But lets say–for example–that I merely made my feelings clear that I wanted her. No suggestion that I would be better (though that would be implied) and no other competition in that regard. Not that I’m doing this right now 
Really.
Ah, natural selection at work. 
I stole a girl once. We were sneaking around behind the back of her live-in boyfriend for about a week, then I told her I didn’t want to do that anymore and told her that if she really was that unhappy with him and liked me so much better, she should leave him. She did, went and stayed with her parents a day, and then the next he came by and begged her to come back, and she did. After that I told her she had no chance of ever being in a relationship with me, but we did fool around some after.
I felt guilty, but probably only because I kinda liked her boyfriend, he was a nice guy. If I have any reason not to like someone I would have ZERO problem taking their girlfriend from them, but I would be cautious about getting serious with them because of the fact they might run out on me eventually.
I’m married now. I found out after the fact that my wife was seeing someone else when she started seeing me.
Ack, hit submit reply too early. Anyway, in my wife’s case her former boyfriend was a real commitmentphobe and always insisted that they weren’t a couple, so it wasn’t really the same as the earlier case.
it would be tempting, but, I woud not do so.
or I hope I would be strong enough to allow logic that it would not work, override my emotional desires.
but, it is tempting from time to time.
Osip
If by ‘steal’ you mean using some devious means to break up a couple, then it is always wrong. But…
What about non-devious means? Hey, they aren’t married. What is wrong with declaring your intentions to win her over? Hey, she might like you better. It may shake him up and get him to pop a question(or pop you one). A little competition maybe a good thing.
That is, until they have made a commitment to each other. Then you’re just being a jerk.
I did fool around with a married woman once. I didn’t know the husband. I thought it wouldn’t bother me. I wan’t being unfaithful or anything…
It bothered me a lot. So much that I had to put a stop to it right away. Still bothers me some.
spooje,
A simple declaration of intent, while honorable and possibly effective, might be received by the other gentleman as an invitation and challenge to ritual combat.
That’s how I’d receive it anyway.
You know, my dear old Dad used to say “You lose a woman the same way that you get her.”
Meaning that if she’ll leave someone else to be with you, she’ll leave you to be with someone else.
On the other hand, my Dad met my Mom on a double date. And she wasn’t his date.
My Dad was a big ol’ hypocrite, I guess.
If you are truly an “Ayn Rand Lover” then you should be familiar with this:
- Man–every man–is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life. *
( http://www.dreamscape.com/willp/phil/obj-faq.html )
Make of that what you will. IMO (no H), Rand’s philosophy is a load of hooey, and I wouldn’t be caught dead adhering to any of her principles. But that’s just me.
I have to add my .02cr. If you can get them away from their current love, what makes you think they’re loyal enough to stick with you? (Ignoring soap opera shit, for a moment.)
If they’ll dump someone just because your pastures look greener, odds are you’ll look pale when another “pasture” looks better. And all that will leave you is full of crap.
o brother :rolleyes:
Like I don’t get Rand flak everywhere else I rear my ugly head. 
Needless to say, the question is, in itself, would it be in my best interest to work on starting a relationship with a girl already in one.
The board seems to feel no, but a sort of slight no, leaning toward yeah sometimes, I’ve done it but…haha, and that’s where I’m at. Truth be told, I don’t know that I’d be better for her, I feel that it is true by an assessment of the parties’ personalities involved (hey, and how objective can I be about myself in a situation like this?). It is very easy to rationalize the behavior, but in the end someone is most likely to be hurt. On the other hand, though he and I are not competing as such, were we to have met her at the same time I feel that I would have been the original. But then would she leave me for him??? I don’t think so because I think that I am somewhat better than him (but that might be a dead author speaking through me )
I feel that while it might not be the best thing since sliced bread, it is possible that this is not a negative situation.
Again, I emphasize: argh.
Yup, that’s how I’d take it as well. A jackass from Airborne Express consistently propositions my girlfriend where she works whenever he comes it. Only the fact that I respect her ability to handle the situation prevents me from throwing down my gauntlet. Literally.
MR
I would think the OP would know. Let’s try some:
"The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave."
“Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.”
“Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to
achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
“The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.”
Guess, who said those aynrandlover? Ha! You would know, none other than Ayn Rand…
I usually avoid true confession threads, but I’ll throw out a significant bit of my history here.
Twelve years ago, in June or July of 1988, I went to see They Might Be Giants at a local club, in company with my roommate (an old college acquaintance) and some friends of his from graduate school. Tagging along with them was a friend of one of his grad school friends, a young woman who’d just graduated from college and was staying with her friend while she interviewed for teaching jobs here in Atlanta. She was cute, but I didn’t initially think much about her. During the course of the evening, however, we both migrated outside – me to cool off a bit, and her to escape the noise and smoke, both of which she intensely disliked. We chatted a bit and hit it off quite well. I was definitely taken with her (so much so that I made mention of her in conversation with other people several times in the next few weeks) but assumed that I was unlikely to see her again; my roommate was moving out to go back to grad school at the end of the summer, she was also interviewing for jobs in D.C., and it just seemed improbable that we’d meet up again. Besides, she was Jewish and intent on marrying someone Jewish, was well-off financially and seemed unlikely to hook up with an impoverished grad school dropout proofreader, and was (IMO) attractive enough that she need not want for male attention.
Labor Day weekend rolled around, and on Friday night I went out to a local Irish pub with my roommate and some of the same crew from the outing previously mentioned. Once again, she had been convinced to come along, having just accepted a teaching job in Atlanta and moved in with her friend’s family. While she obviously was much more taken with my roommate early on (a very common reaction), she warmed up to me as the evening went on and the alcohol went down (I later learned that this was only the second occasion in her life when she’d been drunk). I nearly convinced her to come back to my apartment when the bar closed up at 2 am, but she was still sober enough to beg off on the grounds that she was supposed to go out of town the next morning and would have no way to get back to where she was staying (I was car-less at the time, and she was staying fifteen miles beyond the reach of public transportation).
We started talking on the phone for hours every night. I kept trying to convince her to go out with me, and she kept begging off. She didn’t attempt to dissuade me from calling; she knew almost no one else in town besides the family she was living with, and she enjoyed the conversations. The more we talked, the closer we got. I don’t think we actually were physically in the same place again for nearly a month after Labor Day, but by the time we were, we felt we knew each other extremely well and the attraction was obvious and mutual. Eventually, she mentioned that she was seeing someone she knew from college, a guy who was then living in Charlotte. In fact, it seems that she considered herself informally engaged to him.
At this point, in the opinion of most posters to this thread so far, I should have bowed out. Perhaps I should have. But frankly, I’m not sure I understand the attitude that a person who has gone out with another person is bound to them until they formally reject them. I’m a strong believer in the proposition that one ought to be sexually involved with only one partner at a time, but unless there’s some sort of formal, official commitment to monogamy between two individuals, I don’t see why either of them shouldn’t be free to date others, so long as it’s understood that that’s the case.
In any event, we started occasionally going places together, though she made it clear to me that she considered this a platonic relationship. I didn’t argue the point or attempt to overstep that line, but neither did I give up trying to be charming. We discussed all of the perfectly good reasons why we shouldn’t get romantically involved: she was Jewish, I wasn’t; she was well-off financially, I wasn’t; she was a neat freak, I wasn’t (by a long shot); she was anxious to get married and start a family, while I was by no means ready for either; we had no common tastes or interests; and a bunch of others I don’t now recall. Nevertheless, whenever we were together, there was an intense, almost palpable attraction between us.
We managed to deal with it for a couple of months, until Halloween. I stayed home sick from work that day, and she came by my apartment after school, still dressed in her old hag witch costume – grey wig, make-up warts, etc. We sat as far apart from each other as we could, and despite my feeling like hell and her looking like it, we simply couldn’t deny wanting to jump each other then and there. We didn’t; somehow, we held off until she left, but we both knew we weren’t going to make it much longer.
We finally broke down toward the end of November. She’d resolved in her mind to break up with the guy in Charlotte; she wasn’t planning to see him until the holidays anyway, so we rationalized that she had already broken up with him in her mind, she just wasn’t going to actually tell him until later because she wanted to do it in person instead of by phone. She did so on a trip to Florida together they’d planned for some time.
So what happened? We dated for several years. She was, as I’ve said, eager to marry and have kids, while I was far from financially or emotionally ready for either, so we went through a number of periods in which we suspended sexual activity while she went out with other people (though never more than once or twice with any individual). At one point, she moved to Taiwan and taught there for a year. About two-thirds of the way through that year apart, I realized that I couldn’t imagine finding anyone I’d rather spend the rest of my life with, and that I wasn’t likely to get any closer to being ready to marry unless I started taking some definite steps in that direction. I got a promotion and raise at work, set out to stabilize my finances, and the next time we spoke, told her how I felt and what things I was doing to work toward being marriage material. She decided to forego a second year in Taiwan and come back to Atlanta so we could be together. It still took me over year to get my life in order and save enough money for a minimally respectable ring, but I was obviously making progress throughout this time. I also began studying Judaism, eventually reaching a decision to convert. I proposed and we set a date a little more than a year away, partly to allow me to make more headway financially and partly to accomodate some other family constraints on the date.
Almost exactly eight years after our first meeting, we were married. That was four and a half years ago. We have two beautiful kids and a marriage that I’d rate in the top ten percent of all those I know about.
I don’t believe that it’s automatically the case that a person who would break up with someone to go out with you will do the same to you. If the person is married or has otherwise made a formal commitment to be eternally faithful and then breaks that commitment to be with you, then I’d say there’s little reason to expect them to live up to any commitment they make to you. In the absence of that sort of arrangement, however, encountering a potentially more suitable partner is just one of many reasons for ending a relationship, something that’s almost always painful for one or both parties; to argue otherwise is to equate dating someone with marrying them, and solid lasting relationsips are never based on one party remaining in the relationship merely to avoid hurting the feelings of the other party.
:rolleyes:
Well, not that this is a thread about Ayn Rand but…
A person is not a product. Their relationship is not something I am disposing of; I am asking her if she feels it is worth it. I am asking you if you feel it is worth it for me.
And if that happiness is not being acheived?–then a change of some sort is in order. This borders on rational hedonism, though (my own term, but I feel it is self-evident in meaning). Logically, if the Female is not completely happy in current situation and feels that she would be more happy in another situation, no one would tell her to stay at her job or apartment or grocery store or whatever, but somehow a less-than-fulfilling relationship should be tolerated? This is when an alternative exists, of course, I am not saying that one should idealize a partner then find no one can live up to it then die lonely. (ahem)
My post inplies that my goal is to be with her so we can be happy, and that someone was in the way. If it was merely a long distance relationship, move closer. Family hates him/her? Tougher choice. Current boyfriend/gf? And here we are. I am not competing with him. In many ways he and I are similar. In others, I fear, we are not. It is these other things I think I excell in. But it is ultimately her decision, and so I leave the fact open to her and do not try to sway opinion. I cannot speak fer her bf.
This was why I put “steal” in quotes. It was meant to show that I was not using strategic maneuvers to obtain a relationship, but that is what is commonly done and so it was easy to put in a subject line. However, the question remains, is it stealing anyway? Since it is her decision, and a relationship requires agreement of both parties, if she changes her mind no one’s rights were breached. We all know the score when entering into a bond.
Now that that’s out of the way…I still don’t feel any more justified, just more honest. What bothers me is that we are discussing these things ourselves as this post threads on, and she mentioned the same thing I did earlier: before she was with him, if I had done something then I would surely have “won” (quotes again people, not objectification). This raises the point that might be its own thread in GD,
In other words, is the action of getting a girlfriend in itself bad? then how can anything change that?
Again, I fear I border on the rational/rationalization line.
rackensack holy shit. I knew it could go both ways!
[/ratioanlization]
aynrandlover,
At this point, I’m struck with the thought that you are not really seeking opinions to assist in objective analysis of your condition and options. Rather, I believe you are looking for fuel to further assist you in rationalizing the validity of a questionable course of action you have already decided to pursue. I wish you luck and hope that the posts in this thread will help prepare you for the possible results of your action.
Your responses to the Rand quotes offered by handy make me wonder what Ayn Rand you love. Certainly the Ayn Rand whose work I have studied would be appalled at such corruption of logic designed to suit immediate needs.
rackensack,
Thanks for sharing. Really. It’s nice to read a true story with a happy ending every now and again.
Wolverine: You going to tell me to stay away from your girl?
Cyclops: If I had to do that, she wouldn’t be my girl.
Wolverine: Well, then I guess you’ve got nothing to worry about, do ya, Cyclops?
Cyclops: It must burn you up that a boy like me saved your life, huh? Gotta be careful. Might not be there next time. Oh, and Logan – stay away from my girl.
X-Men 2000
- So a person is a product?
- You find it wrong, then, to search for something better when the present leaves you feeling a little under the weather?
- It is not competition when neither he nor I are trying to “get” her. How is this corrupted logic?
- Do you, then, feel that relationships are a brand of ownership? If so, I would like to hear your Rand’s view on one party owning another. Mine finds it intolerable.
As far as logic goes, I find nothing wrong with my comments. As far as her fiction goes, one might suspect that’s where I got the idea from in the first place. Dominique with Wynand but in love with Roark, and what does Roark do? He makes his intentions clear and the end. Atlas Shrugged romances are about as crazy as you can get without making a daytime television show about it, everybody is leaving everyone else for someone else.
And you are absolutely correct, I am not looking for opinions to sway mine; I obviously have already taken a course of action. I was just looking for opinions. You did note the “rationalization” aspect, and I was hoping to keep that in perspective. But I don’t feel I’m being out of line. Instead, could you tell me why I’m being out of line? If I am shown to be wrong, I’ll admit it. And since this is a pretty damn sensitive topic, all the more reason to find out. Wouldn’t you agree?
Dr.Pinky: nice quote. hahaha, but my bet would be on wolverine. He’s got that whole rugged thing to him, and you know how the middle aged women love those SUV’s.
Romance, trust, love, faith, security – These things are products of human effort. If you won’t see that, there’s no purpose in addressing other points.
I don’t think you’re “out of line”. I don’t care what you actually do with your live and love. Please read the following quote in order to determine why I have posted the things that I have: