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Weiqing Love Hospital offers assistance to many wives and husbands to separate their unfaithful spouses from the lovers. Getty images

Gone are the days when divorce used to be the lone option to escape an unfaithful partner. Now one just needs to hire a mistress dispeller, who would offer their clients all the help to bring happiness back into their married lives.

A new industry is booming now in China, known as mistress-dispelling, which offers assistance to many wives and husbands to separate their unfaithful spouses from their lovers. It is said clients often end up paying tens of thousands of dollars to see off unwanted love rivals. Officially called the Weiqing Love Hospital, it is Shanghai's best known mistress dispeller service.

“Once we figure out what type of mistress she is — in it for money, love or sex — we draw up a plan,” Shu Xin, co-founder of Weiqing Love Hospital, told the Cut. The hospital, situated in Shanghai, bills itself as China’s “first professional transnational love hospital.”

Weiqing — the name translates as “preserve feeling”— was founded 17 years ago by Xin along with Ming Li and it provides an array of services designed to save marriages. The Weiqing hospital employees would give counseling to the clients about the secrets of a successful wedlock, and how to prevent a husband/wife's attentions from wandering.

The love hospital's hotline is open 24 hours a day, with inquires coming in through every social-media platform, according to a report in the New Yorker. When a person seeks the services of the platform, a junior staff at the facility would first conduct an hour-long consultation, explaining the company’s services and fees. A basic course of counseling starts at a hundred thousand Yuan, around 15,000 dollars. The price rises to three times if there is a mistress to be dispelled and five times if the mistress has a child by the errant husband.

The councilors would follow a variety of tactics to help their clients. They might move into the mistress’s apartment building or start working out at her gym to become her confidante, eventually turning her feelings against her partner. Sometimes, the counselor even would find her a new lover or a job opening in another city.

"When I discovered the affair, I confronted my husband. We fought bitterly and I kept on asking him, 'Why - why, when I have followed you so many years?' At first he expressed guilt. But after all the fighting, he just didn't want to talk to me any more. That's when I sought help," a client, who wanted her name to remain secret, told BBC News.

She opted to pay Weiqing to have her husband’s mistress dispelled. In this case, it involved having operatives persuade the 24-year-old secretary she could do better than hang around with an older man. Despite costing thousands of dollars, the middle-aged woman was convinced this was a better option than divorcing her cheating spouse.

"I don't want to give all this up. Separation has never been a concept I have ever thought about. And also I am approaching 50 years old, there's just not a market out there for a woman like me," she said.