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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
This guy's going to still be around and causing trouble when he comes back.
mean? If he's a douchebag himself, I have zero clue what his attractiveness and the envy of strangers has to do with anything.
I'm finding myself much in sympathy with her basic frustration: if you're sacrificing something (companionship, help running the house, etc) to support a loved one's goal (trip of a lifetime, education), then you do get invested in whether they seem to be making the most of the opportunity. These two guys could get drunk and look at boobies in a local bar, no Unimog or 4 month absence or huge pile of money required.
I mean, my baseline is that when you say you'll do something for your partner you then try to make it work with the best will you can, no sulking. It's his trip to render as a series of debaucheries with the only culture the accent on the nearby drunks, and she'll be happier if she can be zen about it. But I get why that gets a little hard to do in practice.
A better resolution to this would be for her to explain that this wasn't what she signed on for, even second-hand, and she'll trust him to act like he would back at home if he'd man the hell up and actually say no to his friend once in a while and oh yeah, actually act like he would back at home.
Seriously, no one owns anyone else. Not even in those dominant-submissive relationships that Savage loves to write about. At the very least, you can legitimately hope that he doesn't bring you a microbial gift, but that would require having the condom talk, which would send your lack of insecurity (God, don't ya just love Seattle?) through the roof.
How about doing it differently and owning up to your insecurity? You don't need to abase yourself. Just say something like, "Look, stud, as long as you get too drunk to perform in the red light district, it's all good." Say it with a smile, and he'll get the point. And then remember: No one owns anyone else.
The quickest way to get him interested in opening one of those doors is to make him feel like he's being backed into a corner and has nothing left to lose by saying, "Hell, if she thinks I'm doing it anyway, I might as well."
It sounds like he didn't give a lot of details on the trip, and despite the presence of the womanizing bastard that arranged the trip, she built it up in her head to be this bromanical trip through Europe and Eurasia. Clearly neither of them are reality checking much. I think he knew that it was going to be a global pub crawl, and I think deep down in her heart, she knew too. What she's looking for is a way to come out smelling like roses AND not deal with this.
But honestly, to me, she sounds like one of those girls that needs to have a guy that slavers at her feet and worships her and is lucky to have her, blah blah blah, and this dude -- he's the guy she dates to have that token 'not-doormat' notch in the belt and some stories where she doesn't sound like a total princess.
Dump him, finish taking care of the dog and leave his home and life in better shape than when you found it, but get out of there and start being honest with yourself about what sort of boy really fulfills you.
In spite of the fact that the LW earns points for having the bisexual mind set to evaluate men and women by their looks on the same scale, anyone who blathers on about dating anyone, let alone a series of people, "far below me physically," deserves to be put through the Spanking Machine (unless, of course, s/he likes that sort of thing).
If I wanted to offer her comfort, I'd suggest that it's often not the gorgeous ones who are most susceptible, especially in certain areas, but I don't/won't.
@vennominon: I'd suggest that it's often not the gorgeous ones who are most susceptible
The gorgeous ones are susceptible because it's constantly being thrown at their feet. The ugly ones are susceptible because it's not.
What are the rules for her, while he's away? She sounds like someone who should be planning some fun adventures closer to home, stuff she can talk to him about to remind him that she's fun, or not talk to him about, lest she make him insecure.
I figure they'd have been better off just going to Vegas, but it sounds like these people have money to burn.
Yes, it's unfair, unreasonable and just unrealistic to give the guy her blessing on the trip and then to flip out when he doesn't vacation as planned, but I jut don't buy it that the guy thought the trip was going to be any different than it is....if he either presented it as a more cultural voyage or just skimmed on the details, it was because he knew she wouldn't ok the trip, and to rub her nose in it now is just him being a jerk.
I suspect those three week visits are going to be really, really awkward and full of whining (her) and asshattery (him, egged on by his friend). I have doubts the 2nd visit will even happen.
DTMFA.
While many people really enjoy cultural enrichment and thrill seeking, some people don't and just want to go out and drink (and no it's not even remotely the same as the local bar). Wouldn't anyone be annoyed if their partner were badgering them about not spending their vacation the "right way"? Wouldn't she expect him to let her enjoy a similar vacation with one of her girlfriends without being a pain in the ass?
(All of this assumes he's respecting their boundaries with respect to making out with, fondling, boning, etc... other women. If not he's an asshole.)
Also, water finds its own level. Her cheating past having, good liar of a lover's best friend is a complete scuzzball. I think she should contemplate this.
Oh, and it was ~his~ cheating past, not hers.
'Luck.
Versus?
"BooooHooo! My current boyfriend is so good-looking that he could get any woman he wants. I much prefer dating ugly men because they worship me properly and feel 'lucky' to be dating me. Not only that but an ugly boyfriend couldn't stray even if he wanted to, because no one will have him (assuming other women are as shallow as I am)."
OK, "rant over," as they say on the internets.
GLB, listen to Dan and follow his instructions carefully. And stop trying to control HOW your boyfriend has fun (outside of the basic rules about monogamy, etc). And the fact that he's 'wasting cultural opportunities' or something seems like sort of a red-herring, or a confusion on your part (in your brain). You have a legitimate beef about responsibilities at home, I guess, but the things you've mentioned are not really what's bugging you, right? That's another thing, get clear about your feelings, so that you and the boyfriend can better solve your real problems.
As a wise man once said, "That's pride FUCKIN' with you! You gotta fight through that shit!"
Let's start with I was in two relationships with very jealous and abusive guys (verbally and physically) .
Given the benefit of the doubt that her retelling is true and that two men (in a row) were both abusive, which gives her license to complain and then move on to the one super perfect boyfriend (who she just happens to find physically attractive) rings the alarm bells.
Women are always finding ways to disparage former lovers as a way of justifying serial relationships. Men just have them. Women have to prove to the world they would have been loyal if only. So ok, maybe that's society's fault.
However, this type of female character just seems to appear over and over again. So, I'm just going to risk the calumny of Spyenna McVid and her gang of Multilators and speculate.
The problem here is that this woman really, really wants to sleep around and would love to find any excuse whatsoever to break up this relationship. So she's digging and digging to find some flaw in her current boy friend. I doubt if he's the big stud muffin she claims, it's just part of the set up. I also suspect that she is attractive, especially in that way that makes men go wild. Really, I don't believe a word of what she says about her boyfriend, and the poor dude probably is just having some beers and daydreaming about when she'll show up.
If she hasn't found a reason to dump Mr. Nice by then, and does show up in the improbable (for her) situation of flying all the way to Kathmandu just to have sex with some guy whose equivalent she can find on the street, she'll find a way to turn her visit into a 3-some with the other guy or else just run away with him entirely. (She's already noticed his testosterone levels...the rest will follow.)
What we are dealing with here is the classic Female Psychopath. She'll manipulate every situation to become the victim, no matter how many times she's the cause of the problem.
Uh?
And, what is a "Spyenna McVid?" I won't even speculate what you mean by "multilator" (sp). And, damn, you really think she wants to cheat on this totally-innocent "nice guy"? And and AND, she wants to cheat with the boyfriend's friend that she dislikes!? All she's thinking about is her boyfriend, dumbass. I don't know whether to laugh (hysterically, of course) or run away.
Holy shit, I thought *I* was harsh. GLB, this is SLOG's mentally-disturbed side-thorn, who is buttsore all the time because women are properly creeped out by his extreme creepiness. PLEASE ignore.
As long as he takes the same vacation she would have.
And holding down the fort was fine until he wasn't taking the vacation he was supposed to. Then "taking care of both of our lives and our dogs" is an issue. Really? Writing a check for the phone and cable bills plus feeding the dog twice a day is such a huge burden? I leave my wife with two kids, a dog, a job, and household issues in a moose-infested forest for one to two weeks at a time. She does the same to me when she takes a trip. Cause we're cool with that. But I had to accept that she'd do little but rowing practices while she was gone and she needed to grasp my desire for long, reflective road trips.
@38/"Supreme Ruler", the level of your assholery regarding women continues to astonish, and bore.
The snark against the "slutty" Czechs, Slovakians, Russians, etc: There is so much poverty prostitution in Central and Eastern Europe. And human trafficking. A lot of these women will either be Czech and Slovakian Roma who have been marginalised after the Iron curtain came down or have been "imported" from poorer countries, such as Albania or Moldova, often having been lied to about the jobs they'd have. Their main customers will be sex tourists from Germany, Austria, and other Western countries.
That would have been something friends of mine from highschool or university could have done after graduation. It doesn't need to be expensive, not more so than Interrail at least.
The Unimog is probably Diesel-powered which is much cheaper than gas, and in Eastern Europe fuel will be comparatively cheap (compared to Western Europe, not necessarily to the US). The Unimog is big enough so that two people can easily sleep in it, saving on hotel/ hostel rooms.
Food and drink-wise, Prague will probably be their most expensive stop.
If I went on this road trip (and I have considered going by train to Taschkent, so a similar route), I would visit very few museums and touristy spots. And I certainly would not go hiking or mountaineering. I'd walk through the cities and towns, including the seedier and poorer parts. I'd stop at markets, cafés, pubs, bakeries, bistros, and sample the local specialties, including beer, wine, and spirits. I'd probably go to bed drunk every night. Still, I think I'd get closer to the culture of each place by doing it this way than by going to the state opera or the national museum.
My expectations on such a trip seem to be closer in line with the bf's than with GLB's.
Anyway, anyone going in that general direction should read Anne Applebaum's "Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe". Just thinking of that book makes me want to get on the next train to Warsaw.
It may be optimistic of me to assume that I shall have at least one more opportunity during the month to cross-examine a LW over a declaration of a partner's monosexuality, but this just wasn't the right letter for it. Besides, I'm more or less waiting for a BS, BL or BG relationship to trot it out the first time, preferably close to halfway through the month.
I lived next door to a young couple some years back and you remind me of the hot little blonde who was the female half: very likely to tag her BF's friends as "misogynistic" or "hostile" if they wouldn't put up with her attempts to turn him into her obedient doormat.
The only strategy for her is to appear cool and relatively uninterested, and to make sure she is having as much fun on her own as possible. When he gets back there may be things to sort out, but if she carries on the way she's going, there will be no relationship left by the end of the trip.
I don't know, even bringing this up as a "need" makes you sound incredibly douchey, so there's a flaw in your logic.
IME experience bro-type guys hang onto their crass buddies much tighter when their GFs are judmental and controlling. Guys with mellow GFs tend to tire of such types faster. YMMV
Also, using an ad hominem and claiming it exposes a flaw in logic is a little ironic to say the least.
Or maybe she edited out the preface "I know complaining about flying to Europe twice in one summer makes me sound like an entitled douche-fuck, but..." for brevity.
If someone is going to cheat on you, they are going to do it no matter what location they are in. If you can't trust him to go to Prague, you can't trust him to go to Bowling Green, Kentucky. You guys probably should have broken up before he left. Sorry, but you do sound very insecure (which maybe you have a right to be since your boyfriend is a 'very good liar') I wouldn't go visit him. Let him have his Bro-Trip. You can't stop it or control what goes on. Do some fun stuff on your own while he's gone.
Unless you reassess your position on absolute monogamy, those are really your only choices.
True. The problem is, some folks think that that they're like mobile phone companies in that they can impose "agreements" unilaterally at a later date, to the utterly impotent anger of the other party. "No babe, I NEVER agreed and DON'T agree to that" is one of the most valuable phrases in relationships. Everyone should use it more often.
I hope they remember that feeling the next time they're asked their opinions on, oh, say, a woman's right to breastfeed in public, or to walk down the street without being catcalled, or to choose when to have a baby or access birth control....
But really, your right to ogle hookers is so much more important.
Wow. I fucking hate this Hierarchy of Attractiveness bullshit. There's no objective scale of attractiveness - your attractiveness can only be measured by another person, and every person is going to rate it differently. Some people will be attractive to more people than others, but that doesn't make them inherently more attractive, as there's no way to compare or trade ratings. There are plenty of people who conform to conventional ideas of beauty but do absolutely nothing for me, and discarding this imaginary ladder was one of the smartest things I've ever done. You haven't dated guys that were far below you physically. You're too shallow to not care about appearance, so you've either dated guys you were not physically attracted to because you wanted some kind of control or emotional distance, or you've dated guys you were physically attracted to but won't admit it because they didn't fit conventional standards and you're too embarrassed to admit it (see: chubby chasers). Or you've changed the story after the fact to fit a more convenient narrative. In none of those cases were the guys "far below you".
They all sound like douchebags to me. That first three-week visit is going to be interminable.
(* yes, I know perfectly well that certain things like symmetry and body mass index can be measured - but none of those things explain why I personally find Julia Roberts unappealing.)
Funny thing is, he's probably figuring that he'll be up front about the revelry rather than sneak around and pretend to have all four cheeks sucked in, Seattle style, and thereby be a lying douchebag. And instead of just saying to him, one way or another, "Look, are you screwing around?" or "Hey, have fun but I'm hoping you're not getting any on the side" -- maybe not like that, but more artfully -- she goes through this oh-so-typical neo-Californian and now hipster Seattle crap about not being exactly what she is: Scared to death that her stud might want to spread his seed.
I say she's got to (using a new jargon phrase that I hate) "own her feelings" about it all. Bitch, you can lie to everyone else, but not to yourself. Tell yourself the truth, which is that you can't control the dude, but that gentle persuasion in the form of a well-crafted quip might help.
And her emphasis on his looks is just pathetic, not to mention wrong. Plenty of less than stunning men get laid. Just look at China and India, for God's sakes. They pop out kids like there's no tomorrow, but the hotness factor is lacking on both sides of the gender barrier. (To those who will now call me racist: See if I give a shit. Hell, the Japanese -- both male and female -- are batshit crazy for big American dicks and square-jawed men, so you can add them to the list, except that their birthrate has collapsed.) Anyhow, a 7-inch tongue, the ability to breathe through your ears, and to at least act as if you have any interest in what she's saying is just an important as looking like Brad Pitt.
But anyway, she needs to understand that yes, she's insecure as all get-out, and that no, she can't control him, regardless of what "agreement" she deludes herself into thinking they might have. And this objection to him getting drunk and looking around in the red light district? Let's just call it Chapter 3,987 of a book that'll never be finished, called Seattle: The Most Uptight, Puritanical City in America
Tell your guy you'll both get STD tests and pass 'em before banging when he gets back.
Use the money you're spending to visit HIM on HIS trip to take a badass chickietrip of your own somewhere fun instead with some badly influential friends and let him worry about you fucking a hot Jean-Marc or Amadou or Leon here and there, if he even gives a shit.
Sitting at home, taking care of everything while he gets to debauch around every new town like you're some little Miss Martyr in her tower. BORING. Get you some upper-hand, betch. You won't care if Tatiana is tasting his testes when Ramon is going down on you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYYTLJ8YH…
If I were an optimist, I'd perhaps guess that most people would prefer not to be in a relationship so adversarial as to use Ramon and Tatiana as counters to each other, but the last thing anyone would ever call me is an optimist.
A fair trial where we will determine, using the latest scientific methods, whether she weighs the same as a duck.
I'd feel sorry for you, LW, but you sound like a shallow twat yourself--frankly, you're getting what you deserve.
Despite it being an easy 50-hour drive from Seattle, people think getting to the western-most part of the western hemisphere's road system means something. The only thing it means is that you drove for thousands of miles. In a Hummer, a Unimog or a Prius. Interestingly to me is that all uber-capable off-road vehicles in the very well-paved local parking lots are German and Dutch. Which SCREAMS dom-sub issues to me. The Germans rather notoriously lost the last big war and now (as a result, I believe) have autobahns with no speed limits. The Dutch lost the last war even before the Germans did. So I see it a compensation mechanism - lose a war: pretend a road trip is an expedition. Much like male height is inversely proportional to vehicle height and penis size is inversely proportional to vehicle horsepower.
The LW's case is more complicated. Just on the basis of procuring the Unimog, I'd saw DTFMA to anyone dating the friend. That the BF went along for the trip is not as damning. The BF is a bit of low-life. Can the LW accept that?
The LW is insecure and controlling. Can the BF accept that?
I stand by my comment @74, which, by the way, is a practical way for her to overcome her awful, horrible, no-good insecurity issues.
You guys, for some reason (privilege? yup), want her to suffer and not find a way to deal with this in a healthy manner, despite her setting aside of her own feelings and priorities so peterpecker can drink his way through his sex tour. Seriously, some ugly shit coming outta y'all towards an LW who is actively helping her SO to take a 4 month trip and is dealing with common long distance relationship issues. A lot of you mention that she cannot control him, so she deserves some weird backwards-ass trial in the misogynist square. Yeah, no.
She can't control him, but she can control HERSELF, thus: take your own trip, woman! If you can't stop thinking that he's taking advantage of your care and your help by dicking it around Europe, which, giving the cock the benefit of the doubt, he may not be doing, the only way not to go crazy is to assume his is and then do the same or whatever it is that would keep you two on an equal ground. Fulfill yourself and balance the scales by having fun and stop focusing on him. PLEASE, stop focusing on him. He is definitely not focused on you, nor will he be for FOUR FRIKKIN' MONTHS, which will only make your insecurities and resentments worse. Focus on you.
To all you dickwadsocks whinging on and boringly on about your odd-nut personal projections: what would you say to her that is actually helpful and not demeaning or simply making fun of her for caring about her bf and their relationship or telling her "to be honest with herself"? What would YOU do if you were in her position? This is, after all, an ADVICE column. Dispense some sense, if you have any. FFS
She should dump him. This is not a healthy relationship. This is a relationship where she is being walked on because she has given her boyfriend implicit permission to do so. They should break up for their own mutual happiness.