November 5, 2008: Korean man pays dearly for affair involving text messages to ex-lover in divorce

by Jeffrey Cottrill

SEOUL -- The information age has given us new ways to flirt with potential partners -- especially when we're already in marriages or serious relationships. The Internet, cell phones, and text phones are common electronic means to keep in touch with your lover in your affair. But you never know when your significant other is going to trump your affair in the gadget-geek wars...

Take a recent divorce case in South Korea. It seems that marriage wasn't enough for one man (identified by The Korea Times only as "Park"), who used his cell phone to exchange flirty text messages in an affair with his former girlfriend even after tying the knot last year.

Park, 31, kept this affair up until his wife, identified as "Shin", found out. But instead of ditching his virtual mistress, he changed the other woman's name registered on the phone to a male name and continued the affair. However, Shin found out about it again.

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Although Park supposedly stopped contacting the ex-girlfriend after that, Shin decided it was time to go Orwellian on her husband. She began keeping a record of all of Park's text messages and telephone calls, as well as the dates he came home late and the alleged reasons for it, in a folder titled "Husband Observation" on their home computer.

Park and Shin filed for divorce against each other after about six months of this game. But both spouses also blamed the other for the marital breakdown, arguing that the other spouse was more responsible for the eroded trust in the marriage.

In the end, a divorce court in Seoul ruled in favor of Shin. "Park broke the trust between husband and wife by not severing relations with his former lover," the court said of the affair, as quoted by the Korea Times on November 4. "Shin's monitoring of Park's life was a consequent countermeasure to uncover the husband's extramarital affairs."

The court ordered Park to pay Shin 40 million won (roughly $31,000 U.S.) in compensation.

The moral? It doesn't pay to cheat, no matter how cleverly. They'll find out about the affair in some way.

• Resolving to Keep Your Marriage Together
• Private Investigators -- The Truth Behind the Fiction
• Grounds for Divorce

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