Two Thirds of Married Women Imagine Affairs

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 )