Because that is exactly what she was trying to do; she wanted to get him married to her while lying about something that he clearly thought was important and that she clearly knew he would not be happy with. I’m not sure what the year 1873 has to do with anything, while divorce may not be as hard to carry out in the year 2018 as it was in 1873, it still takes significant emotional effort and, unless both parties agree on pretty much everything, large amounts of time and money to effect one. Thus, getting someone into a marriage with you under false pretenses is ‘getting them stuck in a marriage’ in any reasonable sense of the words.
There is nothing in any of my posts that claims that Lindsay is a Golddigger, or that says a single word about Josh’s wealth. I’m not sure why you’re angry about a claim that I didn’t make, but your stipulation makes zero difference to my response. The gold digger thing is your hang up, I never thought she was one, said she was one, or made an argument that assumed she was one.
Just to clarify since I seem to have accidentally done the ‘guess what I mean’ game: from the OP, I got the impression that Lindsay wanted to marry Josh to tie him her for emotional reasons, since it fits what was posted there much better. I suspect that she felt that if her lie came out after the marriage, the fact that he’s in a marriage would make him much more likely to stck with her than to break things off like he is now, and like she’s trying to reverse. Though, in what seems to be a pattern for this thread, you’ve also exposed a possible more sinister motive (even with your addition) that she might want to get him stuck in financially so that if the nasty ex-boyfriend manages to tank her career, she’s got something to fall back on.
I think Josh should stay with her but only if she majorly apologizes for lying and comes clean on her reasons. It would not be the first time someone lies to keep a prospective marriage partner.
If Josh chooses to stay with her he should make a promise he will agree to never bring this up again or hold it over her head. It will just be one of those “family secrets”. Hopefully the kids will never hear of it.
Life is complicated, and there are few hardfast rules, but one absolute rule I’ve learned in my long years is to stay the hell out of friends’ relationships, no matter what. You can listen and sympathize, but do not take sides, offer advise, or interfere. It will always bite you in the ass, and you will probably lose both friendships. Sooner or later, the couple is going to talk and maybe get back together, at least for a little while, and they will blame their pain on anything you said or did. This is just human nature.
Skald, can you explain why it was necessary to share this level of (pretty disturbing) detail about the nature of the porn that your fictional character starred in?
Clearly we have different criteria for what constitutes explicitness in descriptions. If I had described a specific sexual act, I would consider that explicit. I did not do so.
But to answer your question, I was thinking of a specific porn site I used to watch before I decided that porn was extremely bad for me and had to be abandoned. They gloried in doing shit like that described as happening to Lindsay in the OP. I visualized Lindsay as having worked for such a site because it seemed that they would provide such an experience as would drive a girl out of porn (and if she were smart & lucky, onto a therapist’s couch).
Don’t people usually marry so that the other person will stay with them for emotional reasons? And isn’t that reason usually that they have emotional reasons to want to stay with that person? Are you from the planet Vulcan or something?
Forgive me for being argumentative, but it seems to me that you are determined to find unsavory reasons for Lindsay’s not telling Josh about the molestation & porn. Which is certainly your privilege; I am not the boss of you. But it seems more likely to me that a woman would do such a thing because sometimes smart people do stupid things. I can easily imagine a woman feeling so humiliated by such an incident as described that, after getting her life together afterwards, she never ever wanted to discuss it again and so made one last very foolish decision of not being entirely forthcoming.
Moreover, I can’t help but notice that you either overlooked or are ignoring what seems a significant detail from the OP. Josh was angry not merely about the undisclosed porn but also the undisclosed molestation. To me that seems extremely significant, because it implies that Josh feels that she should have no private spaces from him. But clearly (to me at least) made the final porn scene so difficult for Lindsay was being force to talk about said molestation. That is nothing anyone has a right to know about.
Forgive me if I seem to be moving the goalposts, but I wish to ask this: do you think Lindsay erred in never telling Josh about being molested?
One should not underestimate the effect confession of abuse or anything bad in someones past would have on your significant other. Or even family members.
Some examples:
I knew a girl who was molested by her older cousin and when I met the guy, well lets just say I had trouble not wanting to punch him out. Damn he was a sleeze.
There is this woman I knew who found out her father, whom she always loved and admired and was a good grandfather, had molested her younger sister. Well then she had to deal with the prospect of a trial and telling her sons that grandpa was going to jail.
Another woman was the victim of a gang rape by a fraternity. A later boyfriend found out and became a police officer at least partially to get back at the guys who did it and ended up getting in trouble for breaking into sealed police files and breaking privacy laws.
So if he stays with her (and I hope he should) he should take steps to make sure this cannot come back and hurt her. Like it was mentioned an ex of hers had the videos. Try and do things so he cannot blackmail her with them again.
This, in particular. If he is going to forgive, he has to drop it, once and forever.
Of course, in the days of the Internet no one can ever be sure it won’t come up again eventually.
My father once said “never get involved with a woman whose problems are worse than yours.” I have no idea how he knew, but he was right.
Nude modeling is not the same as appearing in humiliation porn. A person who is emotionally damaged* enough to do the latter is someone I would be very cautious about marrying.
You’re contradicting yourself. First you say that the motives I ascribe to Lindsay are perfectly normal, then you say that it seems I’m determined to find ‘unsavory reasons.’ Are you saying that most people get into marriages for ‘unsavory reasons?’ If not, then why does me describing someone getting into a marriage for normal reasons somehow morph into someone getting into a marriage for unsavory reasons? And far from being ‘determined to find’ unsavory reasons, people keep throwing them out there with no prompting. You’ve done it twice in this post!
No, she made the decision to ACTIVELY LIE to Josh. Period. Stop trying to dress it up with euphemisms, she outright lied to him about what she did. If I say ‘honey, I’m going to be at Joe’s house tonight, I’ll say hi to Sarah while I’m there’, my wife is going to assume that I’m visiting our friends Joe and Sarah. If I actually go to Joe’s bar and pick up Sarah the Streetwalker for a night of fun, what I told my wife was clearly a lie, even though the individual statements are completely true.
I wasn’t talking about it because it’s not at all significant to my response on the situation. Josh is an autonomous human being, and can decide who he is willing to bang, date, or marry based on ANY CRITERIA he wants, period. If he wants a relationship with no secrets, that is his choice to make, period. Lindsay is also an autonomous human being, and can decide who she is willing to bang, date, or marry based on any criteria she wants. If she wants a relationship where certain topics are off-limits, that is her choice to make, period. If their relationship limits are incompatible, then they shouldn’t be in a relationship together. Lindsay (or you) don’t get to tell Josh that he is required to accept some particular relationship structure, that is his decision.
Again, you’re trying to defend Lindsay and actually making her look worse - the ‘he has no right’ bit implies to me that she knows that it’s a dealbreaker for him and is deliberately deceiving him to get him into a relationship he wouldn’t want if he knew the actual truth. Which, as I said before, is perfectly reasonable to describe as trying to get him ‘stuck’ in a relationship he doesn’t want. My initial assumption was that she was just embarrassed about the situation and stayed quiet because of that, making it a simple mistake, but if she followed your logic and was arguing that she had the right to deceive him to get him into a marriage with her, then she looks much, much worse.
“Erred” is ill-defined, and the question as phrased doesn’t have a simple answer. Lindsay can choose not to talk about her past if she wants to, not discussing it is not itself an error. Lying to Josh about her past, and attempting to use lies to get him stuck in a relationship he wouldn’t want if she told the truth, is wrong on her part. If Lindsay wants a marriage with Josh, her only legitimate options are to agree to his conditions, convince him to change his conditions, or give up on the marriage, doing something else (like lying to him) is definitely an error.
Ok–if this is purely a hypothetical, I, as reader of the (very gross) OP stipulate that she is a horrible troglodyte under a magical enchantment to look and act like a real-live girl and that she’s trying to get him to fall in love with her so she can eat his heart to break the curse.
Or, if this wasn’t a hypothetical and it’s actual people with the names changed, why’d you leave out critical info about their career paths but put in the gross incst porn shit?
Isn’t the entire point of the hypothetical that she was more or less tricked into that particularly toxic brand of porn, which is what caused her to turn her life around and become the terrific person she is today?
It seems like a bit of weird emotional double jeopardy for someone to undergo X, then think “well, that was a horrible mistake, better turn my life around so that I never undergo X again” and then years later you judge them by saying “well, I would never want to associate with someone who would undergo X”?
IMO, you’re missing the last few words of that last sentence “someone who would undergo X…*and then outright lie to me about it for however many years. And would have stayed silent about it if she hadn’t been ‘outed’?”
Thanks for the response. Gratuitous is the word I’d go with, over explicit. Also, you might want to consider including a warning (in this, and in future posts if it applies) that your post contains a detailed description of abuse porn that may be upsetting to some. I’m sure the last thing you’d want is to cause someone that sort of discomfort.
WTF? Where’s my second response? I put a lot of effort into the second one, explaining how my response was actually all about dealing with most of these problems that people have brought up. In case I find that in some forgotten tab when I get back to my computer, I’ll just only address what I hadn’t already said.
Judging someone for porn they no longer do is bad. If you have any sort of morality where someone is not supposed to do porn (and especially if that is Christianity), and that person is clearly ashamed of it and doesn’t do it anymore, I can’t see how you can judge them for it. There is no reason to stop doing something if it marks you for the rest of your life. There must be a way to repent.
Not that I personally argue that there is something inherently wrong with porn. How can I say that when I’ve enjoyed it? For me to enjoy it, there have to be people who want to do it. So it would be wrong for me to think they were bad. They consent, I consent, so it’s all good.
(If they aren’t fully consenting willing participants, then that’s another story, of course. That includes doing it because it’s the only way to make money. That’s not willing participation, even if it is consensual. I literally can’t stand it if it doesn’t look like everyone involved is enjoying themselves.)
That’s a separate (albeit important and non-trivial) discussion. I was specifically responding to Shodan’s claim “Nude modeling is not the same as appearing in humiliation porn. A person who is emotionally damaged* enough to do the latter is someone I would be very cautious about marrying.”
I would argue that many forms (not all) of porn are inherently damaging to the women participating in it. That is part of why I choose not to partake anymore) (the other part being that I think it is damaging to ME, And of course that my eyes don’t work well enough to watch porn videos anymore, though I stopped partaking before the blindness).
But I would not approve of Josh’s tactic here. The sort of porn Lindsay participated in is the sort which I judge bad for the woman doing it, and so I would hardly condemn a woman who did it in the past and then realized its deleterious effects and got out of the industry. I wouldn’t even judge or condemn her for lying about it, though I wouldn’t call calling what she did simply nude modeling lying either. I would understand why someone who had been humiliated or abused as described in the OP would prefer not to go in to detail and prefer not to be explicit. If the person I loved were in Lindsay’s position, I would be inclined to “forgive” her for keeping her own counsel here.
Calling what she did ‘nude modeling’ is a huge lie, especially since it’s very likely from the context of this thread that she knew that telling the truth would probably be a deal breaker. I certainly would not trust at all a person who would try to claim that a blatant lie like that isn’t a lie.