Contract Marriage State

Contract Marriage State is the defining condition of Shen Tang and Gu Huaian’s relationship during the period when they are legally married but not yet married for love. The arrangement gives Shen Tang material security and a way to survive the entertainment industry, while Gu Huaian gains the marital status his circumstances require. Its decisive tension is that the agreement is formal enough to create obligations and public consequences, yet emotionally hollow enough that both partners can still treat the relationship as temporary. As affection grows, the contract ceases to be merely protection and becomes the obstacle that must be renegotiated.

Definition and Material Foundation

Contract Marriage State rests on a written agreement rather than an initially sincere romantic commitment. Shen Tang’s financial position makes the economic side especially important. The original Shen Tang had pursued success partly to improve her own life and partly to support children from the orphanage; one of those children, an eight-year-old boy who was not her biological brother, contracted leukemia and required an expensive operation. Because the orphanage had little money, Shen Tang had gradually spent her savings helping it and was nearly penniless apart from money recently provided by her contractual husband. The marriage therefore carries the weight of medical care, institutional survival, and the practical meaning of having enough money to protect people treated as family.

That financial logic also explains why Shen Tang remains alert to the agreement’s consequences even when the relationship begins to look romantic. She worries that if Gu Huaian finds true love before the contract expires, he might break the arrangement and deprive her of the money she has been promised. Her concern is not presented as simple greed: payment is tied to the sacrifices that made the marriage possible and to the dependents she has tried to support. The contract turns intimacy into a structure of income, obligation, and risk, so emotional developments immediately raise economic questions.

Public Marriage and Private Distance

The agreement requires Shen Tang and Gu Huaian to manage the difference between what outsiders see and what the couple knows. When another woman assumes that Gu Huaian’s attention toward a female celebrity must indicate a mistress, he corrects her by identifying Shen Tang as his wife. The declaration gives the relationship public legitimacy, but it does not erase its private origin. To observers, the marriage is a fact; to the couple, it remains an arrangement whose emotional meaning is still unsettled.

Their private conduct retains signs of distance even as familiarity increases. During one gaming session, Gu Huaian dies again, and Shen Tang tells him to play defensively and stay inside the base. The exchange is mundane, but it shows the agreement becoming a lived partnership through shared routines rather than grand declarations. They play together, tease or advise one another, and occupy the same social world while the legal foundation of their relationship remains artificial. The game becomes a small rehearsal for cooperation: the marriage is not yet emotionally secure, but it already creates habits of mutual participation.

The same uncertainty appears when Shen Tang faces trouble. After discovering that a costume has been tampered with and could tear under slight pressure, she reflects that her contract is nearing its end and that a boycott would not frighten her. She also assumes that her cheap husband would probably not stand by and do nothing. The thought reveals a contradiction at the center of the state: Shen Tang still speaks of Gu Huaian in transactional terms, yet she expects protection from him as though he were an intimate partner. The contract has taught her to measure what she is owed, while daily danger has made emotional reliance increasingly plausible.

Conversion from Agreement to Romance

The state changes decisively when Gu Huaian asks Shen Tang to date him on the premise of marriage. Although the two are already married, the existing marriage is explicitly described as fake and contractual. Gu Huaian wants to annul the agreement and begin again with her properly, transforming a legal fiction into a chosen relationship. His proposal does not merely ask Shen Tang to accept affection; it acknowledges that their current bond is insufficient because its original terms prevent it from expressing what the relationship has become.

This request creates a characteristic reversal. Gu Huaian presents the next step as romantic, but Shen Tang’s first concern is whether the agreement is still valid and whether she will continue receiving its monthly payment. When Gu Huaian says that the agreement is invalid, her expression collapses and she immediately asks about her money. The scene makes the emotional transition comic without making the material issue trivial. For Shen Tang, love cannot simply replace the contract’s benefits; she needs to know whether choosing Gu Huaian means losing the economic security that helped her endure poverty and support others.

The relationship consequently moves through two incompatible forms of commitment. The contractual form promises money, status, and defined obligations but excludes authentic romantic choice. The new romantic form promises mutual intention but initially threatens the financial arrangement on which Shen Tang depends. Their conflict is therefore not only whether they love each other. It is whether affection can survive after the measurable terms of the original bargain disappear.

Rewriting the Meaning of Marriage

Gu Huaian’s desire to annul the agreement and propose properly shows that he regards legal registration as incomplete without a proposal or wedding ceremony. In a private WeChat conversation with Cen Songbai and Fu Junsheng, he asks for help designing a proposal. Fu Junsheng points out that Gu Huaian and Shen Tang are already married, and Gu Huaian explains that they have only registered and have not yet had a proposal or wedding ceremony. The unusual order of events exposes the gap between legal completion and emotional completion: the paperwork came first, while courtship and public celebration must be created afterward.

This makes Contract Marriage State a transitional condition rather than a stable endpoint. At first, the contract allows two people to borrow the social identity of husband and wife without sharing its emotional substance. Later, the borrowed identity becomes the framework within which genuine attachment develops. Gu Huaian’s attempt to propose again does not simply duplicate the earlier marriage; it seeks to give the relationship a voluntary origin that the agreement never possessed.

Family, Protection, and Narrative Significance

The state also complicates the meaning of family throughout the story. Shen Tang’s orphanage brother is not related to her by blood, yet his illness and her years of financial support make him a real obligation in practice. Later, a hospital test confirms a blood relationship between Shen Tang and Shen Boyuan’s family, showing that biological kinship can be discovered after a long period of separation. Set beside the contract marriage, these developments distinguish legal status, blood relation, and lived care rather than treating any one of them as the sole definition of family.

For Shen Tang, Gu Huaian’s role gradually shifts from contractual husband and source of money to a person whose protection and companionship she expects. For Gu Huaian, Shen Tang shifts from an agreement partner to the woman he wants to court openly, despite the fact that their legal marriage already exists. The state’s narrative importance lies in this gradual change of value: a bond created for practical reasons acquires emotional force, while the very contract that brought them together must be discarded before their chosen relationship can stand on its own. Contract Marriage State therefore marks the story’s central movement from marriage as an arrangement to marriage as an affirmed relationship.