Double Dilemma Yuan Changming   © Copyright 2023 by Yuan Changming

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

One thing I’m absolutely sure about is that I could have the heavy burden removed once and forever from my sagging conscience if I were to confess to my wife. Then, I wouldn’t have to use all kinds of infidelity-hiding strategies or resort to Machiavellian manipulation. Tired of telling lies one after another, deleting digital evidence each time in haste and trying to maintain normality in my attitude and behavior, I long for a complete emancipation, able to take a good nap during the day, and dream peaceful dreams at night. Yes, if my wife chose to forgive me or take the whole matter in reasonably good faith, I could talk about my romantic experience, as I’ve habitually shared every secret with her thus far. Sometimes, I strongly wish that my wife allow Hua to live together with us once Hua’s husband dies. All in our mid-sixties now, we’re all physically a bit too old for sex, and with that most fundamental element missing in a romantic relationship, why should my wife, or anybody else, really care about what we might do together? Since there’re little sex and little money involved, what role does sexual morality or marriage as an institution play in such a tri-relationship? Why should we have to conform with conventions in the first place? Since this relationship would have no impact on our adult children, relatives or any other people out there in society, why cannot we live under the same roof? More important, if we could spend our last years together in harmony, each of us would enjoy a better health as a necessary result. At our age, isn’t health our first and foremost concern? I believe that our mutual affection would enable both me and Hua to live longer and more healthily, and the only problem is my wife’s attitude. How would she take the matter?

Of course, I’m keenly aware that my wife could be deeply hurt if I told her how I’ve been cheating on her in our emotional life. Three worst possibilities stand out. For one thing, my wife might come up with a counter-confession. Theoretically, she might also have had an affair with, say, one of her admiring clients or colleagues. I know that wherever she works or goes, there’re always a couple of guys trying to attract her attention, like a dumb dancing flamingo. Though traditionally minded, she is not sharp-eyed or sharp-witted enough to discern men’s love tricks or womanizing skills. In other words, she could’ve made me a cuckold in a sense. She might, who knows, have been one of those wives who keep their own romantic secrets until their last breaths. Hearing such a counter-confession, I would most probably have a heart attack on the spot, or suffer from an emotional trauma for the rest of my life.

Alternatively, my confession could also turn out to be the last straw for her. So morbidly introvert and incommunicative as she is by character, she might never be able to digest the bitter truth, but take it together with her long-held grudges and resentments against me in such a bad fashion that she could develop a terrible mental disease, exactly as her mother did in a similar situation. Should that happen, I would be tortured by a worse conscience while I have to look after a lunatic crone. Or, if my wife chose not to forgive but to divorce me, then, as the faulty party, I’d have to go through all variety of misery and trouble. That would be something to be avoided at any cost.

Needless to say, I’ve reenacted and rehearsed all these dramatic situations scenarios in every detail with Hua during our daily video-chats. As my soulmate, Hua certainly understands my situation and share my concerns, but knowing that there’re no guarantees or magic bullets in any romantic relationships, we see no way out. All I can do is not to take any action while continuing to camouflage my unfaithfulness to my best ability. In so doing, I hope to prevent all the negative possibilities from coming true.

But I’d rather die than make such a confession to Dan, Hua firmly told me the other morning, as if to make a conclusion about all the complicacies of the matter. Not really because she has fears about her husband’s possible counter-confession, loss of his mind, or choice of divorce, but because she cannot bring herself to humiliate him as a cuckold.

You still love him very much then! I said, in a tone carrying a note of jealousy and resentment, but you say you love me more.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean I want to hurt him that way, Hua emphasized repeatedly. Don’t you also love your wife nonetheless?

Well, that’s another issue, I responded. But I just hate cheating. Dishonesty is more hateful, more intolerable than infidelity per se.

Aren’t they the same thing? Hua retorted, her position and pragmatics in this matter becoming more understandable to me now. Yes, she’s been suffering long from a desperately different dilemma. As she’s told me dozens of times, she’s also been tortured by an equally bad, if not worse, conscience. She often denounces herself for being an unfaithful wife, a bad woman, a hypercritical person who’s all her life been self-demanding and self-disciplined as a good traditional woman, but now she’s developed and maintained an unspeakable relationship with me while publicly recognized and praised as a “model” wife. She often assures me that she most highly enjoys our romantic relationship, but she does have an ever-strong sense of suppression at the same time. She’s also been hesitant all the time, though in a different sense, she says.

That’s why, I wrote in a recent poem to her, your love feels like a loach in a rice field, full of splashing vitality but hard to catch.

And yours resembles an onion, Hua texted back. As I peel one layer after another, I can find no heart in the core in the end.

That’s because I wear my heart inside out.

Then we should perhaps fry the fish with onion, or make a soup with these two kinds of love?

While she keeps hesitating about our “abnormal, immoral and imbalanced” relationship, she admits that she just cannot help following her heart.

 What’s your true dilemma then?

To continue or not to continue? That’s the question about our connectivity!