10 Chinese Sayings About Love — "Comparing Necks to Fly Together"

Childhood sweethearts or friends

Literal: Green plums and bamboo horses

Li Bai's Changgan Ballad has a woman remembering her husband when both were small: he came riding a bamboo horse (竹马), and they circled the well playing with green plums (青梅). The two props are ordinary children's things and the poem is about a marriage that grew out of them. The phrase names that s...

Everlasting; eternal

Literal: Heaven is long, earth is lasting

This idiom derives from Chapter 7 of the Daoist classic 'Tao Te Ching' (道德经) by Laozi: 'Heaven and earth are long-lasting.' The phrase uses the long-lasting (长) heaven (天) and enduring (久) earth (地) as metaphors for permanence and durability. It gained romantic connotations through Tang Dynasty poet...

Perfect mutual understanding; hearts in harmony

Literal: Heart and heart mutually seal

Heart (心) to heart (心), mutually (相) stamped (印). 印 is a seal pressed into clay or wax, and the metaphor is exact about what Chan Buddhism meant by it: the master's understanding is not explained to the disciple but impressed, so that what appears in the second mind has the same shape as what was in...

Love at first sight

Literal: One glance, feelings concentrate

At a single (一) sight (见), the feeling (情) gathers (钟). 钟 is the interesting character. Simplified Chinese has merged two of them, and the one here is 鍾, a wine vessel whose extended sense is to gather or concentrate — not 鐘, the bell. So what is described is the whole of somebody's affection collec...

Until the end of time; eternal love

Literal: Seas dry, stones rot

Seas (海) drying (枯) and stones (石) crumbling (烂). Both are chosen for being the slowest imaginable changes rather than impossible ones, which is where the scale comes from — this is deep time, not never. It lives inside oaths, in the form 海枯石烂不变心, unchanged until the seas dry and the stones crumble....

Be inseparable; hate to part

Literal: Hard to part, hard to leave

Hard (难) to divide (分) and hard (难) to let go (舍). The doubled 难 sets the two verbs in parallel and covers both halves of a parting, the separating and the releasing, so no part of the departure is left easy. It is stronger and more physical than 依依不舍, and it does not require affection: business par...

Be deeply reluctant to leave

Literal: Attached and unwilling to part

恋 is love that clings, the character in 恋人 and 留恋; doubled and set against 不舍, unwilling (不) to let go (舍), the phrase gives a reluctance rooted in attachment rather than in habit. That is what separates it from 依依不舍, which reports the same scene from outside as a hesitation of the body. Here the ca...

Yearn day and night

Literal: Soul pulled, dreams haunted

The soul (魂) pulled along (牵) and dreams (梦) wound about (萦). 牵 is leading an animal on a rope and 萦 is thread winding round something, so both halves make the longing an external force acting on somebody who is not choosing it. That the second half happens in sleep is the claim: the preoccupation c...

Think about constantly; yearn for

Literal: Think in morning, yearn at night

Thinking (思) at dawn (朝) and thinking again (想) at dusk (暮). The two verbs are near-synonyms and the two times are the ends of the waking span, so the phrase covers a day by naming its edges. It is plainer than 魂牵梦萦 and correspondingly commoner in speech. Absent people, a place somebody wants to get...

Married couple with great mutual respect

Literal: Raise tray level with eyebrows

Meng Guang, married to the recluse Liang Hong, served his meals by lifting (举) the tray (案) level (齐) with her eyebrows (眉), not daring to look up at him over the food. The deference recorded is hers, in one direction; what the Book of Later Han finds remarkable is the inference their employer drew ...