Can a strong woman quash a man’s womanising ways? Or is it a case of once a womaniser always a womaniser?
While this is a question often asked, pondered, tested and fretted over, the recent spate of news stories involving infamous womanisers proves that, most of the time, this simply can't be done.
As infamous womaniser Hugh Grant so eloquently told Newsnight the other night; men are simply "naughty by nature". Oh, and by his reckoning, famous womanisers such as himself, should be left alone by the press if they do indeed do the dirty.
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Either way the question remains: where should women - who are ensconced in relationships with womanisers - draw the line?
Most recently this question was posed to the wife of the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who just three weeks ago was tipped to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy as the President of France.
Yet all hopes were quashed as he was charged with sexual assault on a hotel maid in New York. His wife, Anne Sinclair, has stood vehemently by her man. So is she living in denial? Brushing it off? Being the good wife? Or simply accepting the fact that men will be men? Who knows.
Most fascinating to me is why the heck women would choose to marry a well-known womaniser in the first place.
Take Maria Shriver, who was apparently well aware of Arnold Schwarzenegger's gargantuan sexual appetite before she married him. True to her marital vows, she stood by his side to brave the sexual storm that began to accumulate during his bid for the 2003 local election.
Yep, despite the fact that, according to The Guardian newspaper, at the time "a long line of women came forward to accuse him of having groped them", Shriver simply brushed it off ... then helped him to victory.
For the next few years, Shriver managed to play the role of the good wife flawlessly, until his womanising ways became too much when she discovered he fathered a love child with a member of their household staff 10 years ago. She'd had no idea and, upon this recent discovery, she finally left him.
Then there's the fascinating case of English comedian Russell Brand. In case you've been living under a rock, Brand is the ex-drug addict, ex-sex addict, ex-womanising cad turned doting husband of pop star Katy Perry. Just a few years back he was bragging about sleeping with 90 women a month to GQ magazine, and now he's living in domestic bliss in a house in the suburbs and talking about starting a family.
So how did this happen? No idea, but the question remains as to why the heck the successful, gorgeous Perry decided to give it a shot with this sort of man in the first place. Obviously her risk has paid off and she has seemingly managed to do what many women could only dream of doing to a womaniser: turn him around and "shut off his wild-oats urges". Or at least that's what journalist Craig McLean surmised in a story in Britain's Daily Telegraph.
During a series of interviews with Brand, McLean learnt that the comedian had seriously turned his life around and quotes him as saying: "As much as I wanted to be successful, I wanted to have a partner and a family. There were long periods amid my single life where I'd think, 'It’d be good to have a mate.'"
In writing this column, I deal with a lot of angst harboured by women who fall in love with womanisers. True, often these men can be mightily charming, handsome and romantic, knowing exactly what to say and what emotional buttons to press in order to get the woman hooked.
But when you become ensconced in an actual relationship with such a man, it becomes less flattering and more degrading as he continues to chase skirts, to talk about women in a fashion you wouldn't want to hear come out of the mouth of the father of your kids and to keep you guessing as to what exactly he gets up to in his spare time.
"Where should I draw the line?" the women ask, unsure whether to stick by their man during a storm, or leave promptly once an unsightly discovery is made.
Being the good wife sure has its perks; it doesn't break up a family, makes the man strive to be a better man (hopefully) and enables some sort of normality to resume. But perhaps there are just some indiscretions too painful to forgive. And as in the case of Schwarzenegger and Shriver, sometimes it becomes a case of enough is enough.
True, some blokes can transform. Or at least attempt to try. As Shane Warne writes on his Twitter page, "you cant change the past ... but [you] can put the future right!" At least he's trying ...
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