Archive for category: General Investigations

Valerie Gibson of the Tornoto Sun has an excellent coulmn for men who may have reason to worry.

The reaction rumbles on from recent columns about cheating men. What about cheating women, asked numerous men in their

e-mails?

My column that followed on the subject asked the same question and pointed out that cheating is an equal opportunity activity these days.

Women cheat as much as men, I stated, Why the emphasis only on men?

After the furor died down however, many men wrote asking that, since there were numerous books available telling women how to detect when their men were cheating, where was the information telling them how to spot when a woman is cheating?

Obviously, the e-mails were from men who’d been cheated on or suspected they were being cheated on.

Sun writer Joanne Richard took up the challenge and asked a U.S. infidelity expert, Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil, for a list of signals that might indicate a woman is cheating. She published it in this Lifestyle section.

But judging by the following e-mails I received, many men missed the list and still want to know what the danger signals are.

By SUE SHELLENBARGER, The Wall Street Journal

For Dick Kline, office romance in the news this week hit a sore spot.
When a creative director he worked with on a previous job years ago had an extramarital affair with a co-worker, Mr. Kline, an art director, and other employees of the big ad agency were aware of it. The illicit relationship was not only a distraction in the office but offended some co-workers, causing them to lose respect for the creative director.
The experience left Mr. Kline, of Yonkers, N.Y., with some clear-cut views on morality at the office: “The rules of the game should be, ‘No hanky-panky during working hours. No exceptions.”‘

His experience lends insight into why some office romances erupt into scandal. Most employers look the other way when issues of morality arise around extramarital affairs; Boeing’s firing this week of CEO Harry Stonecipher, whose dalliance risked embarrassing the company, was an exception. But co-workers don’t look the other way. Colleagues rush in where corporate leaders fear to tread, fixing on their co-workers’ romantic wrongs, making judgments and often lashing out in damaging ways.
The events leading to Mr. Stonecipher’s departure were triggered when directors were tipped off to the relationship after receiving a copy of explicit e-mail he had written. It isn’t yet known who alerted the directors.

Co-workers are often affected by extramarital flings at the office. They may feel morally compromised if a colleague expects them to be complicit in hiding an extramarital affair from a spouse. They may lose out on promotions or projects if the boss favors a lover over them.

Although polls show a large majority of Americans believe extramarital affairs are wrong, employers typically resist making such judgments. Just 12 percent of 391 companies surveyed by the American Management Association have written guidelines on office dating.

One reason is that about 20 states and many cities ban employment discrimination on the basis of marital status. If a married employee who has an affair is fired and an unmarried employee who has an affair is not, the fired employee in those states conceivably could claim illegal discrimination, attorneys say. Thus, many employers turn a blind eye to marital cheating.

That creates an environment where employees are often on their own in deciding what to do about it. Some workers in the 1990s tried to advance so-called third-party sexual harassment lawsuits, claiming they had missed out on promotions or raises because a superior favored an office lover. But the courts have backed away; generally, judges have ruled co-workers’ injuries aren’t severe or pervasive enough to warrant damages, says Gregory M. Davis, an employment attorney in Chicago with Seyfarth Shaw.

Nevertheless, some outraged co-workers feel compelled to act, dropping the political equivalent of an A-bomb and potentially sending their own careers into a Linda Tripp-like swoon. Before taking that path, ask yourself first whether you’re experiencing measurable on-the-job damage, or just moral outrage. Try “straightening out your feelings with your own minister or therapist” rather than attacking the co-worker, advises Ann Pardo, director of behavioral health at Canyon Ranch Health Resort, Tucson, Ariz.
Janet Lever, a sociologist at California State University who has studied the matter, says people have a legitimate beef if a co-worker, in effect, expects them to lie on their behalf. In such cases, co-workers have a right to say, “Don’t make me do your dirty work,” she says.

If an affair disrupts your work or harms teamwork or morale, “the first step is to go to that offending person face-to-face, privately,” Dr. Pardo says. If that fails or isn’t feasible, consider talking to a human-resources manager. At that point, however, you lose control: Depending upon the rules or customs at your office, a human-resource manager might ignore you; counsel the offender(s); report the affair to a supervisor; or arrange for one or both of the offending lovers to be transferred or fired.

More employees will likely face these issues in the future. While the proportion of men admitting to ever having had an extramarital affair is about flat at 22 percent, the same as a decade ago, evidence suggests that the number of women who have cheated is rising. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago says 15 percent of the women in a 3,000 person survey said “yes” when asked if they had ever engaged in an extramarital affair, up from 10 percent previously, based on a 2002 survey. More of these affairs are taking place in the workplace.

A few employers have taken steps toward a solution. Southwest Airlines, which employs more than 1,000 married couples, explicitly allows consensual office relationships. But it also has set a process for employees who object to a particular office romance to complain to the employee-relations department or to a manager, who in turn is charged with finding a remedy if the affair “negatively impacts our culture,” the company says.
More employers should probably do the same.

Married Women Imagine Affairs

The Chosun Ilbo Reports

If one day your wife looks out the window and starts smiling for no reason you can discover, it may be because another man is in her heart. “It started out of curiosity,” says 38-year-old Kim Yeong-mi (not her real name). Three months ago she met an old classmate through her Cyworld blog. They had dinner together, short dates grew into long drinking sessions, and one thing led to another.

“When I heard him say, ‘You’re still as pretty as ever,’ I felt like a woman for the first time in a long while. It had been ages since I heard that or got that feeling from my husband.”

The entire time she dated her lover, she felt pain thinking of her husband, her nine-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. Yet each time she decided to break it off, she found herself waiting for her lover’s calls instead and arrived early at their place of rendezvous.

“I confessed to my friend, but she said to keep meeting him until I grew sick of him. Don’t break up your family, she said. She said there’s barely a married woman who doesn’t have a bit on the side these days.”

In a poll of 1,000 married women conducted by the Chosun Ilbo, the Korea Institute of Sexology, Pfizer Korea and Research Plus, 63 percent of respondents said they could imagine having sex with a man other than their husband. Some 21 percent said they were sitting on the fence, and only 16 percent said they could never sleep with anyone other than their husband.

Park Mi-jin (not her real name) is 43 and seeing a younger man despite being married for 15 years. “In the past, when I told my friends I had a lover, they used to say I was crazy, but now they say I’m clever.”

Chun Kyoung-hee of DeRyook International Law Firm says, “Fewer people now think of marriage as an eternal promise, so infidelity and divorce are rising rapidly.” As women grow more active in society and their economic power increases, their thinking about marriage and affection has grown freer, she said.

For a thesis on extramarital relationships, Sungkyunkwan University student Yang Da-jin interviewed 196 women in the Seoul-Gyeonggi Province area. “Of the respondents, 26 percent said they had had an extramarital affair,” she says. “The women were frank and unconcerned writing down their experiences on the questionnaire.”

Some attribute this atmosphere to TV dramas and movies that make infidelity look good. Since the 1996 drama “Aein” (Lover), women’s infidelity has ceased to be the stuff of controversy, with films such as “Happy End”, “Ardor”, and “Three Women” following the trend. The Internet, too, makes illicit relationships easier. Most of the respondents who confessed they had lovers said they met the men on school alumni sites or online chat. Psychologist Lee Eun-ha says, “The environment, like dramas and films, just helped break social taboos; infidelity on the part of women is rising as they grow confident that they can live on their own even after divorce thanks to their increased economic power.”

Choe Yeong-lee (assumed name), 37, who is having an affair with a colleague, said, “My husband thinks of me as someone who’s there to do housework, but my lover is always considerate of me.” What makes her stay with her husband? “My husband has had many flings with bar girls. We just pretend not to know,” she says.

(englishnews@chosun.com )

by Stephanie Siegel
Staff Writer
May 25, 2005

An article last week about a Bethesda woman who created a line of greeting cards designed for people involved in affairs elicited numerous responses from readers who found the idea objectionable.

“I was really shocked about the infidelity cards,” said Bethesda resident Lola Gimmel. “I don’t agree with this sort of thing and I just felt it was shocking.”

Cathy Gallagher created the line of cards and launched her company, The Secret Lover Collection, at the National Stationery Show last week in New York. The story ran on May 18 in The Gazette, headlined “Love notes for that ‘other’ special someone.”

People in the card industry said the idea is unique and marketable, but a number of The Gazette readers and others who work with couples dealing with marital infidelity said there’s no place in society for such a product.

“We don’t see Hallmark cards about abuse or alcoholism or addiction,” said Joanna Bare, chairwoman of the board of directors of the local chapter of Save Your Marriage Central, a national organization that helps couples who are dealing with infidelity. Bare, a Bethesda resident, e-mailed The Gazette after reading the story.

Like abuse or addiction, affairs cause havoc in marriages, Bare said. Cards for people in affairs romanticize such relationships and ignore the harmful aspects of them.

Read Full Article Here

2005-05-11
By Deogratias Mushi

Any human being possesses a certain percentage of jealousy, and, in fact, this is undoubted truth. Allow me begin by making the observation that there is no twisted object like love. Love is never uniform.

It is subject to many forms, interpretations, and feelings, and there are no standard measures that one can employ to get the perfect picture of love, because each individual feels differently. Other people experience love in inflaming, low intensity pull, betraying but little outward signs that they are burning up, being consumed by the fires of passion.

Yet others show it by a violent disposition, physically pining away at the absence of their loved ones, and brightening up, pulsating with life, when their dear ones are present. These different degrees of responsiveness to love, a person’s temperament so to speak, also manifest differently when this love is threatened. But what we should assert first is that the feeling of jealousy is never born where there is no love. For sure jealousy is a wrecker of relationships, where one party suspects the other of double dealing. Often there are quarrels, fights, breaking down of relationships. The heart thumps, the head swells, there is a constriction in breath – generally day turns into night, when a man for example, suspects that his girl is cheating on him.

There is no bigger tragedy in a man’s life than suspecting that some other man is running your girl; that the girl you love so much, is sharing her heart, and probably more, with you and another.

What is worse – such cases are very difficult to resolve. The ache will remain permanently.

But what is the prime cause of this? Too much love! Too much love will kill you, goes. Song, but you will not die due to the intensity of feelings for him or her, however much your heart thumps for them. What is probable is that you will die from the mere wisp of suspicion that she is seeing another person, then coming back into your arms, pretending to be as holy as a Muslim who does not miss all five daily prayers. When people are in love, there is an abundance of trust. There is a general feeling of putting your whole lifes existence in the other partys hands. So it becomes a betrayal of the highest degree when cracks appear in this armoured trust, and no amount of confrontation will take away these gnawing pangs of jealousy. They become a cancer, and the most frustrating thing is that the fact that there is a cloud between you, you can stop loving him or her. No. You can not tear yourself from your partner, because despite the feeling of insecurity that has engulfed the relationship, you are still held captive by cupids arrow.

The other day I was conversing with a hard-talking woman I met at a wedding, and in the course of talking, she asked the ladies in the group what they would do if their husband brought a woman back home, and coolly introduced her as a co-wife. The reaction, much as it was highly indignant, however, did not match the fury that greeted the lady when she cheekily posed the same question to the men. How could she even think about it, they fumed. But there it was. The tampering of exclusive rights to someones heart, purse, body – everything. And it was clear men felt more strongly than women about this hypothetical threat.

But perhaps this has leanings on feelings of male dominance than that they feel more! A discussion about jealousy can never be quite complete without some allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello. The man is always roundly condemned for having such intense pangs of jealousy, that eventually led him to strangle his beautiful Desdemona. No one ever feels with him, that he loved so intensely, but was seeing, right before his very eyes, his wife ostensibly being wooed by another. There was that issue of incontrovertible proof. Everyone would have died with jealousy, because everything pointed to the fact that his wife was being unfaithful to him. We should blame too much love, not jealousy. Even when he was deciding on her manner of death, he did not want to disfigure her loveliness.

I put it before you ladies and gentlemen, that you never flare completely out of temper when your spouse accuses you of cheating, because then you can be sure that he or she still hold you dear.

deomushi@guardian.co.tz

* SOURCE: Guardian