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Two-thirds of married Korean women 'can imagine affairs'
May 31, 2005
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.
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