Posted on 04/06/2007 4:22:52 AM PDT by shrinkermd
"....Latin Americans aren’t unique in getting worked up about cheating, real or imagined. Everyone does. That mythical country where people fool around and their spouses don’t mind doesn’t exist. Even the French aren’t laissez-faire about affairs. Though they expect their presidents to philander, in their own lives they’re just as faithful as Americans; in both countries, about 4 percent of married men say they’ve had more than one sex partner in the last year. In this era of love matches, monogamy is the preferred arrangement practically everywhere, and cheating is carried out in secret. The big differences are in how people in different countries redress the wrong.
In Russia, cheating is more of a relational problem than a moral violation. Nearly 40 percent of Russians said in a 1998 survey that cheating is “not at all” wrong or “only sometimes” wrong, compared with 6 percent of Americans. Psychologists in Moscow told me that if you live in a two-room apartment with your in-laws, as many Russians do, an affair is practically obligatory just to get relief from the constant bickering.
There hasn’t been a national sex survey, but in a 1996 poll in St. Petersburg, about half of men and a quarter of women said they’d cheated during their current marriage. When an infidelity is discovered, money can remove some of the emotional sting. Women said the classic guilt offering to a sulking wife is a fur coat or a Turkish beach holiday.
In Japan the real crime isn’t sexual betrayal, it’s indiscretion. A 40-year-old woman in Tokyo was furious when she discovered a gift her husband had received from another woman. “He broke the rules, because if you have an affair you’re not supposed to let the other person know,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
In my opinion, there's no such thing as "infidelity" when people are shacked up.
Oh yeah. I believe that. (/sarc)
“Psychologists in Moscow told me that if you live in a two-room apartment with your in-laws, as many Russians do, an affair is practically obligatory just to get relief from the constant bickering.”
Doesn’t that mean that you just wind up going to someone else’s apartment, listening to their in-laws bickering?
;-)
“in a 1996 poll in St. Petersburg, about half of men and a quarter of women said they’d cheated during their current marriage”
So they are saying that the half the women cheat twice as much as the men?
LOL! Sounds like it, unless they’re getting it on in the public parks!
I was talking with my nephew about President’s initials and how I’m not sure America is ready for a “BO”. I went through FDR, JFK, LBJ, when it occurred to me that LBJ could be Clinton’s Spanish nickname!
This article reminded me of that.
That’s all.
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