Is this sleazy or am I easily shocked?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Had dinner with a friend of mine, who brought along a friend of hers I didn’t know. This woman was in her mid-40’s, recently divorced, nice-looking, I think she was some kind of lawyer. She was upset about this incident, and frankly, I was a little scandalized by her tale. Then I thought maybe I was being naive, or uptight, and wanted some other opinions.

So this woman was married for 15 years and recently split with her husband. She has 2 kids, 10 and 8. After her break-up, she was hitting the internet dating sites and met a guy. He was 30, so a bit younger than she is, and he lived in NJ, so about 4 hours drive away. After a few weeks of talking back and forth, she wants to visit this guy.

Here’s where it gets sketchy for me-- she brought her kids for this first meeting with her potential internet squeeze. They stayed in this guy’s one bedroom bachelor pad. She fucked him on his waterbed while her kids were in the other room. She said it was OK because they had a video on, so they couldn’t hear anything. :dubious: I sat there, trying to seem sympathetic but all the while thinking… ‘whoa, that was fucked up, hon. Your judgment, not so good.’

What do you think? I thought it was pretty sleazy of her to drag her kids to visit some guy she met on the internet, then screwed him on a waterbed (not exactly the quietest screw you’ll ever have) with her kids right there. I can imagine her kids talking about this in therapy, her dragging them across state lines to bang this much younger guy, them cringing in the next room while she’s thinking they can’t hear it over SpongeBob.

Anyway, apparently she blew it with this guy. She went to see him the next weekend without the kids, had great sex with him all weekend and then started to look at real estate. She offered to buy him a motorcycle to match hers (she’s pretty loaded). He told her she was moving too fast and didn’t want to lead her on any further, ie., relocating herself and her kids to be with him, plying him with expensive gifts, etc. I thought, hey, at least he didn’t score himself a bike and then bolt. She was feeling bad about it, like he took advantage of her, and that she was an idiot for throwing herself out there so fully (duh), but I think she could have gotten a lot worse in this situation.

I kept my mouth shut, but my final impression of this woman was that she needed to chill out and maybe think more of her kids and less about dating at this point in her post-divorce odyssey. Also, not cool to do to her kids. I’m sure my fellow Dopers will tell me if I’m being too judgmental on this.

2

All I can say is that recently divorced people are scary.

My boss at my first job had just gotten divorced before I started working there, and I thought he was a total sleeze since he would hit on pretty much any woman to come within caterwalling distance. About six months later he calmed down though and became just another guy.

It was odd since he was the guy I least respected among my bosses when I entered the company, and ended up being among the most respectable.

3

To be fair here, how sleazy was the 30 year old guy being? I don’t know that I could screw a strange guy on a waterbed with his kids like 20 feet away. Yuck.

4

I wouldn’t have given it a second thought that she went to visit him, had sex with him, offered to buy him stuff, whatever- she’s obviously a needy nutjob, but that’s nothing new under the sun. But bringing her kids- now that’s sleazy. Poor kids. If you didn’t say so to her face as she was telling the story, you have more restraint than I do.

5

People get crazy after a divorce. I work with a guy who is wonderful…decent, stand up guy, wonderful to be around now. When I first met him a year ago I seriously thought he might be a sexual predator. He was just nuts after getting divorced. Now that he is no longer feeling rejected and hated he is great.

6

I’m jealous—my mom never took us anywhere when I was a kid.

Sounds pretty trashy. Hope for the kids’ sake she isn’t a screamer.

7

Sex or not, it’s fucked up to drag the kids around on first dates.

8

I didn’t know her, so I didn’t want to get all up in her face about it. If it was one of my girlfriends I would have done my damnedest to talk her out of bringing the kids, for sure, and given her the big :dubious: if she told me about it afterwards.

Guys, would you hit it in this situation?

9

When I was young and horny, maybe. Now that I’m a parent, I couldn’t.

10

I got the impression that she brought the kids in part so that she wouldn’t give in to sex on the first weekend. It was supposed to be just a get to know you weekend, no scam planned. Then she gave in to it anyway-- “he was so hot! I hadn’t had any for a while, and before that only with Tim for all those years! They couldn’t hear it anyway, they were asleep AND the video was on!” Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize. So the kids were supposed to cock-block, but failed at that task. :frowning:

11

Your friend’s friend needs to look into this really cool modern concept called a “babysitter” if she’s going to go bang guys she just met. It doesn’t sound like the healthiest approach to being newly single, but her sex life is her business, not her kids’ business. All kids eventually figure out that their parents have sex, but you don’t need to figure it out from hearing mom moaning in the other room with the guy she just met.

I give the guy about 25% of the blame here, too - keep it in your pants until you can get her alone without her kids. Sure, they’re not his kids, but dude, that’s not very cool.

12

I wouldn’t have a problem with it if they were his kids.

13

Agreed. I’m not a parent, but I am older and less hormonal and the thought of kids in the adjacent room, regardless of how loud SpongeBob might be blaring, would be a distraction at best.

On the other hand, I was that guy once, sort of. Except I was in my twenties, and it was at her house, and the kid was much younger and ostensibly asleep in her own bedroom, and even then it seemed kind of trashy, which I guess is hypocritical because I was a willing participant in the trashiness, but…

Ah, dear. I fear I’ve said too much.

14

It’s not the action itself which bothers me, but the personality which it seems to indicate: that her kids are secondary to her own desires. She knew it was a possibility they’d be overheard. Hell, it was a possibility one of them coulld have walked into the room. She thought it was something that the kids shouldn’t see, but she risked it anyway. (Though, really, I think it’s unlikely they would be substantially harmed if they did realize mom was fucking someone? In the 1800s, families frequently shared one bedroom, and considering the family size that some of these folks had, you can bet that the kids saw something.)

She also went to visit a total stranger in his home with her kids in tow. If she really wanted the kids to meet him, they all should have gone to a park or zoo together. For all she knew, he could be an axe murderer.

This is disturbing in of itself. She’s so weak-minded that she can’t turn down sex unless she’s actively chaperoned?

15

I guess my question then is, how much responsibility falls on the non-parent in the situation. If the parent says 'GO, my kids are fine, I want you now!" Do you have any responsibility to those kids to say no?? If their mom is OK with it, is it the guy’s sole decision about whether or not to bang needy but hot 40’something mom who is all too eager to put out. With her kids in the next room. Is it his job to say no in this situation, to be a good guy and say, I pass this weekend.

16

Uh, yeah! When I was younger, my little head often called the shots, but given the circumstances you describe, I’m pretty sure I’d have taken a pass. This bitch needs an attitude check.

17

bolding mine.

BINGO.

And yes, her actions were pretty tacky and sleazy, not that he’s an angel, after all it takes two to tango, but she could have set the tone for any relationship they might have had.

As it is, the tone she set was “I’ll do anything, and I have no respect for myself”. Ugh.

18

If the kids saw or heard something, I would feel that I was partially culpable for it, so I guess my answer would be yes, in the sense that I would want to avoid any responsibility for messing with the kid’s heads.

First, do no harm, as the doctors say.

19

For godsake. It’s not sleazy. What the word I’m looking for…totally insane. It’s a bad enough idea to go 4 hours away to meet a guy you never met in his house and spend the night. You meet in a neurtral place, in public. Then you move on to wild monkey sex, also hopefully in public (er, I mean like in a hotel). Then you let him meet your kids.

Aside from the ax murderer aspect (insane!) what if it didn’t work out and there you are 4 hours from home with two confused kids. No divorce insanity allows for not knowing the word “babysitter”.

20

Why are you even wondering? It sounds like you’re trying to absolve this woman at least somewhat of having to take all the blame in this analyzation that’s going on in your head. What is to be gained by shoving some of it off on him? The guy could have been schizophrenic, a druggie, or who knows what and killed her and them. Whether he shares culpability or not really doesn’t matter much, IMO. It was stupid in the extreme to take the kids along in the first place on a first date to visit a strange man who lived a four hour drive away. As for them being in the next room, frankly there are millions of homes all over this country and the rest of the world where adults are having sex with kids in another room, but given that they were asleep in a strange house with mom nowhere in sight, I would think the risk of one of them waking up and going off in search of her should have been an inhibiting factor…unless she gave them Nyquil or something, which in this case wouldn’t surprise me either. Mom was stupid, and I suspect she knows it and is looking for validation by telling the story to others in hopes they’ll act like it was no big deal.