"Is it because of me? What did I lack that you’re drinking alone?"
At the café window, Jian reddened her eyes and set her phone down. Across the table, Min-su had been bowing his head for an hour straight, apologizing on loop. In truth, it had been an ordinary company dinner with friends.
Yet Jian knew: a single tear was all it took.
The tears were real; the wound was scripted
Every relationship began the same way. Jian let slip—delicately—that she bruised easily. Parents’ divorce in childhood, betrayal by an ex. The stories never changed, and her pupils were forever brimming with sorrow.
‘I only want to be loved—why does everyone keep hurting me?’
The moment the words landed, men lowered the ramparts they’d built for themselves. A vow: I’ll never make her hurt again. And that vow hardened into a promise they had to keep.
Behind the victim mask, desire
In three years Jian dated four men. None of them could leave.
- Min-jae: “If I abandon someone who’s hurting because of me, I’ll be the villain.”
- Hyun-woo: “Watching you fall apart is driving me crazy.”
They never saw the screenshots she filed away in her phone. When Min-jae had dinner with his older sister and told her so, Jian texted:
If your sister is all you need, fine. I’m always an afterthought anyway. Being with you makes me feel lonelier than being alone.
Three sentences. That was all. Min-jae spent the night soothing her until 2 a.m. She photographed the scene and saved it to a folder labelled Evidence.
The subtle art of exquisite torture
Then came Jun-ho. His texts had thinned to a trickle—an ordinary ebb most couples face. Jian refused to let it pass.
"Jun-ho, I went to the hospital today."
One Kakao line.
He called instantly. Jian thinned her voice to a whisper.
"It’s nothing—just this tightness in my chest. The doctor said it might be stress-induced hyperventilation."
After that, Jun-ho never missed a day. In truth, Jian had only gone for a routine check-up. The results didn’t matter; what mattered was that Jun-ho had come back.
The one who was truly ill was Jun-ho—ill with the guilt her tear had distilled.
Why we are drawn to this
Psychologists call it victim coding—the unconscious signals that convince us the wounded deserve extra love. But the deeper lure is our own desire to rescue. Sometimes that desire is erotic: the intoxication of murmuring I’ll protect you now while caressing a lover’s bruised heart. And the simultaneous fear: If I leave, I become the perpetrator.
Jian understood the instinct perfectly. So she exaggerated every scratch, steered petty quarrels toward breakups. In that spiral she held absolute power.
You, in the mirror
Right now you may be telling a friend, That’s too much. But pause. When your lover cried, It’s because of me, isn’t it? didn’t your pulse race? And when you realized the tears were staged, were you angry—or did you, perhaps, envy the performance?
Haven’t you, even once, wanted to try it yourself? Knowing that a show of pain can win everything, yet choosing honesty every time.