Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

Tue 05 May 2004Why we have affairsMIND MOVES Marie MurrayThe Chinese poet Chuo Wen-Chun is quoted as saying "Why should marriage bring only tears? All I wanted was a man with a single heart and we would stay together as our hair turned white, not somebody always wriggling after fish with his big bamboo rod."These words, uttered over a hundred years BC, echo the self-same wish of many women today: to find love, grow old and live out their lives with the man they married. Aspirations they say made unattainable because their husbands are constitutionally incapable of being faithful: this 'wriggling' infidelity complicated by the complicity of other women, who compete, in a callous way, for the attentions of men, regardless of whether they are married or not.