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Comments
**headdesk**
If I can't trust my girlfriend to not eat all the M&Ms in my den and not buy more, how can i possibly trust her to honor a BIG promise, like not emptying the joint back account?
"This relationship imploded for other reasons,"
I have a pretty good idea what they were, and it had to do with your sense of logic leaking out your ears like warm jell-o.
What you wanted him to do is pre-emptively set a hard limit on a date with someone else. The practical effect of doing it your way was of you standing behind his left ear and clucking "Nuh-uh-ahhhh! Don't you dare. You promised." Sure, that's going to go over real well with his date. In other words, you were basically preemptively fucking up his evening -- all the while claiming "Look how giving I am, see, you nominally have permission to go all the way." That's pretty manipulative.
Oh and @6: exactly! It's a slippery slope, isnt it? Someone could forget to replace the toilet paper today and tomorrow shit on the living room carpet. You can't trust a non TP replacer. You just never know and you can't be too careful.
YMMV IDK IANAL
It's true. My dog never replaces the toilet paper and she has shit in the living room.
When you don't know what temperature the water might be, you put a toe in before diving. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to swim, it means you're trying to find out if this is somewhere you want to swim.
Just FYI, pickup artists don't seem to fully grasp what a shit test is about, largely due to too narrow a focus. Displaying low commitment isn't always the appropriate response.
You have a date. The date has gone well. You want to kiss the person. They say, "No, I can't kiss you, I didn't clear kissing with my partner beforehand." WTF? If I were this hypothetical "you," I'd conclude that, A, this person is a loser, and B, their partner doesn't really get poly and continuing to date this person is going to be a whole lotta drama from an immature metamour.
So in other words, yes, SFCN, your "rule" is unreasonable. Does your partner have a crystal ball? Does he know exactly how well and in what direction the date will go ahead of time? Can he make unilateral plans about whether the date will want a kiss, a snog, or more? It's easy to say, "No, I won't kiss her," but how about if she initiates the kiss?
If your relationship allows you to date other people, then you have to accept that a "date" might get hot, or not. Telling someone about the date, being safe on the date, then being honest about what happened after the date, are reasonable expectations. Scripting someone else's date is not.
Yea - I see the logic behind your thought process, but better in theory than practice. Sounds like his reaction of cutting off his end was his way of saying that he's putting you first, and no amount of 3rd person sexing is worth more to him than losing you. It's almost as if he went on the dates to make you happy or to keep some kind of evenness because you were as well.
Have you ever tried to kiss a guy, and he said no, then been excited to go out with him again?
Anyways, point is, rejecting a woman's advances is basically impossible without "Old Yeller'ing" her.
And Dan, great job being gentle with her. I cringed reading this because I anticipated such a smack down.
I feel bad for this girl. She's clearly terrified, and not ready. Open relationships have rules, but you can't get so very controlling with them. If you haven't come to terms with him fucking other women, you need to get there first. Get yourself some books and do some hard thinking. Youll still feel anxiety, however. And the only way to get past that is to actually let him fuck other women and have it go well for you. It's like riding a bike. You're really scared, and you'll probably fall off a few times and get banged up (mistakes will be made - that's normal), but then it'll get easier and easier and soon you'll feel silly that you were so very very scared. That is, if you have good communication, emotional resilience, mutual respect, and good self-care. It's ok to not be ready. It's ok to open and then close if you need a break. But please don't expect perfection - people routinely get hurt in the opening up stages and it takes mistakes to figure out what's gonna work. Forgiveness is a huge part of learning to be happy in a relationship. Don't put up with bullshit, but practice forgiving, if he learns and doesn't do it again.
I now live with that woman. She's amazing.
As you say: "Don't expect perfection."
Basically the second part--find someone who wants roughly the same things you want, or look really hard at what aspect of the rules you really care about, and which element of the rule-breaking your partner really cares about; sometimes there's a hidden middle ground. Usually this means thinking through what the goals behind the rules are, which isn't easy.
Yes, people shouldn't agree to rules they can't live with, but it happens all the time because the person accepting the imposed rule doesn't feel able to speak up for what they actually want.
You don't need a crystal ball to say, "If it goes well we'll probably kiss and if it goes really well there may be some groping."
And it's not like it's earth shattering to shut something down at a specific point. Does every date you go on go straight from goodnight kiss to full-on fucking or do you sometimes stop after a kiss and say, "Wow, that was great. I have to get home now but I can't wait to see you again."?
TL, DR: Sometimes we make rules as a means to an end, without consciously noticing what the end really is.
Or better still, when he's heading out the door, tell him to enjoy his night and let it all be his/ the date's decision.
As I understand open relationships, you either in or you out.
In addition, I don't REALLY buy the argument that 'ducking a kiss from an outside partner is totally unreasonable and will be a turn-off to any sensible outside partner!' I think it would absolutely be a turn-off to some, and those people would be poor additional partners for the members of this couple. They'd probably have done better with new partners like clashfan describes above, who recognize predetermined limits as the sign of respected agreements that they are, and respects the pre-existing relationship enough to respect those limits in the moment.
And finally, even if you think the LW's rule is ridiculous, the boyfriend Done Fucked Up. Because, having agreed to this rule, how hard is it to say, "First date... Maybe some kissing, light making out, if things go well. Laters!"
And from experience I know that it can hurt. (To be fair, in my case it was, "Hey, I'm going home with her" after "Nothing will happen today, just coffee." And we didn't even have a rule like that. I just asked what my partner thought would happen and he said, nothing.)
That's exactly what I was thinking. It's a little odd that Dan didn't seem to go into that at all.
Also...she came to him with a problem ("you're not setting limits for yourself and following them on dates, I don't like that") and he came up with a solution ("ok, I won't keep going on dates then") and...she's still upset at him? Sometimes the easiest way for people to follow small, ambiguous rules (or rules they don't understand the reason for) is to set bigger, clearer rules. Overall, I think it'd be better on her to accept the situation as "he figured out a way to keep his promises, by not dating" than to focus on "he broke his promises, twice."
Also, for crying out loud, just because it's easy for *her* to set limits ahead of time doesn't mean it's easy for *him.* People are different -- might be a gender thing, might just be personal differences, but people are different.
And I agree that if I can't trust someone to keep small promises/commitments, I definitely wouldn't be comfortable about bigger ones. Sure, it may look like a slippery slope argument. Maybe it is. I understand it, though. A guy who doesn't have enough self-control to stop himself from kissing someone when he promised he wouldn't probably doesn't have enough self control to stop in the middle of foreplay to put a condom on either, since the latter requires more self-control than the former, in my opinion.
This being said, I think the issue was slightly different. It probably wasn't a lack of self-control but a lack of understanding. I think the ex didn't realise that the discussion they had were binding to the letter sender. He probably saw them as his current state of mind or something. So if he went to the date with no expectations (which is good, it avoids disappointments or entitlement) he probably said he didn't think anything at all would happen. He probably saw it as "well, the default is nothing, so if I'm not absolutely sure something will happen, I'll say nothing will" while she saw it as "the default is everything, so unless I'm absolutely sure something won't happen, I'll say it may".
This being said, after the first time, I would think the resulting discussion would make him understand how she felt. And it doesn't really matter if you think your partner is silly to want something. The way I see it, if you know something is very important to your partner, and it's not important to you, then you do it their way. Otherwise it shows you don't really care that something is important to them: you'll still do whatever you want if you don't feel the same way. Not a nice precedent to set. I don't know if my partner will agree with me about what is and isn't important. So the best I can hope if for them to respect what I deem important even if they feel differently (and of course in return, I must respect things that are important to them even if I can't understand them).
If you can't do that, I don't think the relationship is going to work because you won't feel appreciated or respected. Obviously, this discussion was important to the LS. Her ex didn't realise it, or didn't care. The latter seems more likely considering it happened more than once, and when she was upset he wasn't sorry but defensive.