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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Yes, LW, if you do decide to own up to it, a fruit basket will certainly help soften the blow.
Good-if-not-best guy friends love that shit! :D
There's something about the way you write this that makes me think you're still not particularly concerned about your friend's well-being. Maybe it's the sense that you're only considering owning your behavior to this guy now that there's a chance he might forgive you. It is not this poor schmuck's duty to absolve you of your guilt.
Dan's right: you did something you knew would hurt your friend, and it wasn't the nicest way to go about it. But @seandr has a point too. Jane wasn't owned by either of you. Stop obsessing about this, and let it go.
So here, please accept this lovely assortment of scented bath soaps shaped like sea shells. And I'll proffer my chest, should you want to take a punch at it. But not my face, bro.
So, like, yeah."
Btw, this is the second letter in a two-week period where the guy's idea of making things right is to send a gift basket. WTF? Is this some new trend among the youngs that I am unaware of?
*eyeroll*
But I mainly wanted to respond to nocutename's point @11... now I kind of want some young people to think they have wronged me, because I'm curious what sorts of gift baskets I might get. I want to know what sort of goodies I can get. Does it vary based on how they wronged me? Is there some hierarchy of gift baskets?
I was amused that we spent all this time on the slow arm around the shoulder, then spooning, the valuing of a friendship with Jane that would probably be damaged should they hook up, and theywentdownoneachother but point being there was NO mouth kissing.
Also, the thing where he told his friends about the NO KISSING WITH THE MOUTH (except I'm guessing that was perhaps not actually the focus of the story?) seems rather... young. Does he feel obligated to give them a detailed rundown on every girl he has oral sex with? ("Look, Tommy, you know Jane, so I think it's important that you know that I am now a notch!")
Only to hear "None of us see Jane any more; she left our friend group."
Talk about being let down.
I also was irritated/fascinated with the but we didn't kiss--no, not that. There was no kissing trope. I can only assume that the LW watched Pretty Woman too many times as a child and thinks that kissing is akin to declaring undying, everlasting love, but doing anything else (perhaps up to and including having sex with poop and animals) doesn't really mean anything as long as there's no kissing, hence no emotional engagement. Kisses are magic.
@16: All I can say is if someone wrongs me sexually, I expect there to be chocolate and bacon in my gift basket, and some fuzzy socks.
Mr Savage's footnote might be considered a natural difference when one group takes friends from Pool A and dates from Pool B and the other takes both friends and dates from the same pool. (I do hope Mr Ophian or Mr Alan or Ms Hopkins will provide the - or at least a - bi perspective.) I actually had a friend who intended to pass on his ex to me (more than twenty-five years ago - oof!), but I shan't give the whole story just now.
Belay that W. TW has already been declared @5.
If you're focusing on the basket part of things, you're really missing the point.
As for a bi perspective - I once had a friend (?) who made a move on my (?) boyfriend while I was away for 2 weeks. She told me when I returned that because I had turned her down when she proposed fooling around with me, she had done the next best thing, which was fucking my boyfriend. It wasn't serious, though, and she appeared to expect me to claim him back.
This was back before "WTF" or I'd have responded that way. Problems were 1) she wasn't really interested in me sexually - she was just drunk, 2) she knew it was serious, because she knew I was explicitly monogamous at that stage and planning to "lose my (straight) virginity" to this guy (if virginity is a thing), 3) she was hot for his older brother and had been in bed with him - but they kept their pants on, etc. etc. etc. This is the kind of craziness you sometimes end up with when you're bi, and someone else who isn't bi (and is a hot mess) is trying to keep up ;)
Christ... that's my most-hated grammatical mistake, which, btw, Dan makes ALL the time.
" Suck on This"..
Or, just leave it all where it's at. In the past.
Sort of like DADT openness: if you have that, and then screw around with your partner's friend or sibling--who might have been qualified by all the other standards for acceptable partners, but fails on the one about their not noticing and having to deal with it--you violated the DADT part of the agreement.
*in --> now, not in the past
**relationship --> something mutual, e.g. regular sex partners (even if they're not on exactly the same page about where they want it to go), not an unrequited crush
That's more or less how it works in the sex workers business (at least, over here). "Kissing" means "intimacy" and for many sex workers kissing their clients (as in, "tongue" or "French" kissing) is off limits.
Then there are sex workers who advertise with "tongue kissing" as one of their services but more often than not that turns out to mean some kind of non-responsive mechanical "pseudo" kissing.
I think the rule should be: Unless you would be significantly harmed by doing so, refrain from dating anyone it would hurt your friends if you dated. It's rude to hurt your friends for no good reason.
He seems to be trying to prove to Dan and to his friend, should he tell (and maybe to himself), that there was nothing emotional going on, that this wasn't romantic at all.
But I can have an emotional connection and experience without kissing, and I can kiss as a sexual act without feeling romance or love. He's investing a lot of magic in that act of mouth kissing, which tells me that he's very young, fairly inexperienced or worldly, and perhaps pretty immature. For example, I doubt that the assurance that they never kissed on the mouth would do a lot to take the sting out if he told his friend that once he went down on this girl.
e.g. Ann and Bob are dating but not exclusive, Ann is more into Bob than vice versa. Ann's close friend Carrie nails Bob when Ann is out of town. Bob isn't 'owned' but he is emotionally entangled with her good friend and pretending there are no emotions there is unfair.
Or make everyone gay men: if you know your good buddy John will be hurt if you sleep with his not-yet-exclusive but-current partner Bill, you could nail someone else.
Also, this consideration gives you time to process any feelings you might have. I like it when friends ask me if it's ok because I know it's not really right to say, "no", even if I'm feeling that, so it forces me to deal with it internally,
I guess it's a common way to blow off shame and guilt without actually making any changes to self.
Especially in the context of him judgmentally observing that she was "notching her bedposts".
I also wonder at the emotional devolution, where it appears that nowadays people tell their besties everything, no matter how TMI. And observe rules best left to middle-school girls.
For any people, there should be some considerations, including:
- Is your friend over the ex?
- Did the friend or the ex do the dumping?
- Was the ex abusive to your friend?
- How long has it been since the split?
- How serious was the relationship?
It all boils down to: Would your friend be hurt if you dated their ex? If not, there is absolutely no reason to put them off limits.
But it's not for "no good reason".
@45: Might just be the early twenties narcissism coming out (his odd narrative style indicates that age of storytelling), there's always the chance to grow out of it.
I think that's *mostly* true. But there are some gay men I know who think that everyone they've ever dated should be forevermore off limits to everyone else they know -- not just their closest friends but their acquaintances, too. One guy tried to insist that everyone he ever had a one night stand with (and he had a lot of them) was off limits to me -- and I was just a casual bar friend who never socialized with him outside of the bar.
But that's more of the extreme. Most of us recognize that with a smaller percentage of the population available, we can't claim a lifetime "dibs" of people we're no longer involved with.
I might add, though, that in the LW's case, it doesn't sounded like they were exes. They were still in some sort of noncommitted "figuring things out" stage. Her hooking up with a rando wouldn't have been a betrayal. Doing it with a friend while not yet exes might be.
The "no sleeping with exes" rule is situational, of course. I'm generally against the "lifetime dibs" thing. BUT if there's a bitter breakup involved, that's an important factor. If it's a fresh breakup after a long relationship, that's an important factor. If it was a two month fling that ended a week ago -- I'm okay with that.
Yes, but keep in mind that it was only oral and with no kissing. He should use Schedule F to calculate Jane's proportional value depreciation. He may also qualify for an additional oral sex deduction, depending on what "is" is.