Extramarital affairs – some have them for love, others out of sheer curiosity. Many of us have heard that they are rampant in Beijing, and some have even been directly affected by one. Here’s one perspective you probably never heard before; the perspective of “the other woman”.

“I’m not going home for Christmas or Chinese New Year,” Annie* tells me. “I never do. They don’t care.” Annie is a girl I’ve known for years. She’s an average looking girl from Southern China. She works an average day job and if you see her walking around Sanlitun, you wouldn’t look at her twice, except maybe at her odd fashion choices. Even after numerous cosmetic surgeries, she still describes herself as “below-average looking with an oversized head”.

Annie has a regular day job, but her other “hobby” is that she’s a professional mistress.

Nobody forced her to do it. She enjoys sex and doesn’t care much about whether her boyfriends are married. “I’m not pretty enough to get the hot young guys so I sleep with the older ones.” Say what you will about her, at least she knows her demographics. These guys visit her on a regular basis and shower her with gifts. She dates multiple guys at the same time and none of them seem to care or bother to ask if they’re exclusive.

So why does a girl barely in her 30s choose to sleep with older, unavailable men? Annie admits that she comes from a dysfunctional family. Though she was never physically abused as a child, she grew up with a mom who constantly told her she was ugly and would never amount to anything. Her father passed away when she was young, and she watched her mother’s whirlwind dating life first-hand.

On multiple occasions, my girl friends and I have reminded her that she has no future with these guys. What’s the point? But she doesn’t see it the same way we do. “I’m only going to get older and uglier so why not enjoy it now? I don’t ask them for stuff, they just give them to me, and old guys are good in bed.” Annie’s boyfriends are all middle-aged guys with questionable style, some slightly overweight.

According to Annie, she’s not alone in thinking this way. According to her, there are plenty of young locals capitalizing on their youth through their “hobbies” and insatiable libido with no regards to the havoc they help cause.

Guo Mei Mei

Recently in Chinese social media, China’s most brazen “professional mistress” Guo Mei Mei made a public apology after being released from prison for her illegal gambling rings. “Guo Mei Mei is my idol. I wish I could be like her,” says Annie. At the height of her “career”, Guo charged no less than RMB 100,000 per night for sex. She gained national notoriety back in 2011 when she claimed she worked for The Red Cross on her social media platforms; platforms filled with her lavish vacations, luxury cars, and designer bags.

“Some girls want love, but I just want to capitalize on my youth as much as I can,” Annie tells me. “It’s not like I go out searching for them. Somehow they find me, and if it’s not with me, they’ll find someone else. It’s not my fault they want to cheat.”

While I don’t agree with her lifestyle, I do see her rationale. She has no plans of settling down in Beijing and has already come to terms with the fact that, in her hometown, marriage is still more old-fashioned and based on practicality rather than love, so when she’s ready to move home, she’ll be going back to a loveless marriage that she’s already mentally prepared for, along with a fat bank account.

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/world/guo-meimei-chinas-most-brazen-professional-mistress-confesses-on-tv-20140805-100fp2.html

Photos: unsplash, Shanghaist

China’s divorce rates continue to climb and recent statistics show that women are increasingly initiating the proceedings – according to an article in The China Daily, 70 percent of divorce cases filed in a Shunyi court last year were by women  – a phenomenon that is believed to reflect a nationwide trend. The Ministry of Civil Affairs has also stated that in 2010 “1.96 million people nationwide applied for divorce while only 1.2 million tied the knot” across the nation.

Life in Beijing offers many perks for expats , of course (check out HSBC’s assessment of China, ranked 11th, in its “Expat Explorer Survey”), but the temptations of living abroad can also take its toll on marriages.

Author Erica Hanfred (He’s History, You’re Not: Surviving Divorce After Forty) has written a piece for The Huffington Post about the psychological and physiological effects of romantic rejection, ranging from increased levels of dopamine and cortisol immediately after a breakup (which is why "rejected lovers get frantic and tend to relentlessly pursue their beloved … [and]take humiliating measures to reconnect …" and oscillate between fits of rage and passion) to feelings of “excess energy” and bouts of intense depression that could even result in life-threatening heart attacks and strokes.

“The expression, dying of a broken heart, is not just hyperbole. People do actually die of a broken heart. They expire from heart attacks or strokes caused by their depression. These statistics probably come from a study of rejection in college students where most psychologists do their studies. If clinical depression is that common after rejection when you’re just dating, imagine how severe it is after twenty years of marriage. Fisher compares the process to the infant mammal when separated from its mother. When you isolate a puppy in the kitchen at first it protests. Eventually, however, it curls up in a corner in a despondent heap.”

Gloom and doom aside, Hanfred, who went through a nasty divorce herself, offers this advice to the lovelorn: “Those of us (like me I’m sad to say) who are glass-half-empty types suffer for longer and may creep, rather than bounce, back. However, eventually I recovered and so will you.”

More on China’s divorce laws here.