The Bitter Single Guy’s Relationship Advice

From Setting a Wedding Date to Polygamy

Dear Bitter Single Guy: I’m a junior in college who has been dating the same woman for three and half years.  We started dating in high school and have had a very good long distance relationship since we went school.  We were a long bus ride away from each other, but we made it work.  We had our spats and she would occasionally have her eye get caught by someone else, but we always made up.

This last year she has taken a year off school for depression and has been living with me.  The year has been fantastic.  She has recovered from her depression and we love living with each other.  The only sad part has been the knowledge that she will return to school this fall.

We have been very serious.  As recently as several months ago, we were trying to figure out when would be the best time to get married and what we would name our future children.  We were enjoying planning our life.

About six weeks ago, while a work a man asked for her number.  This never happened to her before and she was touched.  She gave him the number and they started to talk and meet.  She admitted to this early not wanting to hurt me, but I figured she needed to explore a bit before we moved on.

Well… since then she has come to really like this man, has spent the night with him and had sex, and has decided that she likely wants to live a polygamous life.  She feels her love for me is unchanged (and honestly, it appears that is hasn’t) and is extremely frustrated that I am hurt by her relationship.  She can’t understand why this bothers me, why sex with him  or having a close relationship with him bothers me, if I know that she loves me.  She thinks I am just being jealous and possessive.

I feel hurt that even if she feels feeling for him she can’t set them aside until I get my feelings straight.  I can’t imagine that her having a “second husband” in the future wouldn’t have an impact on our closeness.

I don’t know what to do.  She has had many horrible relationship with family in the past and so is a little unstable sometimes.  I feel like I’m waiting for her to possibly come out of what is a phase, but she is walking all over my feelings.  I put her first all the time, but I feel like she is not.  We have been through so many hard times it’s hard to imagine not getting through this one, but it hurts a lot and she won’t adjust to me. ~Don’t Want to Share~

Dear DWS: Dude, the Bitter Single Guy has hard advice for you. Dump her. Dump her now. She doesn’t want to be polygamous (or polyamorous), she’s caught in that thing that lots of folks get caught in…she’s got a thing for two people at the same time and is being asked to choose (the BSG wonders what New Guy thinks about her marriage plans to you).  She wants to have her cake (you) and eat it too (New Guy) and the BSG isn’t aware of many (any?) situations where that works out happily for everyone.

Don’t buy into any new-agey explanations about how everyone wins in open relationships. The truth is that you’re not ready for an open relationship. Don’t buy into what her past relationships have done to her, or her family, or her history with depression. The best thing you can do for her is help her understand the consequences of her behavior.

Or, to summarize all that stuff: dump her. Dump her now.

~BSG~

Playing House

Dear Bitter Single Guy: This girl and I have started sleeping together, but actually just sleeping without sex or even making out. We both have been hurt/messed up from recent break-ups and agree that we don’t want to be in a relationship right now. We want to take time to figure each other out and see if anything happens.

We both have histories of being impulsive when dating and moving too fast. This is another reason why we have started doing this. I care about her a lot and I’m sure she cares about me. The thing is that I don’t how much longer I can keep “playing house”. She’s amazing and I don’t want to mess things up, but hate feeling sort of led along like she’s getting what she wants out of me and I’m waiting patiently for the reward of sex.

The fact is that I think sleeping together is a very intimate thing especially with the amount of cuddling and small kisses we give each before falling asleep. I really enjoy it despite my frustrations about not having sex. She knows this and retains the argument that we both agreed to just figure each other out first.

Is this normal and healthy or twisted and pathetic? Can anything good happen from playing house the way we are? ~Wanting More~

Dear WM: So many questions!  The Bitter Single Guy can tell you that your situation is both normal and healthy AND twisted and pathetic. From the BSG’s perspective, normal and healthy is any arrangement that results in consenting adults feeling good about a relationship. For that reason, the BSG thinks that some time spent cuddling in a non-sexual way can be a great way to bond in the early part of a relationship.

But clearly you’re done with that WM, or you wouldn’t be writing. The BSG thinks now you’re heading into twisted-and-pathetic-land. In this particular version of twisted-and-pathetic-land there are a couple of clear dangers:

·         Cuddly Girl will get all comfy in your safe, sex-free relationship and she’ll start to think of you as a big stuffed animal that she can cuddle and play house with, but who doesn’t get her motor running, if you get the BSG’s drift. This is all fine and good of course, until she meets someone a little edgy, who is not at all like a stuffed animal and who DOES get her motor running. Do you see this future WM? Of course you do. In this future, she starts telling you all about how exciting it is to be around Edgy Guy even while cuddling up next to you and you finally get to see what it’s like for your girlfriend to be sexually interested in someone. Sounds fun, eh?

·        In this less graphic but more insidious scenario, you will have established a dangerous pattern with Cuddly Girl where she is able to hold out on intimacy, leaving you panting and hoping. You could spend years in a relationship where you are a minor contributor at best. Your girlfriend will own all the decisions about the way in which the two of you connect. After enough time anything can seem normal and you’ll just wake up realizing that *ahem* you have a closer relationship with the latest issue of Cosmo in the bathroom than you do with your girlfriend.

Have a conversation with your girlfriend about how much you care for her and how great you think it is that you’ve both decided to wait for physical intimacy. But then tell her clearly that you’ve gotten all the value out of waiting that you needed and that you’re done waiting. This shouldn’t mean that Cuddly Girl should now live by YOUR timetable…she may not be finished with cuddly time yet. But she should know that your clock is ticking and that at some time in the foreseeable future you’ll be ready to move on to a relationship that includes physical intimacy.

~BSG~

Dating a Four Year Old

Dear Bitter Single Guy: I’m having an odd situation with my bf. we have been dating nearly a year now and I already know and understand that he doesn’t like a good friend of mine.

so I tell him I’m going to my friend’s house for a little party with her grandma we have had every year since we have been friends. He doesn’t like that I’m hanging out with her and brings up for the first time that he wanted to hang out with me on that same day. Then he was basically making me choose between seeing him or going to my friends get-together, and if I saw my friend then he refused to see me the rest of the day because he said it would feel awkward seeing me after me coming from her house.

a little later in the evening after the party, I had invited him to see a show with me and my mom thinking that his little ‘you made your choice’ stunt wasn’t as serious as other times. He declined for the same reason. Then after I got out of the show with my mom, I find out he saw the same show at around the same time but in a different theater!

Do you have any idea why he would do this or how I should respond to it? ~Torn Between Friend and Boyfriend~

Dear TBFB: The Bitter Single Guy is, as he’s said before, usually limited because he only hears one side of the story. For that reason, his policy is usually to assume that what the letter-writer tells him is accurate. The BSG provides this disclaimer so you will understand his response here. Your boyfriend is a big whiny baby and someone needs to spank his whiny ass  (and not in that good way).

Really TBFB? He refused to be around you on a day that you had spent time with your friend? What, like you’ve got cooties on you or something? The BSG could almost…ALMOST…understand his position if the friend in question was an old boyfriend or even just another guy, but as the BSG understands it we’re talking about a girlfriend you’ve had for some years, right?

Unless she’s some sort of axe-murderer, Big Whiny Baby has a responsibility to let you have your friends and to agree to be relatively mature about it simply because she’s your friend. Of course, you have the responsibility to recognize that your boyfriend won’t like all your friends (or you his) and to respect those feelings when making plans. But frankly, none of these finer rules of relationships matter in the face of Big Whiny Baby’s cooties-avoidance behavior. Kick his ass a little, TBFB.

~BSG~

The Wedding’s in Two Weeks

Dear Bitter Single Guy: I’m a 27 year old female and am getting married in two weeks. He’s a good guy and we already have a house together. We don’t fight and everything’s fine. But I can’t say right now that I want to spend the rest of my life with him. I feel like I should be excited to get married but I’m really upset. We went through the motions because our relationship is stable and happy.

The truth is I’ve been intensely in-love with someone else for the last 12 years. He’s a friend of mine and there’s always been more. He has been in a serious relationship for 6 of those years and got married a year ago. His marriage fell apart already. We’ve tried to end our friendship many time for the sake of each other’s happiness but I can’t imagine my life without him. Help me. Am I just afraid because this is a big step or am I unhappy? ~Hearing the Ticking Clock~

Dear HTC: Don’t get married. The Bitter Single Guy knows as he writes those words that you’re probably going to go through with it. Weddings, as many of the BSG’s readers know, are juggernauts…building speed and destructive power until they sweep through the lives of everyone involved with a mind of their own. Often…maybe even usually…the wedding juggernaut leaves happiness in its wake, but sometimes it’s just carnage. The BSG predicts carnage in your case HTC.

OK, the BSG will say what is probably obvious or you wouldn’t have written. If you’ve been in love with someone for 12 years who has also been in love with you for some portion of that time, AND if that person is available AND if you’re about to become (some would argue) permanently UNavailable,then you have a recipe for despair on your hands. The BSG thinks you should not get married and should see what’s up with The Other Guy. Of course, this will leave your fiancé emotionally destitute and isn’t likely to make you many new friends, but it’s likely to be less painful in the long run.

All that said, if the marriage proceeds as the BSG predicts it will, you’re going to have to make the difficult long-term decision to let your love for The Other Guy fizzle out over however many years it takes, while you find a way to appreciate your actual husband.

Of course, the BSG also predicts that none of this will happen. The BSG predicts that you’ll get married and will make a valiant attempt at forgetting The Other Guy, but that it won’t work. The BSG gives you maybe 3 – 5 years before the pressure wins out and you’re divorced or are cheating (if those are the choices, choose divorce HTC).

It’s sad, but the BSG thinks that the sacred institution of marriage is an archaic leftover from when people were willing to be unhappy in their relationships for their entire lives. These days we all have the gall to desire actual happiness more days than not and that’s not always conducive to a ‘better or worse’ kind of relationship. So we say words in front of friends, family and sometimes clergy about commitment and forever when neither the friends, the family, nor the clergy really believe it. But there you have it.

OK, off the soap box. Let us know how it turns out, HTC.

~BSG~

Not Dead

Faithful Readers, the BSG swears he has not met an untimely demise. Spring has brought an unexpected flood of metaphoric fires the BSG has to put out before he can attend to his duties here again.  Soon…soon….

~BSG~