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There are lots of things you don’t know about a man when you meet him at a bar. Like, where he lives. Or who he knows. Or, sometimes, his name (which makes the phone number exchange mighty awkward the next morning). It is all part of the mystery, the fun…and the nature of the situation. Usually it’s better that way; knowing that kid likes Star Wars is not going to help set the mood.
Or, I don’t know…knowing he has a girlfriend?
I found myself in that precarious situation this past weekend. I was hangin’ out when I was approached by a fine specimen of a man. He was tall, dressed really well and his smile made me melt. We totally hit it off and soon found ourselves making out in the bar like we were Freshmen at a frat party.
He invited me back to his place and, eagerly, I obliged.
When we arrived back at his place – which was a far cab ride from my own abode – he went to the kitchen to get some much needed water and I started to look around. And I began to notice a recurring theme: cute kissy photos of him and a very adorable looking girl. Tons of them. Everywhere.
Clearly, this boy had a girlfriend.
He came back out of the kitchen, pushed me against a wall and began grabbing at my dress. I didn’t know what to do. I mean - he had a freaking GIRLFRIEND. What if that was me? What if my boyfriend was out picking up girls? But at the same time, he hit on me. He pursued me. This was his choice, not mine.
And he was such a good kisser.
In my drunken haste I rationalized with myself: that my dress was already halfway down around my legs, so there was nothing I could do now. That I was way too far away from home to walk. And that not knowing the girlfriend made it all OK. This was the boy’s choice, so how could any of this be my fault?
Now that the Amstel Light has left my system, though, I am not quite sure how I feel. I fear the evil wrath of Karma coming back to haunt me and a sleazy cheating boyfriend in my future. I fear that there is no hope for monogamy. And I feel incredibly guilty for waking up in some other girl’s spot the next morning.
I know that this guy is old enough to make his own mistakes, but being the guilt ridden Jewish girl that I am I can’t stop wondering if stopping this sex train was my responsibility. Should I have walked away?
45 Comments
But you don’t KNOW that he had a girlfriend… maybe they recently broke up and he hasn’t taken the pictures down. Maybe that’s his super-affectionate female best friend. Or maybe those are ridiculously unlikely but helpful excuses you can use to make yourself feel better about the situation.
Call me unnecessarily confrontational, but I would have asked him what the deal was. Except if he comes right out and says, “yeah I have a GF” and you stay anyway, that probably makes it worse. But it’s better to be sure, either way.
Yes, you should have in retrospect, but I think that we live in a world where “the other woman” gets blamed all too often for a cheating boyfriend/husband. You didn’t know he had a girlfriend at the time, so how is it your fault? I’ve had a very, very serious boyfriend cheat on me and it took me much too long to realize that it wasn’t the other girl’s fault - no, she probably had no idea and wouldn’t have done it if she had known - it was HIS fault.
Nope. Not your fault. You’re not committed to anyone. You’re in the clear.
It’s not your problem, he was the one doing something wrong. She’s not your friend, you have no bond to her at all, so who cares?
I’m pleasantly surprised that no one has yelled at you yet in this post…but it’s still early; I’m sure your readership won’t disappoint.
Absolutely you should have walked away. You enabled him to cheat on his girlfriend, it’s just as bad. If you were in that other girl’s position, you wouldn’t want the girl to use the excuse “Well it’s your boyfriend. I did nothing wrong.” You would want her to stop him and ask him what the hell is wrong with him.
It’s not your fault. He pursued YOU and even if you were flirting with him, it was HIS choice to keep going with you even though he had a girlfriend. I agree with KB, the “other woman” is too often blamed for the man’s mistakes.
Well.. wrong or right.. I would of done the same damn thing
And.. I’ve been the girlfriend before. It sucks - but so does having a man-whore boyfriend.
Atleast I learned - and didn’t stay in a shitty relationship.
I’d cut you some slack for being drunk, because it’s a lot harder to be the bigger person in that state. But I think you should never feel blameless just because you didn’t facilitate the situation, because standing aside to let something awful happen is just as bad as doing, because you know it’s wrong.
Yes you should have walked away. If some girl went to my boyfriend’s place and saw pictures of me everywhere I’d expect her to leave. Of course I’d be pissed with my boyfriend, too but you should know when to stop yourself whether you’re drunk or not. And usually, unless you’re at blackout point, you have the mindset to say no.
I’m actually surprised at the responses. With all the posts you girls have written about “sisterhood” and “helping a sister out” You all sound extremely hypocritical. It should be our JOB to respect our “sisters” property and stop a cheating boyfriend. Just because you’re single does not make it ok to hook up with a taken man. It was not your responsibility to stop it until you saw the pictures, then you should have said no I can’t do this.
But I can understand the situation completely and it is extremely hard to say no. I hooked up with my ex many times while he was dating someone else (although I had no actual proof he was since he never told me, I saw pictures of him and some girl on his facebook dated 2 years previous and they looked like they could have been friends but I had my suspicions) I confronted him later and he admitted it was his on again off again girlfriend, they are now engaged and he is still calling me, even though he was my first love I ignore him because if he’s going to cheat on his fiance it’s not going to be with me. Plus I’m in a committed relationship.
And before anyone calls me a hypocrite, I’m not the one writing for a site that promotes sisterhood, and I don’t necessarily believe in sisterhood.
I’ve been in the exact same situation… and I walked away. I refused to be the one who enabled him to cheat. And you know what?: I never regretted anything.
I know what it feels like to be cheated on, so I resisted.
After all: I don’t wanna be one of THOSE girls.
But to each their own.
exactly.. I mean everyone talks about women’s liberation, owning your sexuality and doing what you want. A guy would hook up with a girl regardless if she was in a relationship or not.
But stooping to those lower standards might make us equal, if you want to be equal with trash.
But I would never knowingly sleep with a guy who has a girlfriend, maybe because I can’t find them attractive after I realize they’re cheating scum, but for whatever reason, I wouldn’t want to stoop to that level.
I just sympathize WAY too much with the girlfriend and couldn’t live with the guilt of being “that dirty whore” (as I would most assurdely think of both of them, not just the other woman)
At least you could’ve left your underwear somewhere she might find them, and try to give the poor girl a heads up.
I have to wonder, though, would me not sleeping with this dude really make a difference? DO you think taht would stop him from finding someone else?
okay, radical thing you should have done that no one has seemed to bring up lol… why not, after seeing the pictures, ask? say, you arent with anybody right? i dunno maybe its just me but id feel really bad doing something like that and id want to know.
It would make a difference to you, at least it should because you would know that it wasn’t you that’s the “other woman”. It could or could not stop him from finding someone else. If you said something to him he could be either say “wow I’m a dirtbag” and not pursue anyone else or he could say “onto the next person”. Either way, at least you know that you weren’t the one that basically gave him permission to cheat on his gf. When women sleep with guys they know are taken, they give them the okay that this is fine to do and it’s clearly not.
I still maintain, Lauren, it is absolutely not your job to play moral police in this situation. Is this betraying sisterhood? Hells no, it’s not. Lauren hooking up with this guy has nothing to do with that girl. She is the one dating a scumbag and had she turned him down and walked away, that wouldn’t make him any less of a scumbag.
3 reasons I will argue:
-Lesser of two evils
-Do unto others
-Right thing when no one’s looking
This kind of relates to the two kinds of “evil people”: the one who does the evil thing, and the one who sees the evil done and lets it be done. its true that the first person may be “more evil” but I don’t think its right to knowingly sleep with a guy who has a girlfriend. You just have to put yourself in that girls shoes. Do unto others sort of thing.
My guy always says that being drunk is no excuse for anything, but I disagree. When you are drunk, shit happens. So that makes it less of your fault, however if you came into that situation a second time my advice would be to take the high road and not be “the other woman who knows what she is doing is bad and does it anyway because she won’t get caught”. do the right thing when no one’s looking.
How is this NOT betraying sisterhood? You are sleeping with another girls man! That’s the definition of betraying sisterhood! You just want what you want when you want it whether it’s someone else’s or not and that’s f-ing selfish and trashy! Those are the types of girls who give women a bad name. If you had no idea he was taken that’s a different story but she could have asked after seeing the pictures.
Even if he was in a “committed” relationship it’s not your responsibility to stop him from cheating. However, he could have had a girlfriend that recently died and he is still too attached to take down the pictures but also doesn’t want to come off as a sob story and tell you the first night he meets you. Or, maybe she’s spending the summer abroad or in another part of the country and they agreed to give themselves a break.
If I say that you were an accomplice to a guy’s cheating how do you feel about that?
On the one hand, I get it- you got caught up and you were there, it was far from your home, you weren’t really thinking- but at the end of the day you helped another guy cheat on his girlfriend. You’re going to have to deal with some guilt, sorry.
Elizabeth, I never claimed to be moral police. However, last time I checked a comment section is where you can leave comments about the article at hand. Everyone is entitled to voice their opinion. If you have a problem with that, then you probably shouldn’t be reading the comments.
The guy is in a relationship, and he is renegging on his commitment to her. I am not in a relationship, I don’t know the girl, and it is not my responsibility to be the watchdog for someone else. IF I was friends with the girl, then I had a responsibility to her. If she is a complete stranger, I don’t owe her anything , including giving her boyfriend the third degree to make sure he treats her well. He’s a grown man fully capable of making his own decisions. He decided to go to a bar and pick up chicks. he owes his girlfriend fidelity, but their relationship has nothing to do with me. I did sleep with a guy that it turned out had a girlfriend, I didn’t know, and she didn’t blame me, but her friends did. Oh freshman drama. Do I feel bad about it, no, I didn’t know, and it was an innocent mistake.
“He pursued me. This was his choice, not mine.”
But YOU made the choice to let him. I don’t think there’s anyway to justify what you did, and I hope that no one ever does to you what you did to this poor girl.
Since I don’t know you or the exact situation, I find it hard to judge you on this one. I know that, even with all the alcohol, I personally would have walked away. I have done so in the past. Not because I wasn’t in the mood for it (believe me, at times it is extremely hard to say no), but because I’m a firm believer of Karma. I believe that whatever you do to someone else (in this case: the girlfriend), will come back to you threefold. It keeps me cautious. Simple principle: don’t do to someone else what you wouldn’t want anyone else do to you.
But I DO know how hard it probably was, so I’ll cut you some slack. This time. Just don’t do it again!
Eech. I’ve made some dumb hook-up decisions in my life, so I’m not going to judge anyone else for theirs — but I wouldn’t have done it. I was in a position late last year where there was a bigtime obvious attraction between a guy who had a girlfriend (we were both exchange students, so he was doing the long-distance thing) and I. My friends kept saying to go for it anyway if he made a move… even if he had, though, I wouldn’t have been able to. Because “cheater” is such an unattractive personality trait to me that it overrides whatever else attracts me to someone. But that’s just me, and while I think it’s pretty not okay… these things happen.
(Sidenote: 3 months after both of us went back to our home countries, his Facebook status changed to “single”. ARGH.)
Kelsey, you bring up a good point, The reason I wouldn’t go back with my ex after finding out he had a gf while we were hooking up is because, he is a cheater, I don’t want to be cheated on so I’m not going to be with someone who I know is a cheater. And I only hookup with people that I see potential for a relationship with, I don’t care for random hookups and personally don’t see the point.
Shit happens. You didn’t kno for sure. Maybe you should have asked but what are you gonna do when some guy your attracted to is coming at you. your not going to want to kill the mood only for him to make up some excuse anyway and then possibly giving up because all he wants is to hook up and your already starting to act freakish and ask about relationships when you just met him. I’m not saying what you did was right but…what were you sopposed to do?
I think it’s not really about the other girl in this situation… how about having enough respect for YOURSELF that you don’t sleep with such an awful guy?
“I think it’s not really about the other girl in this situation… how about having enough respect for YOURSELF that you don’t sleep with such an awful guy?”
amen to that.
i think that’s the best comment i’ve heard so far.
i respect myself way too much to be some guys cheap cheat ass for the night…
“please do me on the bar while i’m staring at a picture of your girlfriend the whole time.”
ugh.
i dont think so.
have ya’ll heard of the monkeysphere theory? it’s actually really relevant to this situation. it talks about the way you treat and act towards people who are in range of your ‘monkeysphere’ which is an explanation of why women are willing to hook up with taken men…lacking empathy of the ‘monkey’ in question.
check it out- very interesting and humorous article EVERYONE should read. just trust me!!!!
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
Hi. I sympathize with your story - a hot guy singles you out, you feel great, and get to his place only to find that a cheating pick-up artist is, in fact, who singled you out.
Stop focusing on ‘fault’. What happened happened because you decided in the moment that the desire for sex would win out over the desire to feel like you were making the most ethical, considered decision.
You made a bad choice in an impulsive moment when your sex drive was talking louder than your conscience. Sated, your sex drive fell asleep and now you’re conscience, that night-owl, is hooting at you.
You can have all the casual sex you want without violating your personal ethics. You just have to decide what those ethics are. All’s fair in love and war? Do unto others? I think you actually already know the answer to this.
It’s hard to deny our impulses, especially when no one is watching and we can say ‘no one is getting hurt’. But there is always that ‘inner eye’ that sees everything, and judges, once the heat of the moment is past. Don’t beat yourself up needlessly over this - but learn from it. You know you deserve better from even your most casual hookups. Because someone did get hurt that night, and you know it.
Such mixed feelings on this one.
Being me (especially in my drunken state), I would probably just have blurted out, “Is that your girlfriend?!”
But you know what, the act of asking is really only so that your conscience can be clear the next morning. Because if he was so ready to cheat on her, he would have had no problem lying to you. At that point, his mind was on one thing, and really, he would have said anything to get it.
However, it’s devastating to find out that your man cheated, and there’s always a little part of your heart that calls the other girl a dirty whore.
As far as “sisterhood” is concerned, two things:
The point of such sisterhood is not so that we can support each other in staying down in our places and keeping to the old ways. It’s so that we can support each other in breaking out and rising to new levels.
Secondly, even sisters can do terrible things to each other sometimes. That simply means that they are human. Being sisters means they are family, and family forgives.
Less about “he was wrong for pursuing her” or “what about sisterhood?” but more about Lauren waking up in the morning and realizing that she did to someone else what she would never want done to her. Don’t be naive, he had a girlfriend. He is a scumbag. But her hooking up with him knowing he has a girlfriend (be honest, do you think the pictures were really just a pal?) makes her a scumbag. No, she’s not accountable for his actions, however she is accountable for hers. Grow up.
Well, at least you didn’t know for Certain that he had a girlfriend…
I mean, if you would have asked him, and gotten an answer, it would have been an entirely different situation. But sometimes we’re in these types of situations, and as you said, it’s sort of hard to get yourself out of them when overcome with temptation. Every girl makes these sort of faux pas, i feel for you.
I would have done the same.
But I feel you on the guilt sitch.
At least you still don’t know if he had a girl or not. At least you can reassure yourself of the possibility that those were pics of an ex.
You shouldn’t feel guilty.
He’s the one who should feel guilty for taking a drunk girl back to his place and screwing her before she could regain conciousness long enough to decide if it was wrong or right.
Of course you’re going to feel guilty; hey, it happens.
But I think that this shows more about his character than it does about yours. If you were truly evil hearted, you wouldn’t be feeling guilty like you are now.
The only question is, does he feel guilty???
This was likely not his girlfriend.
It was probably his wife.
It doesn’t make any sense when people justify either side of it. He’s a pig for cheating but you enabled him to cheat. You let him do it. That’s like letting a psychopathic killer out of an insane asylum. You didn’t kill anyone, but you let him out, therefore any blood spilled is on your hands. Do you understand? You’re just as responsible as he is. You had sex with another girl’s boyfriend. So enough of the sexist-based double standard.
No matter how good looking the man was….do you have no self control?
I’d hate to be known to people as “The other woman” who sleeps with peoples boyfriends/HUSBANDS!!!
Alright so lets look at it this way,
you saw photos, of…honestly you dont really know.
you know nothing about this guy, like you said, maybe not even his name, so for ALL you know those photos could be a NUMBER of things.
Say you did ask, if he was the “lying cheating scumbag” you think he might be, then he would continue lying and come up with a story about those photos. The fact of the matter, my guess is you were looking for a one night romp, you dont plan on making this guy your bf, so as you said the less you know the better. So to the girls that are jumping on her about “morality” and “sisterhood” back off, cause you know you wouldnt believe hes cheating on you till you caught him anyways. Bottom line, he’s probably not worrying about whether you had a bf or not, so just take it for what it was and move on.
Girls really need to stop doing this to each other. The other woman is to blame, just not solely to blame. Both the guy and the girl who hook up knowing that there is someone who is going to get hurt are to blame. Why are girls ok with doing something like that when they know if it happened to them it would break their hearts?
Well… I would have to say that regardless of if you stopped him or not… he had the intent to cheat which is the equivalent of cheating. So whether you did the deed or not the end result is that he cheated (either through intent or in a literal). So you know what… hey, the crime was already being committed…
… Oh yeah, and on topic… with respect to your moral dillemma… yes you were an accomplice to the crime since you did partake… but he’s liable. It’s all on him. Don’t feel bad for an offence that HE committed.
yeah, you should feel bad. He’s to blame for cheating, and your to blame for knowing he had a gf/justifying that ehh i’m not the one cheating so it’s ok. Don’t get mad at the girl your bf cheats on you with…she didn’t know…just like you…right?
I’m not the type to only get pissed at “the other woman.” In some cases she doesn’t know, and then it’s definitely not her responsibility. The guy knows what he’s doing. But, I think it’s better to be safe than sorry- you should ask the guy, that’s your responsibility. And, if it’s pretty clear a guy’s in a relationship, DON’T do it. No, it’s not your responsibility to hold the guy accountable, but really, do unto others as you would have them do unto you- a guy can’t cheat alone, and yeah, he may find someone else, but at least you did the right thing. And don’t just turn him down for the girlfriend’s sake- but because you’re better than that. There are plenty of hot, single guys.
If a guy is gonna cheat, hes gonna cheat. So it may aswell be you. I’m out to get what i want. Just because somethings not strictly on the menu doesnt mean you cant order it.
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