Including your QQ password, she has to know this. You have to put everything you own in her hands. While other young married men expressed similar sentiments to Wang Gaoshan, not all ultimately deleted strangers from their friends lists upon marriage, with some, as previously mentioned, continuing to add more strangers over time.
Indeed, as time went on, some men opened up to me with regards to their pursuit of romantic relations outside of marriage through social media. His job takes him all around China, and he has frequent long business trips sometimes for several weeks or months to other provinces in China. His wife and young daughter stay at home in Anshan Town while he goes off on these trips. One day Li Jian revealed to me that he actually owned a second phone, from which he could organise to meet his mistress.
But of course, he will not allow the divorce [to happen], he has a wife and a son. A similar instance comes from Pan Bohua, a man in his thirties who manages a small construction company. He often travels around the district supervising the projects that he works on, and he also has to entertain clients by taking them to restaurants and karaoke parlours. It would be easy to try to make sense of such male promiscuity as simply a means to assert their masculinity, or the remnants of feudal marriage practices.
Whatever the explanation, only a few married men actually spoke of arranging trysts through social media and it remains incredibly difficult to gauge how widespread cases such as these really are. Because these forms of relationships challenge the sacrosanct status of monogamous marriage, many do not to want to talk openly about it.
Arguably rumour and gossip surrounding such behaviour had a greater social impact than the actual occurrence of such events. Hearsay among townsfolk is usually sufficient to encourage a widely held feeling that social media constitutes a threat to the stability of marriage and, by implication, society.
