The professor, Rachel Wang, put it this way: "An expert can't guarantee she won't get a divorce, but she should have more courage to face up to the facts of her own marriage."

After the Lunar New Year holiday, Wang took her two children to Thailand's Phuket for a vacation. It was the first time in more than 20 years that the three of them had taken a trip together. It was a sunny, relaxing time--a perfect picture of the relationship between the newly single mother and her children.

Wang says that it was only after her divorce that she and her kids could "breathe freely." Over the last five years, they've grown closer to one another, slowly developing a relationship in which they seemed more like friends than parent and children. "We are getting to be like roommates," Wang says. Her daughter has graduated from college and now works in the Hsinchu Science Park and her son is studying at Tainan's National Cheng Kung University, but even though they are living far apart from one another, they're very close emotionally.

Things are looking up for Wang these days, but it all came only after an earth-shaking divorce and period of painful self-discovery. Even though she is a highly respected marriage expert, she wasn't immune to the hurt.

She's known as a "marriage expert" and "psychological counselor," and she's even written a book entitled My Husband is a Businessman Overseas that discusses how to cope when spouses live apart. When she got the news that her husband was having an affair with a bar girl in China, the fear of ridicule was smothering her. Wang admits that for the first year after secretly signing a divorce agreement, she would think to herself, "We can just quietly get back together to avoid the embarrassment and save my career."

The view from Rachel Wang's counseling office is expansive, as broad and spacious as her post-divorce life.

Farewell to the past

Wang says, "There have to be happy parents for there to be happy kids--that's my main philosophy, and that's what gave me the strength to come out of my cocoon." When a marriage is in crisis, she says, you have to save yourself first. Only when you have made it can you get the kids' lives back in balance.

But losing control in the area of her own expertise made Wang unable to forgive herself. She felt compelled to give herself and everyone else some explanation. She ended up falling into depression. She was given medication and counseling. Once she started to reflect back on her marriage, which had long been in tatters, she finally learned to face the truth and stop living a lie.

Wang spent two years rebuilding her life. She published a book about her experiences during that period called Finally Learning to Love Myself and with that bade farewell to her past. "After I 'came out of the closet,' I felt liberated," she says. After her divorce, she started getting even more counseling clients than she had before. As she had been through it all herself, she could analyze her clients' problems more precisely and she became more convincing when giving advice. Late last year, her Ko-yan Psychological Counseling Office opened for business.

In the past, when people with children told her they were stuck in a bad marriage and didn't know where to turn, Wang would always tell them something like "Kids have their own kind of happiness," and encourage them to seek their own contentedness. But now, having experienced it for herself, she knows how it pains the heart to make the children suffer along with the adults.

What comes next?

The year Wang got divorced, her son was 15 and her daughter had almost reached adulthood. Even though they were old enough to know what was going on and didn't object, they still couldn't completely deal with the emotions brought up by their parents' breakup. The daughter played it cool at first, saying "It doesn't matter--I barely know him anyway." But she couldn't hold back her emotions forever. She especially resented how her mother was so devastated by the experience that she was unable to care for her kids. They ended up in screaming matches. The daughter felt deeply betrayed by both parents, and said she'd never get married or have kids herself.

Just the opposite, the son, who was in the middle of his adolescence, stopped talking. He shut himself off from his own feelings and from the outside world, acting like everything was normal. But Wang knew that her son would always lack a father figure in his life. Even now, when the subject is broached, her son will become guarded and silent. "Maybe he needs some more time for the wounds to heal," Wang says.

Perhaps it's due to their parents' divorce that neither Wang's daughter nor her son are currently in a relationship. Wang isn't worried, though: "It's a good thing that they found out early on that love and marriage aren't as romantic as they are in novels," she says. She keeps a close eye on them, always ready to lend a helping hand.

A marriage counselor who fell flat on her face is bravely picking herself back up and proclaiming that she's finally learned to love herself. What comes next? In love and family relationships, there's always a lot to learn.