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.
I thought you were going to quit.
Simmer down and go knit something.
Yes, this back & forth is something like some dumb college class, where films are picked apart, scene by scene, and discussed as though it had been made recently, using today's/and/or the very young assistant prof's "MODERN" views.
Since Fritz Lang left NO written piece about why he used certain symbols, what he wanted them to mean, if anything, and this is NOT 1920 Germany and we aren't Germans of that era, it's best to just watch and enjoy the movie without dissecting it and attempting to use it as an anti-feminism trope.
Why MOLOCH!?
Why Marie?
Why the FLOOD?
This might come as a schock - but some adolescent males actually DID read the articles that came with the "art" - and wondered... WHY.
Baphomet has NOTHING at all to do with B'aal and just because you have conjured up, in your mind, and then posted it, only makes it "true" for you; though it is wrong/factually incorrect.
Ancient pagans had statuary of their many gods and also totemic animals/animal statues/half animal half human statues. Not only were ancient and modern Jews forbidden to have statuary representing GOD, HIS name was not supposed to be uttered.
Somewhere along the way, somewhat early Christians began to have statuary, paintings, and mosaics representative of Jesus and others. After the Protestant Reformation, some Christians stopped having such statuary and the more stringent even stopped the stained glass window pictures.
You are entitled to your own opinion, even when it is demonstraly wrong; you aren't entitled to then attempt to foist that opinion off on others as the ONLY "truth"!
How about just sticking to the article that heads this thread, which has been taken so far afield, that this is stupidly turning into another UNDEAD THREAD.
This story takes me back to my college days. Her story is not unusual. Unfortunately, do to our cultural attitudes about sex, at the time everyone was getting around. The only question we had at the time was the “quality”.
This is going to sound gross now, but I knew a lot of people that were sleeping with 2 or 3 different women a week every week. It was insane and we were very stupid.
If you were committed in a relationship, then it was just meant lots and lots and lots of sex everyday. Meaning 3 to 5 times minimum a day every day.
It was not until about 5 years after college I finally slowed down on racking up my “trophies”. Well compared to my past. It was all stupid and left me empty, but my ego was bigger than ever.
Evidently you missed the pseudo-html /pun> tag.
I LOVE Dorothy Sayers and read all of her books when I was in college. I own these books and have reread them all a couple of times, at least. My favorite one is THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, which MM also likes.
You did well to bring it up, in view of your earlier remarks on the thread about Philistines, and pop culture vs. more refined interests. Particularly as the book portrayed Shakespeare as being a lickspittle to the leading nobility of his day.
But -- returning to the original topic of the thread, I'm surprised you didn't reference THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR first, as the villain of the book was a slutty young woman who was having an affair with a married man -- and covered it up by making false accusations of kidnapping against another *woman*.
I'm also wondering why you didn't avail yourself of the following quote from THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR:
“Lack of education," old Mrs. Sharpe said thoughtfully, "is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive. They had no resources at all.”
.
.
.
Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but THE DAUGHTER OF TIME (and THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR) were written by Josephine Tey, not Dorothy Sayers.
Using a new GHETTO term ?
Yes, I know what it's supposed to mean and take offense at the debasement of the English language by uneducated, stupid ( as opposed to just ignorant ), ghetto thugs and by the whites who now use it.
Long before there was such a thing as "feminism", many nations devolved into the miasma of debauchery and I'm not talking about pre-Christian societies .
So just WHO do you blame for that?
Oh I know...it still has to be women. LOL
Also, using that kind of language, is appropriating the "culture" of a race, which is now a big no no...supposedly; you little wigger.
Because that wouldn’t fit his religious sensibilities and C.S Lewisian views on Christianity.
Schock??
Your post is schlock.
But what does that have to do with Metropolis??????
Thanks for the translation, NP, you’re a gem!
You’re a loon. I wouldn’t look at a picture of you on toast.
NP: Why do all the women haters on FR think they’re God’s gift to women??
How sad that you watch a German masterwork only looking for something to restore American conservatism. You remind me of one of my husband’s film students who after watching Buster Keaton in one of HIS masterpieces, Steamboat Bill, Jr. asked “Was that really necessary?”
If you want a conservative country, conservatives will have to march right back into the arts and popular culture which they cowardly abandoned in the 1960s. I await with interest.
This ain't the Village Voice, Madam.
The metamorphosis of Feminine Maria into the FeminIST Mechanized Babylonian seductress and ABOMINATION - is illustrated there in plain sight for all to see.
How ironic that fact is completely missed, or deliberately ignored, or deliberately OBSCURED by a pretentiously self-proclaimed member of the Broadway "theater"-worshiping culture.
Liberal chicks are easy...very easy.
>>Baphomet has NOTHING at all to do with B’aal
Survey says:
https://www.google.com/search?ei=QO4EWrP3IIXSjwOzt5vgCw&q=Baphomet++Ba’al
Your opinion is noted with appropriately dismissive impunity.
I am not "surrendering" at all. You want to keep this up for days on end, for some childish, stupid,no doubt some perverted sexual release, which I find to be a total waste of my time, as well as tedious and stultifying.
Now, little boy you're p0laying at being Batman? What next...want me to play "PAT THE BUNNY" ?
Pardon me for imagining, for even one moment, that you would snap out of it and act like an adult.
You haven't posted one single thing about the "restoration of American conservatism", which has just about nothing at all to do with that movie, what this article is about, nor what this stupid, immoral, idiot girl supposedly did.
Though human nature doesn't change, what the Frankfurt School was cooking up back then, had nothing at all to do with this movie, Fritz Lang, nor the price of eggs in England, back then nor now.
Not really, but thanks anyway. :-)
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