I was giving her the benefit of the doubt but the whole “i’m better looking than the last one” at 24, but yet this is her first “real” relationship kind of threw me off. If this guy is decent looking and wealthy, chances are, he could get a decent looking woman. So if the OP is better looking then the original girlfriend, it’s likely she’s fairly easy on the eyes. I refuse to believe that a good looking, semi-intelligent (although from her behavior with the boyfriend, that’s debatable) 24 year old woman that has been through college, has never had a boyfriend. Unless there’s some strict religious background we’re not hearing about (and from the self admitted open sexuality, that’s not quite believable) this all smells a bit rotten.
And what the hell kind of mother would try to excuse this kind of behavior away when it’s coming from the older S.O. of her daughter??
Yes. There’s a 23-year-old at work that is every bit as naïve as this. Completely clueless as to what makes a healthy, adult relationship. (Not that I’m suggesting you’re completely clueless, nongoog, obviously you’re at least clueful enough to be asking the question.)
I don’t understand why the OP would post a question, and once she gets opinions that she doesn’t like, she gets all defensive. nongoog, if what you’re telling us is the complete truth, then at least listen and think about what everyone is saying. If you left things out, but somehow expect us to be able to rationalize why your boyfriend is acting crazy, then that’s your fault. We can only pass criticism if you get us all the facts, and so far the facts you’ve given us point to him being an insecure, possibly abusive and thoughtless boyfriend.
This is your first relationship so I understand why you would want to try your hardest to make things work. But do you really think you could stand to put up with behavior like this in the longrun? Do all the pros in your relationship really outweigh all of these erratic behavioral incidents?
And nongoog, if a friend came to you with the same stories that you’re telling us, what would you say? What if it was a female relative who was telling you this? I doubt you’d want anyone that you care about to go through this same treatment so why should you?
I can appreciate that you find the story hard to swallow, but I was one of those perky, college-educated late emotional bloomers who didn’t have a real “relationship” until my nearly-mid-20’s, so I know it can certainly happen just that way! Yes, I had boyfriends, yes, I had some experience with long-term dating, but the kind of “relationship” where you meet his family, there are arrangements for holidays and “anniversaries”, etc., and there are real discussions about the “future” didn’t happen to me until about then, and I was honestly so naive and boondoggled by being “in love” for the first time that I didn’t know how to handle myself in many of the situations that arose between us either. So I can believe that our OP is in her first serious “love” relationshp, as one-sided as it apparently is.
Hell, knowing what I know NOW, I can sometimes barely handle my own much healthier current relationship, and I still make stupid mistakes—I’ve just learned how to overcome my own stupidity better, which comes from experience.
Now, my own strange mother WOULD have sided with every SO in my life against me, if I’d managed to take them all home to meet her—that’s just the kind of passive-aggressive, demeaning witch she was. But then I had learned early on not to involve her in my life, so the thought that I might have called her for advice as our OP has done with her mother is pretty far out for me. We’re not sure of the mother-daughter dynamics here and we don’t know if our OP said someting like, “how would YOU rationalize his behavior if you were him, Mom?”, as I clearly think she did want (and maybe even need!) to excuse him at first…now it seems she may be ready to hear it “like it is”, or at least I hope so.
I echo the “run for your life” philosophy, girl! This scary guy came back AFTER you’d believed the argument to be resolved (even if you absorbed the blame needlessly, which you did!) and attempted to jump-start the whole flaming issue again for some unknown reason, and direct any lingering remnant of blame he didn’t already heap upon you the first time, right atcha—this is not the behavior of someone who cares about you, nor the behavior of an ordinary decent human being who respects you at all, regardless of whether he loves you. You can do better, much better. Get out of it now, with your dignity intact.
Codependency and bad relationship skills run in families. My mother has never had a romantic relationship with any man who wasn’t an active alcoholic with other mental problems. And any man is better than none.
Thank god for therapy and the fact that I survived my own life until I was 32 and learned better than to discuss my relationships with her.
You’d be surprised. My aunt was in an abusive marriage for more than 20 years. Her husband actually tried to kill her on several occasions. (One time he pinned her down and held a pillow over her face. She got away by playing dead.) But Grandma liked the fact that husband had a six-figure salary. She criticized my aunt’s decision to get a divorce, saying that “she had everything in that marriage except love.” :rolleyes:
[/hijack]
nongoog, you’re not doing yourself any favors by staying with this guy. If I were in this situation, I would have called it quits already.
I mean, sure, rather than threatening me, but I have to ask… For WHAT? Being overly cynical in an IMHO thread? When someone is in a dubious and screwed up situation and they ask you for advice, are you supposed to just say, “He’s a bad, bad man. You’re the victim. Poor you”?
He might well be a bad, bad man. But I don’t think the OP is a saint either. She can’t decide if she wants to defend this guy or tear him down. Her stories have inconsistencies she doesn’t reconcile when asked. It doesn’t make sense to me.
But if you just want to hug it out in here, that’s cool. Then it’s not an advice thread, it’s a hugs thread. Suit yourself.
Let me put on my swami turban for this one. Eenie meenie, chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak: *Not only does your boyfriend masturbate over porn, he does so compulsively. You can always tell if he’s lying by watching his lips. If they’re moving, he’s lying. *
Nongoog, I’ve run into a lot of compulsive liars over the years, mostly because I was drawn to weak men with big egos. Every compulsive liar I ever dated tried to change the subject when confronted, although I don’t recall one reviving the conflict a day later. Once my accusations stopped, the liar assumed he got away with it (until it happened again and again and again), but your boyfriend’s behavior does not surprise me. Against all the odds he might possibly, maybe, perhaps be innocent, there is no excuse for his act of retaliation. None.
If something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t. Either the boyfriend is fundamentally dishonest or you’re not ready to be in a relationship at this time. Only you know the answer to that.
What file, exactly, is she talking about that shows what websites were opened, where they were saved to, and when they were deleted from the local machine?
So you’re saying he’s saved the pages onto his local machine? So you can retrieve them from, say, deleted items or something along those lines? Or are you talking about the pages in the cache? Because damned if I’ve ever seen a version of Windows that shows webpages that have been viewed in the ‘my recent documents’ list on the programs menu.
I assumed she was talking about the “My Recent Documents” feature on the Start menu in Windows. Depending on the type of website you are browsing, it sometimes populates that feature. And since that menu will open if you mouse over it, it can be seen inadvertently.
OK, trying to be fair here, doing some experiments to see if nongoog’s story might have some merit.
What she’s talking about for Recent Pages might be this button on my browser next to the forward and back arrows that lists the last 10 or so pages you looked at. It’s one of those drop menus with an arrow pointing down. Even if you delete your History for the day, that menu still stores the last 10 places you went. For the SDMB for this thread, it looks like this:
The Straight Dope Message Board - "I didn’t
To see what a Craigslist site would look like, I clicked on an ad in Missed Connections. It came up as
ithaca craigslist > missed connections:
No thread title or anything. There isn’t enough room for anything else. When I clicked on the above link it, it did not go to the specific message that I opened, just to the Missed Connections page… but the ad I opened was highlighted, indicating that I had opened it.
BTW, how DO you delete this Recent Pages thing? Because if my fiance does what the OP does and snoops out my recent browsing and I get in trouble, there’s gonna be hell to pay…
