A friend once told me a story about a couple he knew.
Y and T were a middle-aged husband and wife, both born in the early 1970s. Like many people of their generation, they had followed the expected path: dating, marriage, a home, a child, a life built one step at a time. Yet they were not merely ordinary. For years, they had seemed like the kind of couple other people admired from a distance.
Y was tall, handsome, capable, and ambitious. T was bright-eyed, gentle, pretty, and soft-spoken. Three years into the marriage, Y made a risky decision: he quit his secure job at a state-owned company and went into business for himself. T supported him completely. While he fought his way into the marketplace, she quietly took on almost everything inside the home.
Y came from a rural background. He could endure hardship, work relentlessly, take risks, and win people over with his generosity and loyalty. His company grew quickly. He recruited staff, built a team, and gradually put the business on a proper track. After their child was born, T left her modest office job and became a full-time wife and mother.
She stayed in that role for eight years.
During those years, Y’s career flourished. He opened several branch offices within the province. Their child grew up healthy under T’s careful attention. The family moved from comfortable to unmistakably middle class. From the outside, everything seemed to be getting better and better, closer and closer to complete.
At this point in the story, I interrupted my friend and asked, “So is this the usual plot? The man gets rich, changes his heart, finds another woman, and wants a divorce because his wife has become old and tired?”
He shook his head.
“Not this time.”
A man in business cannot avoid drinking tables and social obligations. He will inevitably end up in places full of neon lights, perfume, flirtation, and ambiguous smiles. Y had seen his share of beautiful women and received plenty of invitations that did not need to be spelled out. Many women had tried to get close to him. He had turned them down.
In that sense, he was rare. He spent less and less time with his wife and child, yes, but he had always believed he could hold the moral line a husband ought to hold.
That belief collapsed in the eleventh year of the marriage.
Outside a five-star hotel, T stepped out of a red BMW. She looked elegant and carefully dressed. A young man got out with her. At the entrance to the hotel lobby, he could not wait to pull her close and kiss her. Then he went to the front desk to check in.
Two of Y’s friends saw everything with their own eyes.
When I heard that part, my mind instantly staged a Hong Kong gangster film: two underlings accidentally catch the boss’s woman with her lover, exchange a grave look, lower their voices, and ask, “Should we tell him?” Behind dark sunglasses, two cold faces remain expressionless.
My friend laughed at me for watching too many gangster movies.
“Real life can be harsher than film,” he said.
Y had someone follow T. He checked her phone records, text messages, and QQ chats. The young man had met her online. To outsiders, they called each other brother and sister. T had helped him financially. One thing led to another, and eventually they crossed the line.
At last, Y placed a long list of phone records, a stack of photographs, and a divorce agreement in front of T.
Her face went pale. Her body began to tremble. Then she cried.
Every explanation came out confused and weak. Every apology crashed against a fact that could not be argued away.
T begged him again and again to forgive her for the sake of their child, to see it as a moment of indulgence, a mistake she regretted deeply.
But few men can calmly accept such public humiliation. A betrayal of that kind is not only a private wound; to many men, it is a verdict, a stain, a hat placed squarely on the head for everyone to see.
Y took custody of the child and most of the property. T was left with a small apartment and 200,000 yuan.
When all the procedures were finished, Y looked at her: the smallness of her body, the way her shoulders shook from crying. For one instant, he almost wanted to bend down and hold her as he once had. In the end, he only frowned and did nothing.
The last thing T said was:
“I wasn’t starving for sex. I was just lonely.”
For nearly eight years, Y was either away on business for an entire month or out drinking with clients until midnight. T was left alone through one long night after another. She became bewildered by the emptiness, then slowly lost herself in days that had nothing urgent to demand from her.
She began staying up all night watching Korean dramas. She locked herself in dark rooms to watch horror films. She looked for any stimulation that might jolt her out of the numbness.
She hired two housekeepers. From chores to pets, everything at home was spotless and orderly.
She collected more than fifty VIP cards. After beauty treatments came manicures; after hot springs came yoga.
She made friends with a few women who loved shopping and gossip. When they had shopped enough locally, they would fly to Hong Kong for more.
But none of it smoothed out the hollow place inside her.
She had tried, in small and ordinary ways, to change the stale rhythm of her life.
She got airy bangs and asked Y if they looked nice. Without lifting his head, he said, “It’s okay.”
She had photorejuvenation done on her skin. He never really looked at her from beginning to end.
She bought sexy sleepwear and waited until two in the morning. Y came home drunk and fell asleep as soon as he hit the bed.
She simmered a Cantonese soup and asked him to come home for dinner. He said, “We’ll see. I’m busy.”
In the end, bored and restless, she threw herself into the boundless sea of the internet.
There she met the young man. His tenderness, his soft words, his steady companionship made her feel as if she had fallen in love. The passion of a younger body dazed her. For a while, she felt like an eighteen-year-old girl again.
Desire is like a piece of dried fish laced with a drug: once you steal a bite, that indulgent, fishy taste becomes impossible to forget. It keeps returning until it becomes an addiction, wearing down every last bit of reason.
Marriage is a contract sealed by trust. Once that trust is broken, it is like a mirror struck by a bullet. You may gather the pieces, but you cannot reassemble an intact world.
After the divorce, Y became the kind of single man everyone seemed to want: in his early forties, worth millions, pursued by women who lined up at the door.
After the divorce, T became the cautionary tale people point to and say she had brought it on herself. She lived alone in an old sixty-square-meter apartment, dazed day after day, drowning in regret.
My friend sighed and said, “What a pity. She could have been living comfortably as a rich wife. Why ruin it herself?”
I asked him, “If you were Y, would you forgive her?”
He thought for a while and shook his head.
“Hard to say. Probably not.”
I believe that was an honest answer.
Women may fear loneliness more than men do. But when it comes to betrayal, men are often more final, more unforgiving.
Then he asked me, “How do women see T’s case?”
I said, “I can understand her loneliness. But the adult world has rules. Man or woman, if you do something wrong, you bear the consequences. You pay the price.”
There is a story in Greek mythology about sirens. They could take the form of mermaids and drift among reefs and lonely islands. They possessed incomparable beauty and voices like music from heaven. With their songs, they lured sailors passing by. If a sailor listened too closely and lost himself, the ship would strike the rocks and sink, and everyone aboard would become food for the sirens.
When Odysseus led his fleet through the Strait of Messina, he already knew the danger. Before the ships entered those waters, he had himself tied to the mast. He ordered the sailors to plug their ears with wax and warned them not to obey any command or gesture he might make.
Soon, the sirens’ song drifted over the sea.
It was so beautiful, so mesmerizing, that Odysseus struggled desperately against the ropes. He wanted to break free. He ordered the sailors to steer toward the singing creatures. But the sailors, unable to hear him, ignored every command and kept the ship on its set course. Only after the song faded into the distance did they untie him.
They escaped the dangerous waters. The siren who had fallen in love with Odysseus, despairing, killed herself.
A line from a song comes to mind: “You hear loneliness singing, tenderly, madly. The sorrow grows deeper and deeper. How can it be stopped?”
In marriage, the song that stirs the heart can bring grievance, tears, and ruin. That siren has a name: loneliness.
When passion becomes as familiar as one hand holding the other, when romance is replaced by the endless debris of daily life, who can honestly claim never to have been tempted by loneliness? Who has never heard the siren sing?
Desire is a demon of the heart. At certain moments it calls and calls, seductive enough to steal the soul, maddening enough to make refusal feel like torture. Ordinary people are not Odysseus. A dull marriage cannot always contain the many shades of human longing. Some people are tempted by curiosity and ignorance; others know perfectly well that danger lies ahead and still insist on walking toward the tiger’s mountain.
But a siren remains a siren. It disguises itself as love. It arrives with charm, softness, and a thousand delicate gestures. Then, after the enchantment, it opens its mouth wide in the dark and waits to swallow a person whole, leaving bones behind and no road back.
There is a song title that says, “Falling in love with him was not my fault.” The lyric goes further: “Falling in love with him was not only my fault; it was the loneliness you gave me that caused this. Such a sorrowful ending was something no one imagined at the beginning.”
An affair is an unjust love.
It is like ill-gotten money: the lonely and greedy see it and their eyes light up. But once you take it, the cost may come back a hundredfold, a thousandfold.
A mistake made because of loneliness will only leave a person lonelier in the end.
In this vast human world, dust blinds the eyes and passing clouds cover the face. So many people think they have encountered love again.
More often, they have only entangled themselves with loneliness, and it has nothing to do with love.