The Night a Search Bar Autocomplete for P-force Popped Up, They Finally Talked It Out

When Yating handed her boyfriend's phone back, the screen was still lit. She had only meant to look up the address of the restaurant for tomorrow's dinner gathering, but her finger slipped, and a string of characters sat there in the search history. She recognized those three characters, but she wasn't sure she was supposed to recognize them. The TV in the living room was still playing a shopping channel, and the host was shouting about a buy-one-get-one deal. Suddenly, the volume felt a little too loud.

Ahong came out of the bathroom, his hair still dripping. He saw her sitting on the edge of the sofa, the phone placed dead center on the coffee table, like some piece of evidence. He froze for a moment, then asked her what was wrong. Yating had rehearsed several ways to say it, but in the end all she managed was: Have you been looking something up lately? Ahong stopped drying his hair and said, Oh, that. That what? Just that. The two of them circled around it for three minutes, and neither said it plainly.

Eventually Yating couldn't stand the circling anymore. She said, I'm not trying to check up on you. It's just that when I saw it, my heart clenched, because I didn't know if you were feeling unwell somewhere, or if you thought there was something wrong between us. After hearing her out, Ahong hung the towel on the back of the chair and sat down. He said that a while ago he'd had dinner with friends, and someone at the table got onto the topic of health supplements, talking it up like crazy. He was half-skeptical, and when he got home he casually looked it up. He stressed that he really had only looked, hadn't even bought anything.

Yating asked, Then why didn't you tell me? Ahong said, Because saying it feels weird. He said that with this kind of thing, the moment you say it out loud, it's like admitting you're not enough somewhere. He didn't want her to overthink, but in the end he made her overthink even more. Yating didn't answer right away. She remembered that not long ago she'd secretly looked up sleep aids and hadn't told Ahong either. It suddenly struck her that they were both in the same pit, just each digging their own.

The next night, they decided to treat this as a piece of homework rather than an interrogation. Yating opened a spreadsheet, with "What I saw" in the left column and "What I'm worried about" in the right. Ahong was in charge of researching. He found that online talk about items like P-force was all over the place—some described it like a miracle cure, others were vague and evasive, and even whether it was a prescription drug was written ambiguously. He pasted several sources side by side into the document, and the more he looked, the more he felt he couldn't rely on any single claim.

Yating's principle was to first sort out what was advertising and what was information. She said that whenever she saw phrases like "guaranteed effective" or "results in three days," she'd put a question mark next to them. Ahong was responsible for listing out the packaging labels, sources, and verification channels. They didn't draw any conclusions, only agreed on one thing: if they really wanted to learn more later, they'd bring both their questions to a professional, rather than scaring themselves in the search bar late at night. Ahong said that at least this was better than one person stewing alone.

That weekend, they went to a nearby pharmacy. Not to buy, but to ask. Yating printed out the spreadsheet, and Ahong added points beside her. After listening, the pharmacist first asked where they had seen this information, then reminded them that if they were already taking anything, they should bring the full list along and not piece things together on their own. On the way back, Ahong said, So after actually talking it out, researching this stuff isn't so scary after all. Yating replied, What's scary is that you thought I'd be angry, and I thought you were hiding something.

Later they stuck that spreadsheet on the fridge, next to the bills due next month and a supermarket coupon. Yating said, This spreadsheet looks pretty silly. Ahong said, Silly as it is, at least it's more honest than the search history. They both laughed—at the versions of themselves who'd taken three days to finally talk it out. There was no dramatic ending to this, and they didn't become experts because of it. They just learned that next time they see something they don't understand, they should ask each other first, not the phone. The string of characters in the search bar is still there, but now it's just a topic of conversation, not a secret.