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.
But cultures have, as have social rules, and what the majority of people recognize as "common knowledge".
In the 1920s, in Germany and the neighboring nations, most gentlemen, would do the "kiss the hand" ( no, mostly by that time, the hand wasn't actually kissed ! )thing, to women they knew well. And I bet you don't know what that really represented!
That's a long gone bit, as is the tipping of a hat.
Little girls no longer curtsy to their elders and little boys no longer bow to their elders, when introduced. And yes, that was done here in America too, even in the 1940s, which was the end of all of that.
I just thought of something that further proves my point, if the EVE parable didn't. You are stubborn after all.
Women are the "civilizing influence" on a culture. If they fail in that role, or abandon it, as is the case with modern FEMINISM. Culture falls apart.
So yea. Feminism is not only responsible for slut culture, but for the overall breakdown of our society and will be the ruination of us all, if not snuffed out to it's very core.
And before you jump on your high horse and go all Hillary on me, When I say "feminism" I don't mean "women." Feminism is an ideology.
Maybe that's why you don't get it. If feminism dies, women will still exist. Do you get it now, hardhead?
You said there was no feminist movement in Germany in 1919.
JohnyBoy proved there was.
The umbrella group of feminist organizations, the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), remained the dominant force in German feminism during the inter-war period. It had around 300,000 members at the start of World War I, growing to over 900,000 members during the 1920s
Are there no lengths you will go to in avoiding admitting you are wrong?
Sheesh.
And Nuns "marry" Jesus, is Maria supposed to represent Nuns?
How about the writings and the subsequent movies made from the works of H. G. Wells? Were they all also heavily overlaid with Christian symbolism and Biblical references? After all Thea von Harbou wrote the novel that she and her husband, Fritz Lang turned into the movie was made from, was heavily influenced by Wells and his work. Hint...hint...Wells was a SOCIALIST, a Eugenicist, and yes, part of the Fabian group , from which the leaders of the Brit Suffragette Movement came from.
Wait. That sentence seems wrong. You know what i mean, though, right?
Fix it for me. O mighty vocabulary mistress of all knowledge. I'm uneducated.
That's the gist of what I got from her as well. It's like she was saying, "This was just a difficult experience I had to go through to mature and learn about myself." No real responsibility or ownership of the DECISION to destroy the most binding commitment you can make with another person. No empathy or any attempt whatsoever to view it from her fiance's side.
Cheating is a devastatingly selfish choice that is probably the most intimately personal, emotionally damaging betrayal of another human being that there is. ...and she did it OVER and OVER.
WAAAAAAY beyond some growing experience or self-discovery thing, you clueless girl.
>And just WHERE in all of that, does it mention ABORTION ON DEMAND?
>Did you forget to CCP it?
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=1209-gardiner
Contraception, of course, was not foolproof, so abortions multiplied and “official disapproval” of them faltered. In 1917 new guidelines set forth by the Reich Health Council allowed abortions “on the strictest health grounds,” only if approved by two doctors. In 1926 the law on abortions was mollified, and in 1927 the Supreme Court allowed doctors to perform “therapeutic” abortions. German law on abortion became “one of the most liberal in the world” because doctors could easily convince officials that any abortion was necessary for “health” reasons.
>Are you completely unaware of the fact that the defeated nations, of WW I, were not only suffering from the aftermath of WW I and the TREAT OF VERSAILLES, as well as from the world wide DEPRESSION, which made it necessary for many women to go to work ( there’s something wrong with equal pay for equal work and educated girls, now? ), and you don’t want women to have the vote?
When you let single women vote, they vote for unlimited immigration, welfare, and abortion. It’s not even disputable.
>I was talking about “FEMINISTS”, not a SUFFRAGISTS nor SUFFRAGETTE movement.
There’s no difference between the two. One follows the other as surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
>Where, in there, does it talk about “FREE LOVE”?
https://www.salon.com/2000/11/22/weimar/
Indeed, the sheer variety of odd sexual tastes Gordon documents in “Voluptuous Panic” is astonishing. For instance, Gordon identifies 16 different types of prostitutes, including “telephone girls,” enormously expensive child prostitutes ages 12-17 labeled “Marlene Dietrichs” or “Lillian Harveys” according to their physical attributes. These girls could be ordered by phone and delivered by taxi to the client. There were also so-called minettes, who acted out S/M fantasies, and “demi-castors” (French slang for “half-beavers”), young women from good families who made extra cash by hooking part time.
In tribute to the German mania for taxonomy, Weimar Berlin boasted an equally diverse assortment of lesbian and gay labels. “Sugar-lickers” were nighttime gay pederasts, and “Breslauers” were men with large penises. Lesbians might be ultrafemme “madis,” or tuxedoed, highfalutin “dodos,” and so on. And there seemed to have been countless nudists societies — some for libertines, some for health nuts and still others with ties to political parties like the Nazis or the Communists.
“Another thing which distinguished Berlin was the popularity of transvestism,” Gordon notes. “There’ve been transvestites in every culture and time, but in Berlin they organized, they had special clubs and they became an entertainment. Strangely, the lesbians identified with the male transvestites and the homosexual men despised them. The major organization for gay men (the Militant Homosexualists) saw themselves as supermale. Transvestites were at the bottom of their Nietzschean hierarchy.”
I can no longer watch the carnage.
It's too gruesome.
(There is a small flaw in his argument. Let’s see if you catch it.)
>Was abortion LEGAL in the 1920s, anywhere? Nope.
You seem to know absolutely nothing and make boastful claims that prove your ignorance.
The sword fights, torture, and the like were also for the masses; kind of like horror movies, car chases, and such, today in movies and T.V. shows.
The "histories", that dealt with English kings were written to curry favor with Queen Elizabeth I and some of the aristos. They were also propaganda fro the masses, who weren't all that educated, if educated at all.
There were different levels in the Globe theatre and being close to the stage is NOT where the "elites" were at all! This was a place for the masses, who interacted with the actors, by throwing things ( food, usually ), hooted, howled, yelled things at the actors and carried on in general.
Going to the theatre, back then, was NOT anything like what more modern people are used to at all.
Mostly, the audiences were composed of men. There were always some women in attendance ( mostly whores, orange and other food sellers, mistresses, and sometime some Royals, though they usually had a troop of players come tho their homes to do plays, so women got to see them then ), but "high brow" theatre was NOT, back then!
Fast forward a few hundred years and we come to opera. That most assuredly wasn't as rowdy. OTOH, it too was NOT "high brow"/only for the "elites"! And by the mid 1800s, operettas which are the forerunners of the modern Broadway musical, were for EVERYONE and usually "family" entertainment; especially Gilbert & Sullivan and Humperdinck, whose opera HANSEL AND GRETEL was a stable for children to go to, into the 1950s, in America.
Gulliver's Travels was just part and parcel of Swift's usual biting satire pieces, which is wrote on different topics, not just politics.
I tend to read non-fiction and have done, more and more so as the years go by, throughout my adult life.
I was always an avid reader, who read fiction almost exclusively, until my mid to late 20s. Then I read a mix of fiction ( which I began to read less and less of ) and non-fiction, until I couldn't find any "new" fiction worth a damn to read; let alone to buy...so I didn't.
I'm sort of out of reading detective stories ( yes, even Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, which I adored ) and I can't see going back to it right now. But after I get through with Bank's The L Shaped Room trilogy, I might take up your suggestion.
Re Allingham...her books are FANTASTIC!Once I found her and the books, I bought and read every single one of them; even the one/s that her husband finished for her, after she had died. You should try reading her work.
Re the post of mine that you "missed", I said that I love some country music ( Patsy Cline, Tennesse Ernie Ford, Johnnyh Cash and all of the Carters ), love MONTY PYTHYON ( since the '60s ), almost of their movies ( HATE "THE MEANING OF LIFE"...especially the vomit scene! ) and am a wild fanatic for FAWLTY TOWERS!
Would you like a list of all of the Brit Coms I've been and still am crazy for, since they've been shown in America and/or the ones I saw in London, over the years?
And if that stuff isn't low brow enough for ya, I'm a WHOITE of very long standing, though truth be told, once they resurrected it, I grew less and much less fond of that show and only watched it out of habit, until I just stopped watching it, never to watch it again.
And I LOVED "ORPHAN BLACK" !
I don't give a damn what some might label the books, music, movies, and T.V. shows I like; I like what I like and know what's good and what isn't.
I'm not like the NYC "400",of the Gilded Age, who bought boxes and went to the opera to be seen and hated the whole thing, but who felt that it was "THE THING TO DO"! Ditto for ballet, Shakespeare, and anything else someone calls "high brow".
I hope that clears things up, for you. :-)
Perhaps you and your ilk should start yet another, but different WOMEN HATERS CLUB thread, but then, who would then fulfill your masochistic perversions?
>No, diddums, I’ll start a new topic right here, on this now UNDEAD THREAD! :-)
>Perhaps you and your ilk should start yet another, but different WOMEN HATERS CLUB thread, but then, who would then fulfill your masochistic perversions?
Your so-called historical knowledge is nonexistent. You lie repeatedly and spew little more than small-minded insults. You’re not free republic material. I’ll contact the admins.
You've handed out many insults, so I replied in kind. What's the matter, infant, can't take it?
And using a Hilary phrase, with which to heap calumny upon me, is the lowest of the low; Barry Soetreo O !
LOL...that’s kinda clever but NOT the kind of “INDULGENCES” that I was talking about. The ones I referred to, were sold by priest, to make money for the Catholic church ( more often than not, pocketed by the priest of someone higher up )for the removal of sin/s, and/or for dead relatives in Purgatory.
Mr. First Amendment.
LOL...I'm not the one "bragging"; I just post what I know about several different topics which I don't have to look up, nor have to CCP or link to, because I know about the subject matter and have done for a long time.
Yeah, yeah...what'll you do about it?
Oh Yes I did!
You called me all kinds of fat, ugly, bald, freakish. Mp> I am none of those things and I offered you proof. If you choose not to accept it, that is on you. I suggest you stop speculating on your betters.
I'll tell you a secret, sweetheart. I have been called a lot worse by a lot more foul creatures than you, and lived to tell the tale. Most of the time giving better than I receive. If you imagine that your old lady insults have any affect on me other than to crack me up, you are even more senile than I thought.
Keep trying, though. You may land a punch out of pure persistence. I am on my best behavior. You don't want to see Batman in a bad mood.
Silly wabbit.
Nonsense, I’ve used that word for far longer than you knew it.
Blow it out your ear.
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