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China’s Cheating Husbands Fuel an Industry of ‘Mistress Dispellers’
- sverige 10y agoBut how will this work in, say, LA or New York? A friend of mine in NYC had a lovely wife who divorced him after discovering his serial philandering. He said there were young women throwing themselves at him all the time. (He's wealthy.) The stigma isn't as strong here as it is in China, either. And he ended up paying for the divorce. On the other hand, she's not as well off financially as she had been. It was emotionally difficult for her as well, but the root of that problem was deeper than the symptom. Not sure that this service would work here.
- wyclif 10y agoI doubt it would work in the US, too. Not only is the stigma against divorce now almost non-existent, we have no-fault divorce law. And people marry and divorce at a higher rate than ever before. It's easy come, easy go. And I would say that our system has a lot of bad effects, too: broken homes and single-parent childrearing are crippling our social structure.
- sgk284 10y agoThe divorce rate peaked in the 80s and has been declining ever since in the States. Here's the last 15 years, but can't find the full data set right now: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gakada 10y agoIt's amusing that these statistics are on the CDC website.
- mmmBacon 10y agoWhat's amusing about that? Divorce can be devastating to a person's physical and mental health as can many other social problems. So it seems logical to me that the CDC tracks this.
- lectrick 10y agoSimilar to Global Thermonuclear War in the movie WarGames, the only winning move may soon simply be not to play :O
- pookeh 10y agoYes but marriage rates have also been falling. No marriage no divorce.
- bryanlarsen 10y agoThe major alternative to divorce is dysfunctional families which is similarly crippling to children.
- brianwawok 10y agoHow about counseling? That is a pretty grim view.
- lectrick 10y agoEvidence? Also false dichotomy. We do not know the percentage of successful marriages with undiscovered affairs.
- sanxiyn 10y agoThe key paragraph, in my opinion: "One response to marital infidelity is divorce. But divorce can be costly, especially for women. Aside from the social stigma that falls more heavily on women, family property and finances in China tend to be registered in the husband's name. A divorced woman can find herself homeless, adding to the pressure of taking measures to save the marriage."
- chii 10y agoit's interesting that in the west, divorce usually means the women gets half the networth of the man, in which case, it's the man who normally don't want to divorce.
- ajmurmann 10y agoUnless the wife has higher income in which case the husband benefits. Or maybe they even earn similar incomes...
- dpark 10y agoYeah. I'm not sure what decade these people are living in. If you're worried about marriage because you think your wife is going to divorce you and take half your money, you could choose a spouse with her own source of good income.
- lectrick 10y agoThat limits your choices quite a bit. For example there are a large number of attractive women with terrible incomes and/or no savings, for which "scoring a successful man" may be a "valid" mating strategy
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- intrasight 10y ago
- Illniyar 10y agoWhat's the point though? Wouldn't the husband just end up with a different mistress? I mean they do not resolve the problems in the marriage that led to the situation. Do these women believe it's a one time thing? or that that specific mistress is special?
- draw_down 10y agoThat was what I found so strange about the wife's relief in the article. The husband probably has other employees.
- ma2rten 10y ago"While the counselor goes to work, the mistress-dispelling service advises the wife on how to make herself more attractive to her husband."
- lectrick 10y agoWhile this sounds sexist, would any husband actually argue against that part? Let's be frank, here
- analyst74 10y agoRepeat business!
- ctvo 10y agoThe distinction is probably lost, but a mistress is someone the husband has emotional feelings for (and what scares the wives is their ability to manipulate their husbands). It takes time to find someone like that and build up a new side relationship. It could happen again, but they're hoping not quickly. This is different from sleeping with escorts and other transactional women, which a lot of wives are comfortable with and attribute it to the way business works (taking clients out drinking, etc.).
- ajmurmann 10y agoEscorts are considered part of how business is done in China?
- jogofogo 10y ago.
- venomsnake 10y agoNot that sure about that. For every vagina there has to be corresponding dick for the whole cheating thing to work. So I guess cheaters are roughly equal between sexes.
- zxcvvcxz 10y agoSo I guess cheaters can only cheat with other cheaters...
- coldtea 10y ago>So I guess cheaters are roughly equal between sexes. For it to be cheating you need to be married (or in an exclusive relationship) in the first place. If the other party is not, then they're not cheating anyone themselves. So, if it mostly happens between married men and unmarried women, for example, cheaters don't have to be "roughly equal".
- venomsnake 10y agoAnd what are the unmarried men doing in the meantime?
- coldtea 10y agoWell, for one they can't cheat their wives, because they don't have any. As for cheating with married women, in China woman's infidelity is much lower than that of married men infidelity. "In a representative sample of urban Chinese – 3.9% of married women and 20.6% of married men reported to have the experience of extramarital sex in the past year". So just because each dick needs a corresponding vagina (and vice versa) doesn't mean that infidelity between sexes is equal. There are other factors in play too.
- taneq 10y ago
- rdslw 10y agoHard to believe this is something more than 'wannabe business PR' plus movie PR. China female/male ratio is heavily unbalanced. There is a LOT men on market for women to choose. Also almost no foreign woman marry chinese man, on the contrary to the chinese women marrying a lot of foreigners. 1+2 means china is a market where men are at bad position and women has plenty of fish to choose from. Opposite situation which would create such services as described in the article. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China According to 2012 figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s sex ratio at birth (the number of boys born for every 100 girls) was as high as 118.
- coldtea 10y agoThe culture of a place plays much more important role that mere ratios of men/women. Besides, it's not like this is for the general population. Mistresses are a common trait in the upper classes -- which, in a huge place like China, are still in the tens of millions...
- analyst74 10y agoThis is the logical conclusion if you don't understand another country and solely base your analysis on data. All you said in regards to male/female ratio is true, and single women have lots potential mates to choose from. Unfortunately, the mistress situation is still common, due to a variety of issues around limited supply of wealthy men, divorce laws favouring the wealthy, societal stigma against divorced people, social norm of judging men by success and women by look, etc, etc. Not all those issues are female-centric, but combined, they make it acceptable (while still looked down upon, if advertised) for some women to be a mistress of some powerful man, and powerful men to have mistresses.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoAccording to the article, this is mostly men who are trying to status-signal by having a mistress; it's not Average Joe who's keeping a mistress on the side.
- iliketosleep 10y agoit's not that simple. in china's current materialistic society you have a small pool of rich men with a lot of woman chasing after them. the majority of rich businessman do in fact have mistresses and their wives do take drastic measures to get them back.
- ripitrust 10y agoI doubt that this will ever work in countries other than China because women (and marriage) in other countries are mostly protected by law, while in china, women are not so well protected. Also, culturally speaking, a divorced woman is very hard to get marriage in China. While a divorced man is easy. In society, People think that "divorce" somehow depreciated the value of a woman, while "divorce" means nothing (sometimes positive thing) for a man. Also, after marriage, Chinese woman will not focus mostly on work or career promotion but rather on family, so in the long term, they are 1) financially attached to the husband 2) emotionally attached to the husband. This makes them want to "fix" the marriage rather than abandon it, even if the fix is superficial and (maybe) temporary. But as more and more young women (born after 80s and 90s) are married, this kind of issue may be mitigating. Because young women tend to be much well-educated and wealthy
- ZLeviathan 10y agowow, as a Chinese myself, I agree on everything you said. Well put!
- ripitrust 10y agoThanks
- franciscop 10y agoIn Japan I would say it is similar, maybe not up to such extend but also in the same way
- ripitrust 10y agoYeah I heard about that, it is sad that Japan women are suffering from this too.
- branchless 10y agosurely the one child policy will give women an upper hand in the coming 20 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/File:China_Sex_By_Age_2010_census.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago> Weiqing eventually ended the affair, she said, by persuading the other woman to take a higher-paying job in another city. “I don’t care how that woman is living now,’’ Ms. Wang said. “I just feel relieved that my husband is back.’’ This makes me sad because the issue is not "fixed", it's just lost one of its symptoms. If you speak to enough people who have been married for a "long time" you realize they have been through some really hard stuff. It takes an extreme amount of work and forgiveness from both sides. I can't picture success with just one party being interested in staying together.
- shubhamjain 10y agoAnother point that is missing here is, in many cultures, women are reluctant to consider any fault in their husbands. Cheating? Fault of the mistress. Domestic violence? Fault of herself. Coming from India, I have seen this happening countless times where women would never see anything wrong with their spouse even in worst cases. This may seem horrifying but it is often a result when women are brought up to be good obeying wives, be great mothers and religiously do household duties.
- kazinator 10y agoLaugh; "mistress disspelling" is a time-consuming and expensive remedy which focuses on the symptom of the infidelity. After weeks and months of manipulating the mistress, assuming it works, the husband may just find another one. Back to square one. What if he already has several? Do you hire three counsellors with three strategies to dispel all of them? That's going to get really expensive, fast.