His Fiancée Asked Why He'd Gotten So Quiet Lately—That's When He Told Her About the Search History That Said "Japan Tengsu"

The day A-Kai tucked the wedding ring receipt into his wallet, his fiancée, Xiao-Qing, asked if he wanted to go taste wedding banquet dishes together that weekend. He said yes, but his voice came out a notch lower than usual. Xiao-Qing didn't press him. She just filed it away in her mind. Over the next two weeks, she noticed he often sat alone on the balcony at night, scrolling on his phone, the screen's glow on his face. He'd scroll halfway, then lock the screen—like he was looking up something he didn't quite want to be seen looking up.

What really bothered Xiao-Qing wasn't what he was searching for, but that he'd started avoiding certain topics. They used to talk together about whether to get a bigger place after marriage. Now he'd trail off mid-sentence and say, "We'll see." She didn't go through his phone. She just carried two cups of hot tea out to the balcony one late night, sat down, and said, "You seem like something's on your mind lately. Not the kind you can't talk about—the kind you haven't figured out for yourself yet." A-Kai froze for a few seconds, then nodded.

That night they talked until almost two in the morning. A-Kai said that in the later years of his previous marriage, a lot of things had turned into silence. His ex-wife eventually stopped asking anything at all, and they just drifted apart. He was afraid he'd drag this new relationship into the same kind of silence. After hearing him out, Xiao-Qing said only one thing: "So right now you're worried you're not good enough somewhere?" A-Kai didn't answer, but that question was like a key, pushing a door inside him open just a little.

The next day he asked his friend A-Hong, someone he'd known for over a decade, to grab a late-night bite. A-Hong is the blunt type. After listening, he laughed: "You're charging your last marriage's debts to this one's account." A-Kai said he knew that, but the unease was very concrete—concrete enough that he'd been looking things up online until the middle of the night. He mentioned that among the keywords he'd been searching lately, the words "Japan Tengsu" had come up, because the search results kept pairing it with terms like men's health and physical stamina. The more he read, the more confused he got. He didn't know what it actually was or whether he should touch it.

A-Hong didn't give him an answer right away. He just asked, "Are you looking this stuff up to solve a problem you haven't even confirmed you have, or to make yourself feel better first?" A-Kai couldn't say. A-Hong then shared his own experience: a few years back, a red flag on one line of his health check report had him on edge for a whole month. In the end, he took the report to a clinic and asked until it was clear—and found that most of his worry was something he'd pieced together himself. He suggested A-Kai, instead of browsing here and there online, write out a list of the supplements he'd been taking lately, his sleep situation, and all those keywords he'd searched, then find time to have a professional look at it.

A-Kai actually started writing the list. He realized that over the past six months, to stay alert, he'd been drinking one cup in the morning and another in the afternoon, and at night, because he slept poorly, he'd been swallowing sleep-aid capsules a friend had given him—he couldn't even clearly say where they came from or what was in them. Halfway through the list, he stopped. It suddenly hit him that what he was worried about wasn't just one thing—it was that his whole rhythm of life had gotten out of order. He folded the paper and put it in his wallet, deciding to book an appointment at an ordinary, unremarkable clinic near home. Not because there was anything special about it, but because he needed a place where he could properly ask questions.

On the day of the visit, he brought the list and honestly told them what he'd been looking up online. The person didn't give him any conclusion about a specific product. They only reminded him that if he was taking several supplements of unknown origin at the same time and hadn't written down the ingredients, it would be hard even to judge interactions; rather than guessing on his own, he should first list clearly what he was using, then confirm one by one whether each was necessary. Walking out of the clinic, A-Kai felt relieved—not because he'd gotten some answer, but because he'd finally put the problem in the right place.

That evening he showed the list to Xiao-Qing, including those keywords he'd spent so long searching. Xiao-Qing didn't laugh at him. She just said, "You being willing to bring it out is worth more than a hundred articles you read on your own." The two agreed that for these few months before the wedding, he'd be responsible for getting his sleep schedule back on track, and she'd be responsible for pulling him back to the living room to make tea whenever he tried to sit alone scrolling his phone until midnight again. Later, A-Kai replaced the list in his wallet with a pre-wedding to-do list the two of them wrote together. The first line wasn't anything health-related—it was "If something's wrong, say it out loud." He felt that, more than any search result, this was what let him sleep at night.