When people treat a relationship, they always say "only envy Yuanyang, not immortals", which means they envy being able to grow old hand in hand like Yuanyang and stay with them for life. As long as they can do this, they don't want to be immortals in the sky. Yuanyang is a symbol of love in Chinese literary works, so people refer to loving couples as Yuanyang. In fact, in ancient China, Yuanyang was first compared to a brother.
The Selected Works compiled by Xiao Tong, a Liang in the Southern Dynasties, contains poems such as "Once a mandarin duck and a mandarin duck, now it is a participant in business" and "Leaves of the same flesh and blood", which is a farewell poem between brothers. In the first poem of Four Poems by Su Ziqing, there is a poem that "the past was a honeymoon and a young man, but now it is a time of participation", but judging from the sentences of "the flesh and blood are bound to branches and leaves" and "I am connected with branches and trees", it is obviously a farewell poem between brothers.
Zheng Feng, a Jin native, has four poems in reply to Lu Shilong. The preface of the first poem Yuanyang says, "Yuanyang is beautiful and virtuous, and there are two sages who fly to Dongyue." Yuanyang here is a metaphor for Lu Ji and Lu Yuan. In the poem "Giving Brother a Scholar to Join the Army" written by wei ren Ji Kang in the Three Kingdoms, Yuanyang was also used to describe the harmony and friendship between brothers. It can be traced back to the Book of Songs Xiaoya, in which the sentence "Yuanyang flies" is not a metaphor for couples.
The comparison of Yuanyang to husband and wife originated from the ancient meaning of Chang 'an written by Lu Zhaolin, a poet in the Tang Dynasty. In the poem, there is a saying that "I would rather be a Yuanyang than envy immortals", which praises the beautiful love and makes people feel fresh. Later, some scholars followed suit, so Yuanyang became synonymous with a happy couple. Some people think that the word "Yuanyang" is actually a homophonic transformation of the word "Yin and Yang", taking this bird's habit of "stopping is even, flying is double". Since ancient times, the words "Yuanyang Couple", "Yuanyang Pillow" and "Yuanyang Sword" all contain the meaning of love between men and women, and "Yuanyang playing in the water" is a common theme of Chinese New Year pictures.