I sincerely hope every reader takes the time to read this article carefully — because much of the wisdom here applies equally to men and women alike.
Student Question:
Hello, Master. I’ve seen you respond to messages in the comments before, so I’m taking the liberty of writing to you. I’m hoping to be fortunate enough to receive your thoughts, and I’d also like to arrange a destiny chart (命盘) reading to help plan for my future.
I’ll keep it brief — I don’t want to waste your time.
I’m 38 years old, a working professional with a net annual income of just over 200,000. My husband is a sales representative at a foreign pharmaceutical company, earning just over 600,000 net per year. We have a daughter who is about to enter her teenage years.
From the outside, we look like a polished, successful family. In reality, I’m growing more miserable by the day. This marriage is, to put it plainly, a catalogue of failures.
First: he has been caught — more than once — in emotional and even physical affairs with female employees and clients.
Second: he repeatedly gets talked into bad deals by friends and ends up being swindled — from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands at a time. He never consults me on any investment decision, and as a result, we have zero savings to this day.
Third: his temper. Whenever anything goes wrong at home, I’m the first one he blames, regardless of what it is. There’s no rational discussion — only outbursts — and I end up handling everything alone in the end.
Financially, we operate independently and split most household expenses down the middle. He covers the majority of our daughter’s education costs, but he’s essentially absent from family life. All the daily housework and everything involving our daughter falls on me.
As I get older, I find myself increasingly exhausted — physically and mentally. The pressure at work has been intense lately too. I feel like nothing in my life is going right. I keep asking myself how things got this bad. Thoughts of divorce come to me often. The idea of raising my daughter on my own, just the two of us — that feels better than keeping a man around who takes no responsibility and keeps making things worse.
So I wanted to hear your opinion: is this marriage worth holding on to?
Master Chi’s Response:
My dear, you are exactly the type of person who, frankly, makes my blood boil when I read your letter.
Because even without looking at your destiny chart, I can tell you with complete clarity: you married into a genuinely terrible pairing, and you have spent your best years letting it drain you.
If I’m being blunt — and I will be — it’s almost as if your husband has been repeatedly stabbing you with a dagger, and instead of running or dodging, you’ve been stepping forward to meet the blade.
Think that’s an unfair assessment? Let me walk through the key points, and I suspect you’ll recognize each one immediately.
1. On the affairs
Even a single affair is enough to tell you that in your husband’s subconscious mind, he has concluded: “The risk of blowing up this family is worth taking for a good time.” Repeated affairs go further — they reveal a man who believes that as long as he covers his tracks well enough, he’ll never have to face consequences.
After years of habitual betrayal, you have become — in his mind — an adversary to be continually deceived, not a partner to be trusted.
Your mistake was this: when you discovered the first affair, you didn’t respond with enough anger, enough finality. You didn’t draw the line that needed to be drawn. That moment of hesitation set everything that followed in motion.
2. On the financial recklessness
A man who loses money repeatedly, consistently, demonstrates a fundamental problem with his judgment. Yes, he earns a decent income — but that’s the fruit of hard work, not wisdom.
And the fact that he never consults you? That reveals something deeper. Either he doesn’t dare to, or he doesn’t think he should have to. Either way, it means he fundamentally does not see his personal wealth as connected to this family. That is a question of responsibility and character.
The most basic test of whether a man is truly reliable is this: does he understand, in his bones, that he and you are building something together? Everything I’ve described tells me he does not. He is, at his core, a gambler.
3. On his absence from the home
I understand that men who travel often for work can reasonably stay out of daily domestic affairs — as long as they provide financially, the traditional arrangement of one partner outside and one at home is perfectly workable.
But that’s not what’s happening here. He covers only the bare minimum for his daughter. He is absent from everything else. Which tells you that somewhere deep down, he is entirely comfortable offloading all of that onto you — because he knows you’ll handle it.
And he’s been proven right, hasn’t he? You, out of a sense of duty and sheer necessity, have been absorbing every crisis, internal and external, for years.
All of this, taken together — I trust that anyone with basic logical thinking can see: these are not problems that fix themselves over time. Could some dramatic turning point one day change him completely? Perhaps. But the probability is vanishingly small.
And I suspect you’re already preparing your next defense: “But we have a daughter. A broken home will traumatize her.”
I’m sorry, but you are completely wrong.
There is one environment worse for a child’s development than a single-parent home: a so-called “intact” family where one parent does as they please and the other silently endures the damage.
Consider what this family looks like through each set of eyes.
Your husband’s view: Things are fine. No matter what I do out there, she’ll swallow it for the sake of the kid. What have I got to worry about?
Your view: Things are fine. I’ve put up with a great deal, but at least my daughter has a stable life. It’s worth it.
Your daughter’s view: A man like my father — and a woman like my mother still serves him? Either I can’t understand this, or… is this just how things are supposed to be?
In other words: your daughter will not look back and see you as a hero who sacrificed herself for the family. She will see a woman who endured quietly, who bent low, who accepted what came. And that image — absorbed silently, day after day — becomes the blueprint she carries into her own life.
You cannot deny that.
I want to be clear: I am not criticizing you. I am genuinely saddened for you.
Because at this point, the situation is like a car that missed a turn long ago — and because no one corrected course at that first intersection, it has been traveling the wrong road ever since, further and further from where it should be.
You want to know what to do?
I will not, under any circumstances, offer major life decisions to anyone without first reading their destiny chart. That is a line I hold.
But I will leave you with this — whether you absorb it is up to you:
Life sometimes demands that you embrace “no destruction, no rebirth” — that you accept a complete dismantling before something new can rise. Anything that drains you, anyone who depletes you — you must find the resolve to cut them out of your life entirely. Like catching cancer in its early stage: you cannot afford to be lenient.
People fear change. But only change brings new possibility, new energy.
After the pain is processed and the breaking is done, what awaits is nothing less than transformation — a phoenix rising.
Do not cling to what was. Do not flee from what is. Part ways gracefully, each finding your own peace. You stop enabling his recklessness. He stops being an obstacle to your growth.
Three years from now, standing light and free, you will discover that all it took was letting go — and a beautiful new world was waiting on the other side.