In 2011, Chinese artist Peiwen Liu proposed to his girlfriend. But things didn’t go smoothly: the girl jokingly told him she would marry him only if he walked 1,000 miles for her. Peiwen took her words literally and set off to walk from the town of Anyang to Guangzhou, a city around 1,000 miles away, where his girlfriend’s parents lived. Carrying a backpack and a red flag reading “Eager to meet my mother-in-law,” he walked about 25 miles a day. He even started to blog his experiences, which included a terrifying incident in which he was almost murdered by cows. By the time Peiwen was a week away from his destination, his fiance was already sending him text messages telling him to give it up and go home. When he persevered and arrived in the city, she sent him a text that read “I will not spend the rest of my life with you” and then switched off her phone.