She Says Her Boyfriend Earns About RMB 1 Million a Year. Can Livestream Stories Really Be a Benchmark for Her?

She says her boyfriend earns about RMB 1 million a year before tax. They have been together for eight or nine months and have started discussing meeting the parents. She thinks he could be someone to marry, yet she also wonders: What if she meets someone younger, with a higher income, who is willing to give more?

As the call continued, another part of her situation came into view. She used to work in insurance sales and, by her account, could earn a little over RMB 100,000 in a normal working year. After receiving help with her living expenses, she let her work slide. Her boyfriend now wants her to earn her own income. She wants to return to sales, but has yet to decide what kind of work to pursue.

She has a relationship that, by her account, has unfolded over several months. She also has the high-income stories she hears in livestreams and online. The question is not whether those stories must be false. It is this: Even if a story is true, why might it still be the wrong yardstick for her own circumstances? The central distinction is that whether a story is true, whether it becomes visible, and whether it is right for me to follow are three different questions.

Ququ brought the question back to the caller's own life

On this call, Ququ did not continue the thought experiment about finding someone with a higher income. She asked about the caller's work and earnings, then encouraged her to work again and keep a place of her own in society. She did not decide for the caller whether to marry or leave. Nor did she use another high-earning woman's experience to dictate this decision.

Ququ then turned to the livestream itself. She reminded viewers that the high-income or unusual stories they hear there are shaped in part by who chooses to pay for a call-in. Someone has to be willing to bear that cost and bring a question on air before viewers can hear their story. The callers an audience sees cannot simply stand in for everyone else's lives.

This is Ququ's judgment about the setting in which her own calls take place, not a study of callers' income distribution. We do not know what share of callers fall into any income bracket. A handful of calls cannot tell us the odds that an ordinary person will find a particular kind of partner or earn a particular income.

Before a story reaches you, it has passed through three gates

First: Who comes into view? A paid call-in has conditions for entry. The people on screen are those who wanted to tell their stories and came through that particular doorway. The people who do not appear cannot, by their absence alone, prove a different conclusion. MELODY calls this the story's “entry point” as an editorial way of organizing Ququ's judgment; Ququ did not present it as a technical term from statistics.

Second: How is the story presented? When speaking about stories people post online, Ququ cautioned that a person may choose to show the side most likely to attract attention or purchases. When a story stirs your envy, you can ask: Which parts have I seen? What do I still not know about the person's circumstances, costs, or what happened next? That is not a claim that any particular creator is lying, and one curated glimpse cannot reveal an entire life.

Third: At what point do you first see them? In another livestream, Ququ discussed achievements that seem to appear suddenly. An audience may notice the moment when a result becomes conspicuous without having seen the work that came before it. The point is that the moment you see a result may not be when the person began. It does not follow that anyone who puts in the same amount of time will obtain the same result.

These three gates are not a reason to dismiss other people's experiences. They clarify that whether a story is true, whether it becomes visible, and whether it is right for me to follow are three different questions.

Back to the caller: What can she use to answer her own question?

There are several things she can speak to about her own situation: she feels this relationship could lead to marriage; she remains interested in other possibilities; she has done less work since receiving help with her living expenses; and her boyfriend's willingness to keep providing that help has changed. All of this comes from her account on the call. He was not there to speak for himself, and nothing here establishes what will happen to the relationship.

Instead of scoring her life against someone else's income and relationship outcome, she can separate the questions in front of her. What does she actually want from a partner? What has happened in this relationship, and what remains an expectation? If she resumes working, what does she want to do, and what can she take responsibility for herself?

These are MELODY's questions for reviewing this case, not a checklist Ququ recited in the livestream. What needs an answer is this: In what ways are those stories genuinely comparable to her own relationship and working circumstances? Ququ repeatedly brought the conversation back to the caller's work, actions, and place in her own life. Whether to continue the relationship is for the people involved to decide with a clear view of their circumstances and each other's wishes. Someone else's success story cannot decide it for them.

The next time a story excites or unsettles you, you can hold off on asking, “When will I have that life?” First ask: Whose story am I seeing? Why did it reach me? At what point in that person's life did I start watching? Then return to the choice in front of you. A story can show you a possibility. It cannot check the conditions of your own life for you.

If you are using a high-income or success story to measure your relationship or career, bring the story, the facts you can establish about your own situation, and the decision you are weighing to Ask Melody. You can start by sorting out which conditions are genuinely comparable and which are only fragments visible on a screen. This does not verify a third party's income or promise that your decision will bring the same outcome.