Posted on 11/07/2017 1:15:39 PM PST by drewh
When I was a freshman in college, I thought I met the love of my life. He was cool and fun and sexy, an older frat guy who was good at beer pong and knew exactly how to make me laugh. Within weeks of our first meeting, he became my official boyfriend. Within six months, we moved in together. Another six months later and we were engaged.
It was a whirlwind romance by any definition — except for the fact that I cheated on my boyfriend three times. Despite the heartache it caused, my experience with infidelity taught me a lot about love, relationships, and growing up.
Before college, I had been a serial monogamist. Since my first schoolgirl relationship at 14, I had several long-term boyfriends, and was never single for longer than two months at a time. I lost my virginity the summer before high school, and after that, had been sexually active with my subsequent partners. Despite my "experience," as my friends and future boyfriends would call it, I had no idea what it was like to be in a serious adult relationship — that is, until I went off to college.
That's when I met the man I would date, get engaged to, and inevitably cheat on. That's when I learned what a real romantic relationship was.
The beginning of my relationship with my college boyfriend was like a fairy tale. We were inseparable: He walked me to class, studied with me in the library, ate meals with me, and slept over nearly every night. We partied together on weekends, got to know each other's friends, and started talking about The Future. I was 18, and although I had been in what I had considered a "serious" relationship before, this was the first time I had the freedom to explore what I thought an adult relationship was supposed to be like — love, sex, drama and all.
The first time I cheated on my boyfriend, I wrote it off as a foolish mistake. I was drunk at a concert with a group of friends who found some cute boys for us to hang out with. After a half-dozen 20-ounce beers, a couple of joints, and a few sexy country songs, could I really be help accountable for my drunken actions? I loved my boyfriend, after all, and I knew we were going to be together forever, so what was one stupid mistake?
Even though I tried to write it off as insignificant, a week after I cheated I fessed up to my boyfriend out of sheer guilt. His face crumpled as I admitted, as he had suspected, that something did happen the night of the concert I didn't want to tell him about. His eyes burned with anger when I tried to tell him the same excuse I had been telling myself: I was drunk, and it didn't mean anything.
Eventually, he did forgive me, but after cheating, there was a distance between us that no amount of time seemed to be able to close. Something had changed in our relationship, and it wasn't just broken trust on behalf of my boyfriend. It was an uneasy feeling in my gut and a tiny voice in my head that said, But what if you did mean it?
Something had changed in our relationship, and it wasn't just broken trust on behalf of my boyfriend. It was an uneasy feeling in my gut and a tiny voice in my head that said, But what if you did mean it?
The second time I cheated on my boyfriend was no drunken mistake, and both of us knew it. After partying with friends, I ended up at a former crush's house and quite predictably, one thing lead to another and we slept together. The next day, that uneasy feeling in my gut had some company: pure guilt, and an overwhelming sense of being a truly terrible person. The voice got louder too, and started to say more: You did mean it, and this won't be the last time this happens, either.
When I cheated on my boyfriend for the third and last time, he wasn't actually my boyfriend — he was my fiancé. Despite the bumps in our relationship, a combination of our feelings for one another, a heavy dose of hormones, and the idea of finding happily ever after kept hurtled us towards a disastrous engagement that would only last seven uncomfortable months.
A month before it all fell apart, I cheated on my then-fiancé with another former crush, and even before our lips touched, I knew I was doing something wrong, but that I wouldn't regret it. I needed this infidelity to get me out of my relationship, something I knew deep down needed to happen, but something I was too weak and too immature to do on my own. So I cheated — again — and it served as one last sign that not only were my fiancé and I not meant to be, but I was not mature enough to really be with anyone.
That's the biggest lesson cheating taught me: that fidelity is an exercise in trust and maturity, one that not everyone can perform. I certainly couldn't at age 20, and it showed me that not only was I not ready for a serious monogamous relationship with my ex, but that I was not ready for a serious monogamous relationship at all. I may have felt like an adult, but I didn't have the relationship experience, communication skills, patience, or empathy to embark on a forever kind of love I so desperately wanted to have. I was selfish, uncaring, immature, and too caught up in the idea of what relationships are supposed to be, rather than what my relationship was actually like.
Cheating ripped away the false narrative about my relationship that I had created — we were in love, and with love came pain and drama — and instead illuminated my love, or lack thereof, for what it was: hurtful and ugly and so necessary for me to become the faithful person I am today.
Cheating ripped away the false narrative about my relationship that I had created — we were in love, and with love came pain and drama — and instead illuminated my love, or lack thereof, for what it was: hurtful and ugly and so necessary for me to become the faithful person I am today.
They say once a cheater, always a cheater, but after my experience, I can say that phrase is patently false. Cheating on my boyfriend multiple times taught me invaluable, albeit painful, lessons in love and relationships, on adulthood and maturity, on growing up. My actions showed me that relationships take a lot of work, not just together, but within oneself. It can't be forced, it can't be rushed, and it can't be half-hearted. When it is, people — yourself, your partner, your loved ones — get hurt.
Cheating taught me that kind of hurt never quite goes away.
Look kid, I know it isn’t supposed to be taken literally...and it’s still stupid!
You're really old, so tell me. Do you remember a time when divorce was frowned upon by society? People were ashamed to be divorced. Do you remember when an illegitimate child was called a bastard? When teen daughters who got pregnant were shipped off to Aunt Sally's in North Dakota to save the family's honor?
Those were all examples of "public shaming." People avoided those behaviors, partly to avoid public shaming.
This is what I'm talking about when I say public shaming. It's a thing, and a valuable tool to enforce the civil code.
Today, in large part, there is no shame for these behaviors. In fact, it is celebrated. High schools now have special rooms for "teen moms" to bring their kids. Single mothers are heroes. Chicks like in this article under discussion are written about in magazines as good examples.
This can all be lain at the feet of modern feminism.
You can ask for a return to rules, manners, civility, morality and yes, those are important. But the way those are enforced is by actual action, not disregard. Public shaming is part of that enforcement.
And as for a return to actual parenting. Over half the population of todays youth are products of a broken home or being raised by single mothers. Parenting suffers and we have generations of broken people because of it. The reasons for these broken homes can also be lain at the feet of feminism, as I've described previously.
So, I repeat.
Feminism is cancer.
In a crate of a dozen candles, a 25 watt light bulb is "brilliant". In a room with a six tiered chandelier, holding six arms on each tier, and each arm having a 60w light bulb, that 25w bulb is as nothing. Are you sure you are even as "bright" as that 25w bulb? You aren't!
Happily, I went to college before there was such stupid things as classes and/or degrees in IDENTITY POLITICAL effluvia.
You've absolutely no idea whom you're dealing with...you poor subhuman low life.
LOL
YIKES...posted that one to fast and it is more than a bit garbled. I should refrain from posting whilst on the phone.
I’m well educated and have an extensive vocabulary, which I’ve had to dumb down, when posting here, because so few know simple but very good English words. But this is as dumbed down as I can get; sorry if I’m still confusing/upsetting the terminally illiterate here. :-)
This is NOT "fun" and you must be a sick pervert of a masochist to be enjoying this public humiliation.
And neither MM nor I "like you" and hell I don't ever even want to be in the same state you happen to be in!
That IS “mannerly”!
You have “friends”? Are they a bunch of uneducated low lifes like you?
That’s not the first time, however. Back in the 1980s, my then-living Grandmother on my Mother’s side would always be getting these magazines with names like True Story, True Confessions and Modern Romance. One of the magazines had a story about a young lady who started a romance with her cousin. So this in nothing new. Time will tell if it’s an actual trend today.
Of course one CAN and SHOULD raise a daughter to not fall for that crap.
She has Decked The Halls of many boys and men over the years.
Actually it has been around since the Garden of Eden; Adam’s first mate/wife ( if one believe in the earliest Jewish version of Genesis ), Lilith, claimed to be Adam’s “equal”, since she too had been fashioned from clay, sans one of Adam’s ribs. Later on, Lilith became one of the demons in the Jewish lexicon of demons and one of the worst.
But it is a German dystopian sci-fi movie, filled with German Expressionism film technique/filming.It's not anything at all to do with a "feminist movement", of which there was none, right after WW I, but rather an anti-authoritarian/anti-war film.
Sanger was a eugenicist; her activism was in wanting to rid the world of certain populations ( blacks especially, the poor, and those whose ethnicities she felt superior to ) and not to loose upon the world generations of the louche.
I hope to continue being berated at some future date, Ms. Nopardons.
It's been a treat. See ya' round the campfire.
Thank you.
Back in the olden days, when dirt was young, we called these magazines "trashies."
Now the trash is mainstream.
I absolutely concur!
I’m not quite so sure what Metropolis has to do with the subject of feminism although it is a very great film as No Pardons says and stars the mesmerizing Brigette Helm in the dual role of the girl and the robot. Hey! Maybe, that’s it.
Most of the guys who are posting about “sluts” here, probably want a sex robot. But they’ll never find one looking like Helm.
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