I’m married to a psycho xiaojie. Four years now. I’ve never had a problem as bad as yours but that’s because from the first moment I met her I knew I wanted to marry her and I’ve never wavered in that feeling.
Even that wasn’t enough to eliminate the psycho factor in her though.
I first realized she was a little psycho about our relationship when she started telling me about the dreams she was having night after night where I was running off with another woman or high-tailing it for the U.S. never to be seen again. She’d tell me how in her dreams she was shellacking my ‘girlfriends’ or traipsing all over the U.S. like a refugee searching for me because she loved me so much and couldn’t live without me.
Other times she’d accuse me of looking at some other woman that I hadn’t even noticed. That was a regular thing.
Or if I wanted to go off and do something by myself for a couple of hours like go to the hardware store or go for a bike ride she got angry and acted as if she was sure I was going off with another woman.
This was only about 5% of the time though. The rest of the time we’ve had a wonderful, stable relationship which has given me lots of happiness.
That 5% though could be pretty rough and it was unpredictable. She would have fits of screaming temper that really began to make me wonder if the other 95% was really worth it.
One day though during one of her fits she said something that made a light go on in my head. I had asked her why for the hundredth time she was so frickin’ mad about such a small thing (who knows what it was) and she answered because she was afraid I was going to leave her.
Now there was no apparent connection between what she was mad at me about and that statement so that made me think she had finally let some clue to the real problem slip out.
I told her right then and there, ‘Honey, I’m not going to leave you. I promise I’ll never leave you. Hell, I love you so much I’d even like to have two of you.’
Well that didn’t go over entirely the way I would have liked it to but it seemed to really help for the first time. It was the first thing I’d ever said during one of her psycho tirades that made the least bit of difference.
I began to explore that idea with her and reassure her regularly that I was in it for the long haul and it really seemed to have a thawing effect on the psycho logjam. As we talked and I followed the thread in the things she said to me, I began to make a connection between her anger and a fear of being abandoned – by men. I had known already that when she was a little girl her father had been emotionally very distant with her and her sisters. She had described him as the typical Chinese father. One day when she was about eight, he just stopped coming home altogether and started living with another woman.
She had always told me it didn’t really matter to her anymore but when I made her really begin to talk about it she finally told me one day that because of it she was certain I was going to do the same thing to her one day too and that really scared her.
I looked her in the eyes and took her by the hands and told her I gave her my word I was never going to do that – that I would stay with her forever. I left off the part about wanting two of her that time though. For a moment as I held her hands I could almost see the little eight-year-old girl in her eyes the moment she had realized her dad wasn’t coming home anymore and it really made me feel bad for her.
Since then she’s never said another word about me wanting to go off and do something for a few hours without her. She even encourages me to do it. We haven’t had another one of those psycho arguments. I have to do regular maintenance with her though and repeat what I said to her then but she seems to need to hear it less and less as time goes on.
So why the long-winded speech to a guy who doesn’t have the slightest intention of marrying the psycho xiaojie in his life? Well, my point is is that I think there are a lot of Chinese girls like my wife out there. The men in their lives from their earliest recollection have made them feel emotionally abandoned because of the stoic nature of traditional Chinese fatherhood – not to mention their wandering nature – and now their daughters are left with a deep-seated anxiety about being abandoned by all men and it scares them to death. It’s not for nothing that you hear all those stories about female infanticide in Chinese culture. I believe Chinese women tend to bond with the men in their lives much deeper than Western women too so these two factors can make for an explosive and unexpected mixture for an unsuspecting Western man.
So, if you’re thinking about hooking up with some xiaojie, get to know her a little first and ask a few things about how she started out. Does she have any of this knife-in-the-heart feeling from the past about Chinese men just not caring about their wives and daughters? If she does, then you’ve got an important choice to make, but at least you’ll have some foreknowledge about what you’re getting yourself into.