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.
>>imagining that you are the only expert on what Fritz Lang had in mind,
Pretty sure not.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Metropolis+Occult+Symbolism
I’m clearly not the only one who recognized The Feminine Bride of Christ in juxtaposition against the counterfeit Feminist ABOMINATION.
haha Look who's talkin'. I thought this was The Cat Ladies Masterpiece Theater for a minute there.
Your hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Moloch (Phoenician: 𐤌𐤋𐤊, Masoretic מֹלֶךְ mōlek, Greek Μολόχ) is the biblical name of a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. The name of this deity is also sometimes spelled Molech, Milcom, or Malcam.
>>You haven’t posted one single thing about the “restoration of American conservatism”,
LOL The Feminine Maria (bride of Christ) and the Counter-Maria (FeminIST anti-Christ) are an exquisitely artistic illustration of the GOALS of Cultural Marxism.
Understanding the repetitive underlying nature of that predictable process, and how America got UNconserved to begin with, is prerequisite to the restoration of American conservatism.
Fritz Lang clearly RECOGNIZED, and subsequently illustrated, the nature of the process.
I only mention this because you style yourself as a master wordsmith after already having been shown to be a fraud by your misunderstanding of "profanity."
Though the word salad you threw out to dance out of it was amusing.
I dunno. I look pretty spectacular on toast.
If you won't look, then perhaps you will quit speculating as to what people on the internet look like.
Why do all the women haters on FR think they’re God’s gift to women??
Did you ever stop to think that a man can hate you without hating all women?
I'm sure not all men on FR are God's gift to women. I know I am, and that's all that matters.
Don't hate. Participate.
What's the related symbolism of the heroine's blondness and youth?
Why is SHE, the robot, the leader, whom the workers blindly follow ?
Is this, perhaps, just a different version of CINDERELLA...i.e. the son of the wealthy "ruler" falling for the lowly worker girl?
Why is a man moving the oversized clock arms? Is it man who determines the hours and the minutes of a day? Is time controlled by man?
What did each character have for breakfast that day?
How many DMs does each worker make?
Is this really an anti-war film, with the cannon fodder rising up against the powers that be, so that they won't ever again have to serve in the military, or is it instead, a reaction against the German government signing the devastating, to Germany and her allies, the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919?
It's a movie, a sci-fi, dystopian movie!
But hey...maybe it's just a SJW film about how the 99%ers are rising up against those EVIL 1%ers. Yeah...that's it! This is a VERY modern movie about the 1920s origin of today's America, where the EVIL "elite" keep down the people and refuse to allow them to have their own sex robots, which are priced to high for them to afford. LOL
>>You should have told me “You are boring”.
Uhh. Might want to check yer firing azimuth there sparky.
I'm sorry, I don't get the reference. Is that from back before "talkies" when you were in your prime?
Or, blame the Supreme Court.
OTOH, abortion was ILLEGAL in Europe and America in the 1920s, when this movie was made.
No you haven’t.
>>Why is SHE, the robot, the leader, whom the workers blindly follow ?
Because she symbolizes the counterfeit bride of Christ - which is the spirit of anti-Christ in the Church.
And that’s relevant in this thread because young feminine girls who follow THAT subversive feminIST role mode, might tend to be unfaithful.
You take offense at a lot of things.
Do you find it tedious to associate yourself with the uneducated rabble here on FR? Hobnobbing with the hoi polio, as as it were? Walking amongst the common folk? It must be hard for a woman of your sophistication and upbrining.
Tell us all again how you have to dumb down your extensive vocabulary in order to be understood here. I find it fascinating.
So just WHO do you blame for that?
Oh I know...it still has to be women
Duh. Two words.
Eve.
Since we're gettin' all Biblical up in the hizzy.
signed,
The Wigger
I don't get this post, HLPhat. Are you saying I'm wrong? The possibility exists. If proven so I will stand corrected. Unlike certain cat ladies I might mention.
What the hell is "firing azimuth"?
>>Blame Margaret Sanger and her fellow eugenicists for that;
For MOLOCH?
Nah - I’ll blame the culture that created her and her fellow eugenicists. And let’s not forget - Sanger was instumental for inspiring some of the Nazi’s more quaint ideas.
Lang would certainly, justifiably, have been concerned about those little flaws in Human nature that can be observed cropping up time after time... especially when they were cropping up AGAIN - right in his own back yard.
“Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Lang
Where did I say you were boring?
Did you perhaps intend that message be targeted at someone else?
Oh ooops. Yes, that was for Miss bigwords. Sorry.
Now you're catchin' on.
:)
But YOU are the one who messed up far worse! I never wrote the word PHILISTINE, nor put down what you called "pop culture" ! As a matter of fact, I went into a long description about how Shakespeare wrote for EVERYONE/the masses and the Queen ( and yes, he was a toady to the aristos and the Queen, because he needed their money and their patronage! ) going so far as to rewrite history, to favor the Tudors! Who do you think he was writing all of that bawdy and slapstick comedy stuff for...the aristos and sophisticates? LOL
And I went on to say that I like Hee Haw and named the country singers I listen to.
I mentioned Tey's THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, because it's my favorite Tey book.
Again, sorry, it's been an extremely long time since I've even thought about Lord Peter W., let alone read any of those books. As a matter of fact, I haven't read, until a few weeks ago, anything but non-fiction, in an extremely long time. And the last time I read any book by Dorthy Sayers, was almost 4 decades ago! Cotton candy for the brain and I guess that though I enjoyed the books, when I read them, they didn't leave all that much of an impression on me.
Since you also like Brit sleuth fiction, have you ever read any of Margery Allinham's works?
>>Oh ooops. Yes, that was for Miss bigwords. Sorry.
Fire! Aim, Ready. { oh wait }
No worries :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.