NYU渣男，纯爱战神，和在上海的罗兰巴特
In the end, all lovers are torn between young Werther and Don Juan—or, better, the 纯爱战神 and the NYU渣男。
几年来我发现很多不认识我的人对我的印象不是傻逼、渣男，就是傻逼渣男。作为江南第一深情的我今天吃火锅的时候突然恍然大悟想明白了为什么；这一顿大龙燚也算是没白吃。
其实说实话， I don’t really have the heart to blame them. After all, was it not I who trumped up my Romantic escapades to unsympathetic ears? Was it not I who blindly sought answers to the ontological question in love? Was it not I who traversed through Sodom and Gomorrah, descended to the second ring of hell on the heels of Dante and Virgil, denounced Stendhal, and annunciated alongside Stephen Dedalus “non serviam” to a world devoid of Amor?
Alas, after three deconstructive relationships and a fourth one ongoing (I hope it’s the last), I must divest myself of the amour fou so characteristic of the myth I had built around my character. At one point in my naivete, I probably thought it would make me more appealing to girls. Embarrassing, I know, but not as embarrassing as getting slapped in the company of some 网红。
But I digress, and it is again the twilight of the idols. First, Fuck Rousseau, and I will take my metaphysical sledgehammer and smash Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to pieces, follow John Keats into his sedentary monastery, and welcome the aesthetics of Schiller and Schelling triumphantly until there came a voice out of heaven calling: Elijah! Elijah! And I cry Abba! Adonai! Amid a Cloud of Cabanel’s Angels.
OK, OK, to those familiar with my writing, 我知道我不一会儿估计又要开始东扯西扯上海夜店，普鲁斯特，纽约天花板啥的了。I will stop myself from overindulging. Instead, today I will answer this deep-seated question about whether or not I am ultimately a 渣男 or a 小单纯 by slowly teasing out a third, higher thing that represents the unity of both. In so doing, I attempt to rescue love from this useless dialectic and elevate it through mediation with art. But first, a bit about love.
我第一任算是很正常的高中恋爱；我们会在（都知道对方会去那儿的）小咖啡店偶遇，仗着一起学习的借口去干饭，然后以消食的pretense绕着查尔斯湖畔周围漫步。It was at least something like that until I met my second, someone closer to Werther’s invention of Lotte, except she was wearing Thom Browne 高筒袜 instead of a white dress, and I wasn’t going to complain. 第三任是一个开始认为我是渣男的人， as I had this time around taken it slow and explored a bit, but of course, it was also delightful, and she was a cool girl who found beauty in small things, someone who liked both 爱情公寓 and 辣子鸡 and hummed tunes to herself when I droned on about Baudelaire.
到现任的时候我自我感觉好像已经快要知道我想要的爱情究竟是什么样的了。当然，我俩刚认识的时候，我还是很慌的。因为人家毕竟是Barnard的，听说了不少我的“光荣事迹”，让现在的我甚是惭愧。不知道是老天开了眼还是咋地，她撇开了这些舆论的压力，顶着被闺蜜骂的风险来找我吃面。总之， fast forward to today, 4+ months into our relationship, I think I had gotten a pretty good idea of what dates are like—in other words, I got the rizz. Ok, maybe not, but by now, I had become well-acquainted with the NYU渣男，the quintessential rizzard of Oz. At times I was repelled by him, other times idolized him, but it took too long for the realization to dawn on me that without understanding the NYU渣男， one cannot understand love.
So, without further ado: what is the NYU渣男？
Well, one can’t help but reminisce about that 视频 of the 女网红 in the back of the Sedan asking her 行情, “how many girl u fk? Five-hundred?” At any rate, I once had a friend who was skinny and short (but moneyed) who metamorphosized himself into an “NYU渣男” after, you guessed it, enrolling at NYU. That it actually started when he joined the 2024NYU本科群， or maybe the seed was planted in him long ago, is of little import to him—he is now pitting several romantic liaisons against each other in some twisted Battle Royale. Learning from my man and 其他能吃瓜吃到的NYU渣男和那些表白墙上挂过的人，I think I have discovered the essence of the 渣男, which is something along the mantra of “girls like bad guys.”
How things play out is pretty similar to the 上海留学圈渣男 playbook, which includes in its first chapter 密室/剧本日料蹦迪酒店一条龙。 I won’t go into the details here, but if you’re dying to know, my DMs are open. But, in broad strokes, they are good-looking and fun to approach, some of which are the classic 细狗 + 阴郁男孩 combo, which has proven to be especially popular, second only to the guy with the Goldman Sachs return offer. These guys have closely studied the blade, and they count 太宰治 or James Dean amongst their greatest inspirations. These guys know everything: how to get the best 销售 to 送最烈的酒（even 旺仔牛奶）, where to find the best 小众speakeasies, from Hats & Caps to the Broken Dagger， to 巨鹿路哪里最好玩，最好买，最潮。They have watched every 王家卫 film, heard every 红花会 song，and know when to take it easy when appropriate—按照Kira的话说，如果渣男搞得不是你，那他就是个很好的哥们儿。At this point, the playbook has many and many more pages left, but the secret to the NYU渣男 is not even NYU—the school has nothing to do with it—but the fact that he never gets hung up on anyone, like the bird from 阿飞正传 (et voila, the mantra above).
Of course, 很多女生都觉得这种渣男 are morally objectionable, especially when their emotionless, procedural seduction leads them to cheat or abuse. But my friend told me that he is just 玩玩， and so too are the women he gets with—just “玩玩”。“纽约有你妈的真爱，” he tells me one evening in the OMS lounge, or maybe it was AC. If 辉夜大小姐 is right, then Love is War, and when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. Even the bystanders fall in love collaterally.
But even if one accepts the NYU渣男 myth (and many 小学弟 do idolize them), even if someone looks at my 女朋友 and say “哇好好看呀” and extrapolates from this that I am a 渣男，I get this creeping feeling that something is not quite right here. Something’s afoot. Suppose the myth of the NYU渣男 wins and becomes embraced by popular 留学生 culture, which it already has, and perpetuates a discursive reading of “渣ness” and 爱情. In that case, we are left with this recast version of love that is a shadow of its former romantic self. This love is postmodernist in every sense of the word. It is hyperreal. It is over-stimulated. It is shiny and sleek. It looks like it contains, for the old me, the answer to the ontological question, or, for my friends at Columbia who dislike ontology, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Mais, cette vérité ne valait pas le bûcher! The truth is not worth the stake!
But I’m just grumbling. In the end, all lovers are torn between young Werther and Don Juan—or, better, the 纯爱战神 and the NYU渣男。The NYU渣男，in my opinion, is really not that bad; he is witty and poised, all of which allow him to transcend the many embarrassments the 纯爱战神 will have to endure. Maybe, in the end, for the guys at NYU, it’s really not so bad, not so bad… But in my defense of the 纯爱战神，舔狗，备胎，the underdog, I would say that he comes to know something that the 渣男 never will.
恰恰相反，the great mistake of the NYU渣男 is to think that the 小单纯 is a failed version of themselves. He tries to “get the girl,” they say, but just doesn’t know how—if he, too, drove the Aston Martin and had the right 沙龙香水 picked out and was above 一米八, he would get the girl. The problem is that this “getting” here loses meaning. In truth, if the 纯爱战神 were to use the tricks of the 渣男, his getting is no longer possible, as the beloved’s sexual surrender does not count as “getting”. The 纯爱战神’s “getting” requires his own hero’s journey, his own making of a way between Scylla and Charybdis. And the reward of the homecoming is not sexual gratification—it is a proof of love. The most extraordinary moment for the 小单纯 is not a war, a game, even. It is the sight of his beloved before his eyes.
Well, well, it seems like I have ousted myself once again. But the way I see it, the new aesthete in me is but the other side of the coin from this type of 纯爱 existentialist. Maybe I can redeem Kierkegaard too. Love, perhaps, remains in the romantic ideal of the imagination. There is genuine authenticity in loving when that love is not reciprocated; to be a 纯爱战神 in this way is to stay true to one’s own desires, a possibility closed off to the 渣男.
If it is truly impossible to combine the NYU渣男 and 纯爱战神, I might try to find a unity between them. That is—bringing the essay full circle. 我想要的恋爱相处模式也正是如此：I want to be intoxicated but am nonetheless prepared for lucidity. I yield carefully, but I nevertheless yield. My idea is similar to 庄子’s idea of genuine pretending, and it is in love that we hope to become 逍遥。In this form of love, I balance myself between Goethe and Rasputin, yielding my 纯爱 downbad-ness with love mediated through art.
This careful balancing act called for must be reproduced at every level and every moment: the lover shall never lose the genuine passion or the counter-balancing restraint—an actor playing to the role but never losing himself in the part. The love affair is a tragicomedy that contains both moments of distance and closeness; the lover must always be teetering on edge, ready to fall and make the movement of infinite resignation, and pull himself back and be grounded again in the realm of transcendental freedom.
And now we talk about 上海。 Sometimes, when I look back on my previous relationships, I am filled with a pang of regret. I always talk about Shanghai is because of the Romantic vision I have of it in my mind, as the Paris of the East, the whorehouse of China, the 掌上明珠， the 华人与狗不得入内。 As a 北京人 looking inward from the outside, like how I regard NYU from Harvard Yard in Cambridge, I feel like Roland Barthes, who visited the bund in 1974 as part of Tel Quel, under the approval of 伟大领袖毛主席 himself. An outsider, an artist, a philosopher of love, in the city of unadulterated passion, one the great birthplace of Montaigne and the other the vacation spot of the the Song sisters, I light Barthes’ cigar across the 租界。On a visit to 南京动物园, Barthes sees a young Chinese writer wearing a dapper cap, and he reminds him of Michel Foucault—and me of myself. Sometimes in my sepia-colored nostalgia for love in the time of Corona, I find their faces looking back at me in Massachusetts from Akoma or Ninja or 8 1/2 otto e mezzo Bombana.
But ultimately, my discontentment is tempered by the knowledge that my greatest failure was not to do more for my love, but rather, odd as it seems, the failure to do justice to Eros in the aesthetic sense. In other words, I failed the chance we had to create something beautiful. Nobody knows how many more times we would have reveled in the details of the flirtation that brought us together, how many more 永不失联的爱 we could have sung, how many more 嘉里中心店的Robuchon马卡龙 we could have eaten, but now I have another chance, and all I have to say at 3 am on a Saturday morning to the shanghai locals and the annoying waiters at Jean Georges in New York and the overpriced bakery on 86th and 3rd and the guy who tried to roll me a blunt at Wave or 9Plus and the Uber drivers in Tampa and all the NYU people and the Columbia people and the people who I have their 微信 from some 局 but I don’t remember and God the son the holy spirit and all those fuckers is that 我虽然是个傻逼但我不是个渣男。
