It all happened when a friend and I were waiting for the pool table at a pub and this guy at the table started talking to us about relationships and how it is impossible for men to stay faithful.
As he was lining up his shot, he said: "You want to know my theory on this It's like this see: In prehistoric times, people had to run away from predators all the time -- like sabre tooth tigers. And if women were pregnant all the time, they wouldn't be able to run very fast.
"So God made women with very low sex drive so that they wouldn't get pregnant too often. But if the men were like this as well, the human population would dwindle. So men were made to have high sex drives -- and it remains till today."
The guy, who was a manager in a large consulting firm, made his shot, turned around and smiled. "OK, OK," he said. "Here's the real reason. And it's really simple -- men marry for looks, and women marry for love. And when you go for looks it's really difficult to resist temptation.
"I should know, I speak from experience. When I went to school overseas, I had a girlfriend here. And you know, when you're alone there, you get lonely, and things happen."
And he said he could not guarantee that he would do anything different if he found himself in the same position after he gets married. And he expects whoever marries him to, well, accept it.
Wow. Which time warp and cave did he get caught in. I asked a sales engineer friend, Timothy, a few days later.
"Can you believe this guy? Now I'm supposed to think that men are poor weak creatures who really mean well but can't control their biology" I said.
Tim laughed and told me the man probably thought he was being cool.
"Well, guys do fool around leh," he said. "But there are faithful ones too lah -- you want someone faithful? Just find one square- looking guy lah."
Yeah right. Square? I used to think that Prince Charles, the ultimate parallelogram, was a safe bet. But now it is public knowledge that his extra curricular affairs, oops, I mean, activities, included night-time romps in the mud -- and not with his wife either.
Maybe all those cliches and easy excuses are true after all. You know, the usual list: Men separate the physical from the emotional, women can't, so men can actually sleep with other women without being unfaithful to their wife/girlfriend/whatever. Successful men have so many women hurling themselves in their paths that to say no would be, well, uncharitable. Everybody does it, so what's wrong? Men who are unfaithful really, really cannot help themselves.
"Remember that line in the movie City Slickers?" a 31-year-old male friend asked.
"There's this part where Billy Crystal leaves his wife at home and goes to this ranch for a vacation. And this other guy is egging him on to have an affair. When Crystal hesitates, his friend says something like `women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place."
A fortysomething colleague of mine told me that out of six of his close, married male friends, four have had affairs.
"But they're happily married anyway -- so who are we to say anything else?"
I say, I'd like to know their wives' definition of "happy".
There is also a whole slew of scholarly research, including a recent cover story in Time magazine that said yes, it is in our genes: males, animal and human, have a vested interest in spreading their seed far and wide, and are thus predisposed to having many partners.
Females, on the other hand, did better to look for a strong male to provide security for their offspring, thus it did them more good to be faithful.
Another study said that men, if they could have their way, would sequester all the attractive women and keep them for themselves.
Hey, there's a concept -- for my birthday I'd like to have a battalion of straight men who look like Harrison Ford, Pierce Brosnan (but with a better bod), Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Winston Chao, John Lone and Keanu Reeves holed up in some East Coast condo for my women friends and I -- and we'd expect our husbands and boyfriends to well, accept it.
"Aiyah OK, lah. It's actually mind over matter lah," said Timothy, finally. I mean, this is from a guy who is cute, sweet, has really nice biceps and pecs and until recently, said he wanted to, in his words, "play the field".
Then he met this women when he took his car to the mechanic one day and slowly, he started evolving into something that started to look like a SNAG -- a Sensitive New Age Man.
And I rang up a married friend of mine, Victor, 31, married for three years to a woman he had dated for five years.
"Well, I uh ... eh, can I talk to you some other time? My wife's in the room," he said with a sheepish laugh before he finally relented.
"All right. I'll tell you. I have married friends who fool around, and I go out to pubs and to karaoke lounges with them, and yes, I still socialise with women. I talk to them, I go out with women friends -- but I draw the line at sleeping around.
"I guess you have to keep your marriage fresh, do things together, do different things -- and it takes both sides to make it work. But that's a whole other story. And hey, besides, it's not like married women these days don't have their share of fun as well."
A 28-year-old TV producer friend, who is known to have his share of female company, agreed very quickly. "Hey, this stuff's not just restricted to men you know -- although men do get a large share of the blame. You know, we're human. We want variety.
"But when I get married, I intend to remain faithful. I mean, I've had relationships before where I've been tempted to sleep with someone else, but I never acted on it."
So maybe it is possible to reverse centuries of biological programming: I know I have older men friends who have been married a long time who are good-looking, successful -- and faithful.
Maybe you can say, chill out, this is almost the 21st century, where people are not supposed to be puritanical about such things anymore.
Or maybe you can use the caveman/sabre-tooth tiger argument and say men are just slightly more evolved versions of apes who really cannot help their behaviour.
Well, we don't have sabre-tooth tigers running around anymore. We now wear clothes and walk with two legs instead of four. But we still have the power to hurt the people who love us by doing really dumb things. Then again, we also have these things called willpower and discipline.
And in the end, it is not just our wives or husbands we have to sleep with at night. It is ourselves -- and this sometimes inconvenient, irritating thing called a conscience.