monogamy & cheating

Question #1: Hi! A while ago I went through a pretty heavy break-up of a longstanding relationship when I found out that my girlfriend had been cheating on me. I don't want to be single my whole life so I would like to start going out again and maybe even get another girlfriend. But I sure don't want a repeat of my last experience. I think you could understand why maybe I feel a little burned by women. It was a really fucked situation by the end and she even ended up eloping with the guy she was cheating on me with and moved out of town with him. I guess she really couldn't stand the life we had together. The thing is, I really trusted her up to that point and I still don't really know why it happened. Before that things had been pretty good between us I thought. I guess she had issues I didn't know about. Anyway, my point is - I'm really wary and it's hard for me not to think - well are all women like that? I mean can you trust them? I don't want this experience to affect my next relationship because I would actually like to get married one day. Signed, Trying Not to Be Too Bitter.

Question #2: My last two boyfriends cheated on me. The first one confessed pretty quickly but the 2nd one lied to me for months. It was pretty ugly and I was devastated for a long time. Now I'm starting to think about dating again but I wonder is there even such a thing as a man who can be faithful? My dad cheated on my mom so I know how common it is. But isn't there anyone out there who can resist the impulse to be a lying, cheating bastard? Or is it just in their genes? Seriously. I would like to meet him if there is one. Signed, Somewhat Hopeful but Doesn't Really Believe Men Can Be Faithful.

Hello, Worried About Cheating Lovers People! And welcome. I'm very sorry to hear about your Cheated-on and Pretty Damn Unhappy About It experiences. Life can be fairly hellish from time to time, can't it? My sympathies indeed.

Unfortunately, as you have already figured out, the gripping drama of your personal life, impressive as it is, is not all that special. Billions of people throughout history have been cheated on and a significant percentage of them did not care for the experience really. But they dealt and so you can you. In fact, we are here specifically to help you deal - along with all those other cheated on people, male and female, gay and straight, young and old, who happen to stumble on this website. Because the issues that we will deal with are applicable not only to men as well as women - but even to people who are good-looking as well as people who are not! Unlikely as that seems.

First we will quickly answer your basic question as to whether there is such a thing as a person, even a person of your favorite sex for activities of a let's get it on nature, who can be faithful. The answer is: yeah, sure.

Of course there is. One of the truly alarming features of human beings is that they come in a disturbing array of varieties. Out of the 6 billion or so people on the planet, there are men (and women) who, once encsconced in some sort of relationship will not bother to be unfaithful for a wide variety of reasons. They are too lazy, too tired, too timid, too conscientious, too religious, too busy, not into sex enough, don't have enough opportunities, can't find someone attractive enough to cheat with, too scared, too moral, too much in love, not sure how to go about it, don't want to, don't like people enough to get embroiled with two of the horrible creatures at once, too unconfident, it messes with their head, it messes with their emotions, it messes with their chemistry; they are too rational, too focused on dealing with that pesky terminal bone cancer issue, too clingy, not imaginative enough, too romantic, not romantic enough, too resigned, too into their career, got into a relationship in the first place primarily so they wouldn't have to go through the harrowing process of seeking sex from novel sources anymore, too into whoever it is they are with, too sensitive, too aware of the consequences, or even some other reason nobody else would guess. There are oodles and boodles of these people wandering all over the planet, some of them, of course, already locked into a relationship on which they will not cheat (making them unavailable to you, of course). But they do exist.

These people are weird. The weirdness factor will become relevant later, but for now just make a note of it.

So that's not too helpful is it? Yeah sure, right, there are people who can be faithful, yeah I can intellectually accept that - but who cares because none of them are dating me! This is what your subconscious brain should be muttering to itself right about now.

And since I have such deep respect and esteem for your subconcious brain, and since you didn't really ask me to, I am now going to present a frighteningly logical and essentially absurd plan to secure for you a reasonably long-lasting relationship with someone who will not cheat on you. This plan will work for anyone and, surprisingly enough, it's actually guaranteed to produce the intended results! This, however, will be of small comfort to you once you get a load of what's actually entailed in implementing it. Intrigued? Of course you are.

All right, so let's dive into our plan in an organized fashion. The first we thing we will do is Face Reality. I know that sounds horrible, and of course it is, but don't worry we will not do that for too long. We are just getting it out of the way at the beginning so that we never have to do that again. At least not on this particular subject.

In the interests of Facing Reality so that it will not bother us again, we will start with Basic Facts.

Basic Fact #1:

All right, we've started to face reality. Basic Fact #1 means the odds are in some ways against you. Big deal. The odds are always against anything important to you personally. The odds against you actually being born were staggering, and yet here you are, like it or not. 6 million sperm vied for the chance to produce you, none of them really had a chance and yet one of them was the lucky lottery winner. Your odds are better than a sperm's by far. And the important thing is not the odds, but whether or not something is actually possible. The odds of a particular person going down in a spectacular plane crash are relatively small, but try telling that to to the hunk of charred flesh pulled from the burning wreckage by fatigued rescue workers! Okay, now that we've cheered you up with the burning flesh image and distracted your troubled mind from the horrors of your previous lovers, let's get back to the subject at hand. We've proven above that faithful people do exist, due to the fact that a significant percentage of the people on the planet at any given time are weird, so we know it is physically possible for you to find and mate with one.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find someone suitably weird and beat the odds. This business of weirdness and beating the odds and so on is crucial to our strategy. Two of the major keys to a happy and fulfilled life are a) beating the odds and b) securing the companionship of weird people. Normal people have a wide variety of undesirable traits and there will be times, in your search for happiness, where you will just really not fucking want to deal with certain of the undesirable traits of normal people. You will need to find someone unusual enough to not display the normal undesirable trait you have become used to so that you can be much much happier when you don't have to deal with it anymore! Make sense? Of course it does.

In our search for happiness, we must often pick and choose what unusual and yet desirable trait we are going to seek and then pursue it with relentless and dogged determination. This is exactly what finding a non-cheating lover is all about! This is very exciting and means that maybe securing a better class of lover is a go project for securing happiness all around.

Maybe.

Or maybe not. Because, in our ruthlessly organized and logical plan for getting you hooked up on a semi-permanent basis with someone who will not cheat on you, the 2nd component of Facing Reality is deciding whether the hell we want to accept the mission in the first place. Maybe we don't. Because we don't actually have to. Most people don't really. There are other options.

Important Point. Sometimes you will go ahead and embark on a mission without deciding first whether you choose to accept it and sometimes that mission will get completed even if more or less against your will - such as when you find yourself 6 months pregnant and you haven't really decided what to do. Chances are fairly strong that what you will do, like it or not, is give birth in about 3 months. But in many cases, it is helpful to decide whether or not to accept a particular mission because missions, like many other things, turn out to be real pain in the ass about halfway through. And when that happens, it's good to know, oh okay, I'm on a mission, I expected this, boy will I be glad when I'm done.

So let's just go ahead and go through the motions of deciding whether or not this is a mission worth accepting. We'll do this on the next page wherein we Review Our Options And Decide Whether We Can Live With Them and Maybe We Just Don't Care That Much Really About the Cheating Problem Anyway Now That We Have Thought About It and Realized That Maybe We Don't Want to Do Anything About It After All.

But first, let's take a refreshing break to whine! Like this:

prettyfedup.com

the pretty fucked up website

The Not 100% Complete FAQs for the Pretty Fucked Up Person in a Pretty Fucked Up World

Ah, cheating. If there is a hell...we're there right now