i’m answering an ask right now + i’ve seen posts floating around about this so i wanted to make a post of my own: i do subscribe to the idea that zhongli and guizhong were lovers, and i have said as such before. however, i’ve moved on from this a little as far as implementing it on my blog goes, and wanted to explain what that entails and why i’ve decided to do so.
zhongli believes in fate. he believes that if he’s meant to be with someone, that it will happen; i believe he loved her very much, but it was never realized because he understood too late what his feelings were. after her death, and in an effort to preserve her memory and to carry on the unofficial vow they made together to see liyue prosper, he did his best to carry on her legacy, but he figured out that she was not meant to be his. they would have been together if that was to be true.
she had gifted him with the means of having a human heart. (she eroded his stone heart.) in giving up his gnosis, he wanted to move on from that past he was holding onto so frigidly and move openly into the arms of humankind, as she had, and to love fully knowing that he was equipped to do so then. all of that having been said, for my blog specifically, i believe his soulmate is going to be the person who comes around and loves him when all the dust settles; that is what she would’ve wanted for him, i think. since my blog’s flagship is childe/zhongli (very carefully crafted with zhazhdas because the fandom is super strange abt them and canon gave us enough wiggle room), this was basically a long post explaining that zhongli and childe are who i view as soulmates for this blog, and that is why it’s the main ship here. however, the same remains true for other ships, because they are contained within their own universes.
i have a friend picking up guizhong, and the dynamic and the what-ifs might be explored, but for the sake of continuity here, it just wasn’t meant to be.