A rare non-Donald Trump-themed article from New Yorker: “China’s Mistress-Dispellers”. Some excerpts:
… clients are women who hope to preserve their marriages by fending off what is known in Chinese as a xiao san, or “Little Third”—a term that encompasses everything from a partner in a casual affair to a long-term “kept woman.”
A volatile mixture of rapid social change, legal reforms, and traditional attitudes has created something approaching a crisis in Chinese marriage. In the past decade, the divorce rate has doubled. Adultery is the most prevalent cause, accounting for about a third of the cases, and men are more than thirteen times as likely to stray as women are.
The company’s co-founder, a woman in her late forties, came out to meet me. She wore a crimson cape coat, which, combined with her swift stride, gave the impression of imminent flight. She introduced herself as “Ming laoshi”—Teacher Ming. Her actual name is Ming Li, but she was formerly a teacher and has kept the honorific, because she still sees her role as instructional. … “There are no enduring marriages,” she told me matter-of-factly. “Only mistresses who haven’t worked hard enough at tearing it apart.”
“Marriage is like the process of learning to swim,” Ming said. “It doesn’t matter how big or fancy your pool is, just like it doesn’t always matter how good your husband is. If you don’t know how to swim, you will drown in any case, and someone else who knows how to swim will get to enjoy the pool.”
Shu and Ming set up their company in 2001, just after an amendment to a law made divorce easier to obtain. This new freedom created a business opportunity, and, indeed, Shu framed the threats to marriage in material terms. “Today’s Little Thirds want a good bargain,” he told me. “They are of the post-nineties generation—competitive, shrewd, worldly.” Likewise, the best course for wronged wives was to follow the money: “Secure the marriage to secure the assets. Secure the assets to secure happiness.”
Li told me that she doubted she would ever remarry. “The truth is, in China, at least, the last thing a marriage is about is the relationship between two people,” she said. “It’s about property, the children, and the vast and various entanglements of those two things.”
“and men are more than thirteen times as likely to stray as women are.”
If adultery is indeed widespread, what could be wrong with this statistics?
I think that on there should be about the same percentile of both male and female adulterers, unless most of sexually active population is not married.
If there are more unmarried men then unmarried women, which is the case in China, the percentile is even more fantastic.
So who are these men having sex with? each other? prostitutes? or women who have an appetite for 13 men? They should all be concerned about HPV – those cancers are incurable unless caught early.
A rare marriage themed, non Donald Trump article anyway. Is the post marriage/post domestic partner world really that bad? While seeing all the other middle aged couples hobbling around on July 4, the thought of being in a relationship at our age & dealing with the health problems of a normal person seemed utterly terrible.