- “Let’s just have a beer.” A tawny lager is set on the glass table, exhaling lazy foam. Min-woo fills his wife Soo-jin’s glass to the rim without leaving a drop. Neither speaks. That is the privilege—no, the lethargy—of nine years of marriage. Soo-jin breaks the silence first.
“I told you last month. The new junior at the office… it was a mistake. Just once.”
Min-woo doesn’t blink. He scratches the edge of the bottle cap with his fingernail. “Yeah. Me too. The design-agency rep after the team dinner.”
They avoid each other’s eyes. Confessing the affairs they once hid turns out to be astonishingly easy. The first time, carefully. The second, familiarly. The third, as if by habit.
The first time stole my breath
At first I held my breath; every buzz of my phone in the far-end restroom felt like a heart ready to burst.
That night Soo-jin’s footsteps coming home were leaden. Whenever Min-woo pretended to sleep and rolled over, the bedsprings creaked. She couldn’t speak, only locked the bathroom door. Under the hot water sliding over her stiff skin, what came out was not a sob but a sigh.
‘This will be the end.’
But it wasn’t.
The second time felt almost weightless
“For here or to go?” the barista asked.
The man across from her, Jung-woo, passed Soo-jin an Americano he already knew she liked. After the first mistake, his texts grew shorter, faster: Let’s meet again, I miss you, Let’s grab lunch.
Soo-jin no longer counted to three before replying; guilt, once tasted, is halved the second time.
That lunch lasted forty-seven minutes. In the café restroom, fixing her makeup in haste, she felt her own gaze in the mirror turn cold. Whether anyone had seen them—such worries had become secondary.
The third time was numb
The third man was Min-woo. The kiss with his colleague Hye-jin felt less like betrayal than a tool to justify Soo-jin’s affairs.
After the company dinner, Hye-jin brushed Min-woo’s cheek. “Let’s stop here for tonight.”
“…All right.”
Yet his feet followed her around the corner to her flat. That first kiss in the alley behind the bar reminded him of his very first date with Soo-jin. The feeling lasted one minute, then guttered out.
‘Enough. I’ve taken my revenge.’
But it wasn’t revenge, only another link in a chain of desire.
Why can’t we stop at the third
Are we starved for love, or do we devour relationships the way we wolf down food when we are merely hungry?
Psychologists say repeated infidelity hacks the brain’s dopamine circuit. The thrill tasted in the first affair dulls in the second; by the third, only a dry rustle remains. Still, we can’t let go—because even that rustle is the only noise that fills the emptiness of ordinary days.
Min-woo and Soo-jin ceased keeping score of who started it, who betrayed more. Such questions hardened into habit like veins beneath the skin. Twice a week, three times a month. Lies grew shorter, honesty blunter.
A look exchanged over the last of the beer
“Let’s end it,” Soo-jin said.
The cap snapped shut with a click. Min-woo, instead of answering, stroked the back of her hand. For a moment it trembled, then the tremor vanished.
Whom are we forgiving, exactly? You? Me? Or simply the trap we call a relationship?
The two cans are empty. Only ring-shaped water stains remain on the glass table. Inside those circles, Min-woo and Soo-jin’s faces overlap.
No one speaks.
Only the hollowness left by three affairs condenses to fill the room.
How many more betrayals can you still endure?
Or, in truth, could even a single one ever be forgiven?