Still, stories of straying men abound.

Lisa, a vivacious, straight-talking analyst, discovered her husband was seeing another woman just months after they registered their marriage in 2005. By then his affair was a year old, meaning the third party, a woman many years younger, had already been in the picture when the couple exchanged vows.

The 35-year-old's suspicions were aroused when her husband began having surreptitious phone conversations. When she confronted him, he confessed to the affair.

'Given my strong personality, he and I both thought that I would slap him and go off. But in fact, I broke down and cried,' she recalls. She excused his infidelity because he was two years younger and had not dated other women before her.

She says: 'When you are somebody's first, you realise he hasn't gone out with other girls... I won't say he's a bad guy, just that sometimes people get sidetracked.'

What made his transgression more 'tolerable' was that he said he had genuine feelings for the other woman. 'He's not the kind of guy who would try to cheat girls into a relationship to bed them,' she says.

She met his mistress to put a stop to the affair. A few years later, she forgave him for another slip-up: He was caught chatting up girls on the Internet.

With their relationship on the mend, the couple now have a two-year-old son.

Though Lisa is calm when recounting her tale, there is an air of resignation about her. She says: 'Affairs are so common now that marriage is a certificate that holds no meaning. I love him but what is holding us together is my son.'

When it comes to adultery, men and women get angry and hurt to the 'same intensity', says marriage counsellor Benny Bong. 'The way in which men try to express this intensity is often to destroy the marriage. Women are equally hurt but what often dominates their thinking is how to preserve the marriage and keep the family together.'

Raffles Hospital psychologist Danny Ng says men find it harder to recover from their spouses' adultery because they feel they have 'lost face'.

'For men, it is a matter of pride, territory and possession. They often think 'she is mine'. It's a sad thing but there are double standards - what a male can do, a female cannot.'

Family lawyer Anamah Tan points out that women have different priorities. She says: 'In the cases that I come across, women usually have softer natures and they forgive their husbands. So long as the husband is good and generous to the family, many wives close one eye.'

Frances, a 37-year-old clerk, is still with her husband of 11 years though he has cheated on her twice. Both were affairs with someone from his workplace and she found out after coming across 'incriminating e-mail'.

'Men are the weaker sex,' says the mother-of-three drily, adding that her husband strayed due to 'work stress'.

She says that when men are unfaithful, they are often at low points in their lives, racked with guilt from their betrayal. 'Instead of leaving him, I should support him.'

Her Catholic faith played a large part in reconciliation. She says: 'I was reminded of our vow that marriage is for a lifetime through good times and bad.

'Love is not just about feelings. It's a commitment that you make with someone and if it is only true and real in good times, then that's not true love.'

She makes it a point to show that she trusts her husband and refrains from checking up on him or questioning him unnecessarily. 'If it happens again, it would kill me,' she says. 'But I told him I would just have to go through all this again as we are for life.'

Apart from being more open to working things out, women also stay on for much more pragmatic reasons. For those with children, there is the desire to preserve the family nucleus.

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What Singapore women say about cheating hearts