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Comments
The thing I would refocus on now is figuring out how to keep her attraction level high in the long term. You're in the right place to figure that out. Did you ever figure out what went wrong in your marriage? Have you read the mmsl primer?
@scarlet - castigate? I'm just pointing out her actions that would bother me. You're obviously comfortable to give the advice to go full steam ahead, but I'm not as understanding of the lies.
You are getting a lot of good advice here from people who give really good advice, so I hesitate to say this... but if I understand the timeline correctly, I think I would eject from this relationship.
You said:
"It came a point where I would get up and leave after she rejected me and having gone though what I had, I kinda suspected something and I asked flat out front if there was another man in the picture. She denied it."
If you have evidence that the other dude was still in the picture when this conversation happened, then you have evidence that your GF will be dishonest when she is feeling conflicted and trapped. That is a red flag to me. Even if you guys weren't in a committed relationship at the time, you were in a relationship where honesty was a reasonable expectation.
It sounds like maybe the conversation happened as the relationship with the other man was unraveling, but then her journal said they gave it another try later. I would get a very clear understanding of the timeline and circumstances.
At the very least, I would not make a decision about marrying her or not at this time. I typically recommend people date for two years before making a decision about marriage. I think in this case I would double that timeframe due to this issue.
"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy, if not, you'll become a philosopher." -Socrates
Progress not perfection.
@icaerus The honesty issue is the killer here. You clearly feel comfortable forgiving/living with everything else and maintaining your captain/alpha status. You caught her being dishonest, and then covering up her big lie with another half-truth. If you can't find a way to put that totally behind you and let that go, then you're not going to be able to sustain a marriage with her, because it is always going to come back to whether you can trust her.
Trust in a relationship is like a car - it can survive the minor dings and scratches of a few little white lies just fine, but when the framework is bent or broken, even if the patience is there for a major repair, it will never be the same again. If you can live with that, you're ready to be married to this person.
If you can't let it go, then definitely let her go. But it sounds like you want this relationship to work, and with good reason. Ultimately, it's not reasonable to hold someone to LTR standards when they're not in an LTR. If she had this fling *after* you had the exclusivity talk, that would be a whole different ballgame. As it is, this supposed "big lie" is, IMO, no bigger than when women lie about their number of partners. They're not trying to betray their current partner when they do this - they're just trying to protect themselves from embarrassment.
@Scarlet : Somehow what you wrote is exactly what I needed to hear. After time has passed I've gotten to know her a lot better. And judging from what I know now, looking back it really seems like she lied in order to save a huge amount of face, to protect herself from shame and judgment. Is it right? Probably not. Is it understandable? At least I now think it is.
@Lisa: Judging by how she responds to me while having sex, and of course by my own experience, our sex life is great ;-)
As someone on the lied to end of an affair, I'm pretty hard line on stuff that appears like it would lead to it.
But I also get pretty torqued when someone tries to holdme to a standard they clearly don't follow, and the OP's admission that during the time this "affair" was going on he would have hit some strange if he'd had the chance negates all the handwringing. It is a fact that some people of either gender get bent out of shape about stuff that happened before they were even in the picture. Non-exclusive dating means ElTHER party is free to pursue other options. But good manners says you don't flaunt it.
When plate-spinning transitions to exclusive dating, you don't suddenly get permission to mine the plate days for things to get angry over.
Remember to play!
Do the right thing, whether anyone is watching or not.
Be married, until you are not.
Email address: angeline.greenwood@att.net
@Angeline ; This might seem like I'm splitting hairs, but I think it is important: seeing (and even having sex with) other people while they were dating but before they were exclusive is not the issue, as I see it. The issue is that when she was seeing somebody else, it was effecting her and the OP's sex life together, he was trying to figure out what was going on, asked her if there was somebody else in the picture, and she lied to him about it. To me that is a different issue from the one you are pointing out above... not exclusivity, but honesty.
"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy, if not, you'll become a philosopher." -Socrates
But he didn't have any right to that information.
ETA: Switch the genders, what would we be advising him if she went all ballistic over someone else he dated / slept with in the early dating period, when he had not offered or requested exclusivity? We'd be telling him to get the heck out of Bunny Boiler-Ville.
@Monkeys_Uncle said:
Remember to play!
Do the right thing, whether anyone is watching or not.
Be married, until you are not.
Email address: angeline.greenwood@att.net
@Angeline Yes, if OP is outraged that she was seeing and having sex with someone else, he needs to let that go because he admits they weren't exclusive and he would have been interested in doing the same during that time frame. But if he has bothered by the fact that she affirmatively lied about her plate spinning, then that's a different situation.
@The_Dude : I think so too. Yes, I've figured out what went wrong on my side at least. There are some things my ex-wife did that I cannot to this day begin to comprehend, but at least I understand now my share of responsibility in the failure of my marriage. Basically I became the biggest beta supplicating schlob you can think of. I was not even close to leading my family, and for that I paid dearly. Yes, I have read the primer. It was, along with "No more Mr. Nice guy", the two first books that opened my eyes and made me swallow the RP.
Now my girlfriend says that one of the things she finds most attractive in me is that I stand up to her and not give in to her BS just to appease her ;-)
Yes the lie in December is a pain. But if she had told you the truth she wouldn't be your girl. The world isn't always nice and clean.
I have to disagree. Maybe in a one-night stand situation that information would be inconsequential. But when you are having sex with somebody regularly, going on dates, building a relationship with them, you have a right to know if they are fucking somebody else. You just don't have a right to make them stop doing it."My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy, if not, you'll become a philosopher." -Socrates
The reality of modern dating is that you don't have any claims on another person's dating/sexual life unless you are offering an exclusive commitment. My advice to anyone who is getting demands of exclusivity without any reciprocal offering is to Next them.
Remember to play!
Do the right thing, whether anyone is watching or not.
Be married, until you are not.
Email address: angeline.greenwood@att.net
Again, the question isn't about who slept with who and when, it is about lying. If a girl come here saying her now boyfriend outright lied to her about spinning other plates when they were first getting together, I would tell her she has a boyfriend who has a history of lying to her, and she should consider that carefully when she thinks about building a marriage with him.
"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy, if not, you'll become a philosopher." -Socrates
We should probably split this out into its own Thread. @Serenity, could you please send these plate-spinner comments out? And please add your own perspective, because I know we had several conversations about it.
The reality is, you won't get a straight answer either way. They should both assume there are other partners. Women will not admit to it because it makes them look slutty, men won't admit to it because they think she'll say no to sex.
Dating is not Marriage Lite.
Remember to play!
Do the right thing, whether anyone is watching or not.
Be married, until you are not.
Email address: angeline.greenwood@att.net
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement.
I would still Next someone who lied to me about fucking other people when asked. There are many good responses when the person you've been casually hooking up with asks if you are having sex with other people. None of them involve lying.
"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy, if not, you'll become a philosopher." -Socrates
Danceny said:
To my recollection, there was the ONE other guy in this story.
Remember to play!
Do the right thing, whether anyone is watching or not.
Be married, until you are not.
Email address: angeline.greenwood@att.net