Oh, yeah. Since he’s relatively loaded it’s safe to assume he probably works, and he’s also in process of building a house for his parents. He sounds like a pretty danged decent guy to me, and one who has a hell of a lot on his plate at the moment. I’ve overseen three construction projects and they soaked up every spare minute I had and a lot that I didn’t have to spare. If Boyfriend isn’t paying much attention to this girl right now, gee, maybe there’s a reason.
Even if he’s a complete shit he still doesn’t deserve to be treated as nothing more than a reserve safety net.
It can suck to be poor–been there, in spades–but lack of money doesn’t have to erode character. This girl may be in tight circumstances at the moment but I’m not impressed with how she’s treating anyone in this drama.
Men always give other guys this supposedly sage advice, but why? It’s a weak approach almost guaranteed to fail. No one likes the silent treatment, and they say “out of sight, out of mind” for a reason. If you cut off all contact with a well-adjust person, most of them feel rejected for a short while and get over you in favor of people they actually interact with because playing head games with someone already indecisive isn’t likely to tip the balance in your favor. The ones who obsess over winning you back after you do something like this are the ones you don’t want as a girlfriend.
Too bad if she doesn’t like the silent treatment. It’s not done for strategy. It’s done for the sake of the guy’s mental health. You don’t stalk a girl that’s taken and whine and plead for her to break up with her SO. You say “call me when you’re available,” and move on with your life. It’s not a tactic. It’s not something that’s supposed to “work.” It’s just being an adult, accepting that you have no control over a situation and not torturing yourself about it.
You should go to Vegas and enter the Super Duper World Series of Poker Tournament ™. After playing non-stop for 72 hours, it will come down to you and the boyfriend. When he goes all in and you are holding an unbeatable hand, look into the crowd and you will see her watching. You should then show her your hand, fold, snd walk away from the table, telling her it is her you want.
There are a number of wedding chapels to choose from in Vegas.
…sadly, though, since the girl doesn’t understand poker, she’ll just think you folded because you had a crap hand, and within the hour she’ll be saying “I do” in front of Elvis, but not to you.
I think this strategy as you put isn’t playing games. It’s being realistic to all involved.
The “silent treatment” is the only course open to one at some point. That is why I suggested that he put all his cards on the table, tell her that he wants a relationship with her first. Be honest and forthright. Don’t play games. But then move on with his life. Mostly this is for his well being. There is nothing good that will come from his torturing himself over her. And he needs to act in a way that he can live with himself thereafter.
My experience in life, and in my love life such that it is, has taught be a couple of things, YMMV but:
Given the option, most people will choose to have their cake and eat it too, and,
no one will date someone that they think is a loser. If you don’t respect yourself, no one else will respect you either.
Continuing to bang one’s head against the wall and saying “I’ll always be here for you” will only make this woman think she can have both of them, and given enough time, make her think only a loser would tolerate this situation and wait for her. People do respond when they think someone is moving on.
I hate trading bumper stickers, but you say “out of sight, out of mind.” I could say “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
Not to be snide in anyway, but the “loveable loser” who never gives up, only gets the girl in the movies. In real life, he’s left in the gulley as road kill. At the end of the day, you are left without the girl, and you’ll feel like an idiot. It’s one thing to feel bad about a lost relationship. It’s another to feel bad about a lost relationship and lose one’s self esteem in the process.
First off, I want to thank everyone for their candid, honest, and helpful responses. You all have given me a lot to think about, and I feel much, much better than I did yesterday. That said, I’m noticing a couple of themes here that people are touching on:
We cheated. I didn’t deny it from the beginning, but I didn’t address it, either. I always told myself that I would never be the other guy, and I am. On one hand, I feel kind of shitty for it, but on the other hand, I can’t regret the awesome weekend I had with her.
I need to present to her in clear words the decision she needs to make. Be firm, but not an asshole, and stick to my guns.
I’m only getting her side of the story when it comes to her relationship with her boyfriend. He may indeed be a decent guy, but all I’ve gotten from her is complaints about him.
It’s now very much on my mind that if she cheated on him, she’ll cheat on me. I heard her lie to him on several occasions. If she does end up coming back, we’re going to have to have a long discussion about trust before we proceed any further.
What really struck me was this:
Yeah.
I’ll respond more soon. Thanks, everyone, for your honesty and support.
Eh. All (or most) of us have been there before- in your shoes, his shoes, and even hers. I was probably a little harsher than you deserve; you haven’t really done anything wrong here.
I wasn’t trying to help him get the girl; I was trying to help him not get his heart stomped on like this again in the future.
ETA: On reading the thread, what Dio said. And if she lies, she’s a liar. You really want a liar, Agent Foxtrot? I truly am sympathetic to you, but please, find a better woman.
Of course it isn’t better to be stalkerish. It’s better to look for someone else. But you and spifflog are talking about two different things. You’re taking about being realistic, and moving on, which is the best course of action of the three (ignore, stalk, move on). He’s talking about having the “best chance of winning her over” which is what I think is unrealistic.
zweiskameit: We’re not talking about a married woman, unless there’s something the OP isn’t telling us. And if you reread the post, you’ll see it’s prefaced with “Playing devil’s advocate a bit…” That, I thought, would clarify that I may not believe it but I’m looking at the problem from another angle. :rolleyes:
And where did I use the word “conquest?”
Pick any old saying—a rolling stone gathers no moss, a watched pot never boils over, a stitch in time saves nine—and they all survive because there’s some truth to them. People don’t say “All’s fair in love and war” because they think ‘How untrue that always is! What a stupid saying! Let’s pass it on to our children!’
Well, PLAYING DEVIL’S ADVOCATE, how might it apply? I’m just going by what the OP has told us, but he seems to be telling us what he believes to be the truth: she isn’t happy with the boyfriend and went so far as to break up for awhile, IIRC. Her actions of making out with the OP for an entire weekend make me think she was truly unhappy. I’ll own my gender bias here—if this were a guy who was unhappy with his girlfriend, we’d be all over his ass as a playah.
Sure, I think she should “woman up” and break it off permanently before starting something new. But not everybody plays by the same rules in love or war—and to me, that’s a big part of what the saying means. If you haven’t agreed on rules of fairness, then there are none to be broken and by definition, therefore, nothing can be called unfair. I think posters are assuming everyone has the same morals and values, but I’m not willing to do so.
As a parallel, I’m pro-choice but for myself, I could never father a child and then abort it. IMO I don’t have the right to look down on those who choose differently than me. So in the OP’s case, I don’t think pursuing her is the way to go, BUT that’s up to him. Visual: it’s like at the end of “Planet of the Apes” when the apes don’t pursue Charleton Heston and the babe. The ape leader says something like, “He’s going to find his destiny.” Some things you just have to find out for yourself, the hard way.
But what if I’m wrong? I’m not the one who lives with the consequences, good or bad, and that’s why he has to choose.
I think the saying also means people interpret the rules situationally as they go. Suppose Alice is the sort who would never just go out and have an affair…but then Alice finds out that Bob, her SO, is having one. So Alice says “Well, I’ll show Bob…if he can do it, so can I!” Should Alice “woman up,” confront him, etc.? Of course. Got anything in writing that guarantees she will? Alice may decide she prefers to be judge, jury, and executioner.
Hell’s bells, waterboarding anyone? Gitmo? Abu Ghraib? The government is allegedly rational, enters into “legally binding” agreements, and then does some very, uh, questionable things—and they’re not even crazy in love. Clearly some “agreements” get folded, stapled, and mutilated in time of war. That doesn’t make it right, but it also doesn’t make it not happen.
And that’s the biggest message to me in the saying “All’s fair in love and war,” i.e. that bad shit goes down. We can debate what should never have happened, who started it, why this was unfair yadda—but once a shitstorm happens, it can’t unhappen. The man at the bottom of this picture?
He’s dead. Argue to your heart’s content and you won’t bring him back. Relationships also die terrible deaths sometimes and the academic debate doesn’t undo the damage.
“All’s fair in love and war” could be said so many ways. Tongue-in-cheek: yeah, fair, right, depending on whose ox is being gored. Ironically: sure it’s fair because it says so right here, in the history books that the victors wrote. The “Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord” slant: the universe put a karmic smackdown on a total asshole. Etc.
@featherlou: I wasn’t suggesting that he should go for her…I was playing Monday morning quarterback. This toothpaste has already left the tube, after all, because he can’t undo what’s done.
I’m saying that in the future if a similar situation with a different woman presented itself, he might try that strategy but IMO it would be unlikely to work for the reasons I discussed. But I don’t think there is a better one…at least not that I can think of.
Fellow dopers, I think we need to remember that we’re analyzing this with the luxury of detached reason and logic. The OP has been through some intense making out with a very desirable woman and although coitus wasn’t involved, the emotional impact on him is evident from his posts. I suspect his brain is telling him one thing and his heart is telling him another…I’m sure mine would be.
Marilyn vos Savant once got a question, something to the effect: “When you face a situation and your heart tells you one thing and your brain tells you another, which do you obey?” She replied that she follows her mind, knowing that her heart would catch up.
I think that’s brilliant. The heart remains a child; the brain is the sadder-but-wiser adult. The distance between them, IMO, can be immeasurable.
Some people are coming down on the OP for “immorality”—the quotation marks here indicate that I’ll leave the semantics of the precise term to each of you. OK, if you want, let’s take as a given that he fucked up badly. In my universe when you do something wrong, you’re supposed to be punished, proportionately to what you did: if you think he isn’t suffering consequences, I’d encourage you to re-read what he’s written.
But once your punishment is concluded, in my universe, you’re supposed to be forgiven.
I’d hope any woman he considered would be one he finds attractive.
Basically what he’s described is a cheating, using, money grubber who is hot. Personality defects are a little different to me. A personality defect might be that she’s often late or she is messy. Someone who cheats, uses someone for security/money for their own benefit has character defects. When you accept that, you can only expect more of the same for yourself. If that ends up being the case, one gets what they asked for.
You know the parable of the scorpion and the turtle? Same thing…
"You knew I was a scorpion when you allowed me to climb onto your back”…
That would be the “sin” (again, quotation marks indicate “pick the term you think fits best”) of being blinded by lust.
And with regard to level of punishment-if he HAD consummated with this woman, the punishment would be automatically worse. I think the OP is deeply infatuated with her—it’s too early to be genuine love but might turn into it. If, after making out AND sex, the door slams in his face forever? His feeling of loss would only be deeper and last longer.
