I once heard you say that when a woman has an affair, it is more alarming for a partnership than when a man does it. How exactly did you mean that?

Lama Ole’s answer:

I am always in close contact with people. They come to me and write letters asking me for advice. Hence, I can deduce certain patterns. They might not be valid for everybody, but I would say that they are valid in most cases.

Based on what I’ve seen and heard, I do think that for the woman, the mental level of a relationship is more important, whereas for the man it’s the physical relationship. As long as the man doesn’t build up a relationship of trust with another woman, women don’t feel too disturbed if their partner has fun somewhere else from time to time. On the other hand, a woman can have her five movie stars pinned up on the wall, and it doesn’t bother the man as long as dinner is cooked when he comes home. But he doesn’t want her to go to bed with other men. The physical level is more important for the man, while the mental level is more important for the woman.

Quite often, an affair has a different meaning for a man and for a woman—there is certainly a difference there. If a man has an affair, it might just be because he was in a good mood. A man goes out, has some fun, wakes up in another bed, checks whether she’s a blonde or a redhead, and then goes home and forgets about it. But if a woman does this, in most cases it’s because her relationship is somehow in bad shape. When a woman has an affair, it reveals more about the state of a relationship than when a man does it. That’s why there is the saying, “What Caesar does is not so important; look instead at what Caesar’s wife does to discover the true state of the nation.”