The Night Before His Remarriage, He Asked Me What Japanese Tengsu Really Is

Kai spread the wedding invitation samples across the coffee table, the red paper glaring a little under the desk lamp. In forty days he was getting married, to Yating, whom he'd been with for two years. Yet at eleven at night he called me, saying he wanted to come out and sit for a while. We met at the soy milk shop at the mouth of the alley that still had its lights on. He ordered a bowl of savory soy milk and stirred it for ages without drinking.

He said Yating's younger sister had just finished her wedding a few days earlier, and during the banquet a few of the elders had half-jokingly asked him whether he was "ready." He'd laughed it off at the time, but once he got home he tossed and turned. Not because the remark was so hurtful, but because he realized he couldn't really explain what "ready" was supposed to mean. His previous marriage hadn't ended well. During those years he was busy with work and left almost everything at home to his ex-wife, and by the time they were both exhausted, they discovered they had long since stopped talking.

"What I'm afraid of isn't my body. It's walking down the same road again." He said this very quietly. I asked him what exactly he'd been looking up these past few days. He pulled out his phone and swiped through tab after tab—some were forums, some were shopping pages, each headline more exaggerated than the last. He said he'd searched all night and saw people asking about Japanese Tengsu, and saw others describing this kind of thing like a miracle cure. The more he read, the more confused he got, so he just closed all the pages.

I couldn't judge for him whether those pages were right, and I'm no professional. I only told him that men our age make their biggest mistake by hiding their uncertainty and pretending they understand everything. The first thing he really needed to do wasn't buy something—it was to state the problem clearly. What exactly was he worried about: stamina, sleep, stress, or the fact that he'd never talked about any of this with Yating? He was stunned for a few seconds and said he'd never asked Yating what she thought.

The next day he actually did two things. The first was to book an appointment at a clinic near his home, and he listed on a piece of paper his schedule, work stress, and all the supplements he was taking over the past six months, planning to ask about them face to face. The second was harder: he took Yating out to dinner and told her, word for word, everything he'd said to me the night before. After listening, Yating didn't laugh at him. She only said, "If you'd told me earlier, we wouldn't have had to guess for so long."

After that dinner, Kai relaxed completely. He still looked things up online, but his approach changed. He no longer believed whatever he saw; instead he first checked the source, read the labels on the packaging carefully, and when he came across ingredients he didn't understand, he wrote them down to ask about at his next appointment. He also learned to tell which claims were advertising talk and which were just other people's personal experiences. He said looking things up itself isn't wrong—what's wrong is treating the research as the answer.

Two weeks before the wedding, he sent me a photo: that sheet of paper covered in questions, now with a few extra lines of notes he'd copied down in the exam room. He said the doctor hadn't given him anything magical, only reminded him that sleep, stress, and communication between partners matter more than any single product. He taped that paper in front of his desk as a reminder. Looking at the photo, I suddenly felt that this time he really was ready.

Later we went to that soy milk shop again. This time he finished his savory soy milk quickly and even joked that from now on, if there's a problem, he should speak up early instead of waiting until midnight to find someone. I nodded. What truly changes a person in a relationship is never some jar of something—it's whether you're willing to say your doubts out loud, and then, holding the other person's hand, go look for the answers together.