere strategy for escaping the loneliness of singleness — a hurried search for shelter. Its excess of dopamine makes people feverish and banal. If love were always so easily available and endlessly gratifying, no one would bother to pursue difficult goals or engage in deeper thought; we would all drift into complacency and emptiness.
To illustrate this contrast, consider the difference between revolutionary friendship and love bombing: the former is a pure, natural, and genuinely “impractical” bond, while the latter is a counterfeit intimacy — seemingly sweet but deeply manipulative. One often-overlooked red flag is when someone, right from the beginning, acts as if they are madly in love with you, showering you with sweet words and grand promises.
After just a week or two, they start declaring, “Baby, I want to marry you,” or “I want to spend my life with you.” Naturally, you begin to wonder, Am I really that great? Does he really love me that much? But you must be cautious. Many people mistake this behavior for passion or destiny — thinking they’ve finally met their soulmate. Yet in reality, this is love bombing: an illusion of intensity designed to overwhelm you.
Every single case of this I’ve seen turned out to be bad news. Sooner or later, they reveal their true nature. First of all, when someone behaves a certain way, it’s never just once. Whether their feelings are genuine or not, this is simply a pattern of behavior. Look into their messages and you’ll find the same words, the same gestures, repeated with everyone they meet.
True affection takes time — to know someone before loving them. If a person becomes obsessed with you without even knowing who you are, what is that, if not desire? And is that desire even healthy? What kind of inner void drives such fixation? Moreover, the more intense an emotion is at the start, the less sustainable it tends to be. Soon, the person’s mask slips, and what follows is irresponsibility — because, fundamentally, they do not care what you think or want. They only want to win you over quickly, to achieve their goal. In most cases, it’s not love at all — it’s strategy.
In the end, friendship teaches us a quieter, deeper kind of intimacy — one that does not rush, consume, or demand possession. It grows in freedom rather than fear, in curiosity rather than control. To be a true friend is to recognize another’s autonomy and still choose connection; to stay, not because of duty or desire, but because of shared trust. Perhaps this is what makes friendship so rare and so radical: it resists both colonization and commodification. In a world obsessed with instant gratification and transactional affection, friendship remains a small act of rebellion — and a quiet miracle of being human.