The honesty that put a marriage on the rocks

There is a maxim that says you should never confess an extramarital affair to your partner unless you want a divorce. Lin Feng was either blissfully unaware of this or felt confident enough to be immune from any truth it may hold.

So when Lin, 33, decided to tell her husband about her feelings for another man she felt this would be the first step toward recovering their marriage.

"I really felt that in marriage both parties needed to be honest," she says.

However, rather than receiving the understanding she had hoped for, her husband reacted very badly, and eventually they divorced.

Experiences like that of Lin and her former husband are not uncommon among young and middle-aged Chinese couples, one important factor perhaps being that the higher expectations of marriage are, the more difficult it is for couples to tolerate each others' shortcomings and to be patient in the relationship.

Having extramarital affairs seems to be increasingly common. According to Chinese Sexuality 2000-15, a study by Pan Suiming, a former professor of sexology at Renmin University of China in Beijing, in the year 2000 eight out of 100 Chinese who answered a survey acknowledged having had such affairs, and by 2015 the number had grown to 25 out of 100. The number of those saying they had had extramarital sex had tripled in the five years to 2015, Pan said.

In 2015, 34 percent of Chinese males surveyed acknowledged having had extramarital affairs, compared with 11.8 percent in 2000, and 13.4 percent of Chinese women acknowledged having done so, compared with 7.9 percent in 2000, the report said.

More than half of the married people choose to divorce when they found out about their partner's unfaithfulness, the report said.

However, though Lin divorced in 2015 she is unrepentant about the rationale for confessing her strayful thoughts to her husband.

"In the third year of our marriage (they had married in 2012) I began to feel we weren't communicating as well as we used to. It is not as though we both had any big differences of opinion, but we were talking less and less.

"I had earlier planned to have a baby with him because that was what I wanted from the marriage, which is a natural thing. However, I raised it with him a few times and he'd say he didn't want kids right then. We could wait for a few years, he said, and after that I didn't raise the matter again."

Asked whether they would have divorced had they had a child, she says she thinks that would not have changed matters.

"I wanted to have a baby because I thought there was love between us. If a couple have their own problems involving values, plans in life and their communication, I don't think kids can change things that much. In fact I think having children would only make matters worse."

Lin says it took her several months to recover emotionally after the divorce, but she continues to insist that her decision to tell her husband the truth about her and the other man was the correct one.

"I've never changed my view on being honest with the other half, especially something we have to work on. I think that my having affection for another man meant that something was wrong in our marriage that needed to be fixed. In the same circumstances I would do exactly what I did."

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