Comments

1
Wow, I'd really like to see a follow-up on this one. Wonder how things worked out.
2
Remember how shit the job market was in April 2010? I graduated around then and remember it well.
3
He dug through her emails. Fuck that guy.
4
I sort of agree with #3 but Dan is right: she should have been honest. But my very first take on this letter is: this is a fake. It is sooo very pat, so very (really) funny in its way, that I don't believe it is real.
5
@4: having seen two minor variations of this story play out in real life, I find it believable.
6
@3: Maybe he wanted to go to eTrade and it suddenly started autocorrecting to escortservices.com, maybe she started getting drunk letch calls from her clients at 5am, they're already over. I'm sure he was checking her emails, but unreliable narrator as to the signs she was giving him up until that point.
7
@6 - Maybe they're one of those awful couples who use a joint email account, and she was stupid enough to use that account to operate her sex business.
8
@7 I was one of those awful couples and you are right, it was stupid. And awful. If someone wants an joint account, dtmfa.
9
Whoops, I meant @ 6. MacCrocodile. Don't drink and post.
10
Oh for fucks sake, it is too early to have had this much wine.
11
brother
12
@7/8: Oh god, people do that? Are they the sort who coblog and say Dear Husband / Dear Wifey?
13
Some do. Never said Dear Husband and certainly never heard Dear Anything. It was sorta like "We are so close why would you need your own account? You would never hide anything from me right? We share everything right? So why would you need your own anything?"
14
Eeeek. Condolences.
15
Thanks. It's ok, all in the past now. I learned. Hope things turned out as well for North as they did for me.
16
@2,

I'm sure it was. That said, they were together for *two years* at that point. If you've been in a serious relationship for two years and prostituting yourself is looking like a better option than asking your partner for financial help, maybe it's time to break up.
17
A sex worker's romantic partners have a right to know about the sex work—and consent to it—because it places them not only at heightened risk of STIs, but also at heightened risk of someone else fucking their romantic partner... up with which they may not want to put.
18
Dear Dan,

My boyfriend of two years just broke up with me because about one year in, I fucked someone else. I say it was okay, because it was only for the cash. Is there any way of making this okay with him?

signed,
Captain Clueless

There, Letter Writer, fixed it for you.
19
@17 You can't and shouldn't put "up" before "put" here. It's overcorrection because "up" is not a preposition, it's a particle.
20
Well, it's always a little tough to explain to your parents that you married a prostitute
21
"Remember how shit the job market was in April 2010? I graduated around then and remember it"

Did you suck dicks to pay rent?
22
@19: That wooshing sound was the joke going over your head.
23
@22 I thought jokes are supposed to be like...funny?
24
It's time to put the proscription against ending sentences with a preposition to bed, anyway. It was a silly rule made up by 19th century philologists with inferiority complexes anxious to make English more like Latin. In Latin, it's impossible to end a sentence with a preposition, because of the way word order functions. So they decided we shouldn't do it, either. Silly.
25
Gotta let a ho be a ho.....
26
@23 The over-correction of "up with which I will not put" is a classic exaggeration of the pretzels people will twist their sentences into in order to avoid getting flagged down by the grammar police. It goes back at least to the 1940's. The story goes that some obnoxious proofreader marked a sentence because it ended in a preposition, and the original author replied that the markup was "ridiculous pedantry, up with which I will not put."

There's also the shitkicker who got into Harvard:
"Where's the library at?"
*Sniff.* "Here at Harvard, we do not end a sentence in a preposition."
"Okay. Where's the library at, asshole?"

P.S. Also, "up" is not the preposition in question. The preposition is "with." Imagine how the sentence would be phrased without the correction: "This is something I will not put up with."

P.P.S. There's actually no grammatical rule against ending a phrase with a preposition. Should the resulting sentence create ambiguity in the relationships between various phrases (especially when spoken aloud), it is merely advised against. ;)
27
"You can't and shouldn't put "up" before "put" here."

For $100, this prostitute can.
28
SOMETHING WITH WHICH THEY MAY NOT WANT PUT UP. There.
29
Prepositions at the ends of sentences are only "wrong" when they're redundant--e.g., "Where's my coat at?" when "Where's my coat?" will do just fine. "Something I will not put up with" is only considered wrong by pedants who are more intent on being "right" in the eyes of white male prescriptivists than on thinking about what actually makes sense for a Germanic language.

Regarding the LW, I agree with Dan--(s)he makes sex workers look pretty bad.
30
@21: The sex work was some of the lesser weird of the letter.
31
@18: It should be "My boyfriend of two years just broke up with me because about one year in, I started fucking other people, and kept doing it."

He apparently didn't find out about that one time she fucked some other dude, he found out that she was answering ads, putting up ads, and sending photos. The boyfriend didn't find out about history, he found out stuff she was doing right then.

CPOS wants to make it about sex worker stigma, rather than about CPOSness.
32
This is what DTMFA looks like from the other side.
33

Re: @19's grammar -

"… also at heightened risk of someone else fucking their romantic partner UP …"

There is that risk too, isn't there… at least that's how I read the tortured grammar.

34
@26 Imagine how the sentence would be phrased without the correction: "This is something I will not put up with."

Er, that above was an example of correct sentence I was given in English class. So it's not correct ? Why ?
35
All particles aside, just wanna wish Michael Franti a happy happy birthday for 21st.. And thank him , and Spearhead for the great music at Byron Bay, Australia's Bluesfest..
36
Or should it be, Byron Bay, Australias' Bluesfest.. Or perhaps
Bluesfest, Byron Bay, Australia..
37
Dan has the right emphasis: If nothing you do is your fault yet, then you are too young to get married. Whether you're 17 or 33.
38
Any significant other who violates your personal private space, such as hacking into your e-mail account without your permission is an asshole and not worth your time.

So is any significant other who has sex with others without informing your partners; so that they can make knowledgeable decisions about their own health.

In the future, if you find yourself in a relationship progressing to the point wherein either of you may consider yourself a significant other, and you cannot find it in you to act as an adult -- which entails informing him you are not sexually exclusive, which also entails mentioning "sex" specifically as opposed to "dating" other people -- the half-assed asshole way to inform him is to tell him in a sarcastic tone. As in say it so he thinks it must be some sort of a joke.

This effectively puts the ball in his court and would require him to corner you on the subject and make him ask, specifically, if you are seriously fucking other people.

Which is a really shitty thing to do, but it's better than leaving him in the dark. Perhaps the reason the LW feels like a piece of shit isn't due to the escorting, but rather the fact that she isn't treating him like someone she loves. Loving a person means treating them with respect, and in a lot of ways she is treating her clients with more respect than the person she claims to love.

The act of escorting itself, is not wrong, it's escorting behind your significant other's back that is fucked up. I've had a couple of close friends who were "escorts" at one point or another, and the ones who got out of it, didn't stop because escorting made them feel dirty; they quit because they had a hard time dealing with asshole men who didn't respect women.

Being a sex worker does not have to include catering to degrading dickheads, nor does it mean you need to treat someone you care about in a dickheaded degrading way.


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