Totally agree, I’ve been a member of that site for a year and haven’t gotten one date! Yes, I know I’m a horrible person. But that site is a scam, plain and simple.
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Yeah, the more I think about it, the more it seems likely that the post was written by an AM employee or executive trying to salvage the business in the wake of these devastating leaks.
It seems like this is completely dismissive of the possibility that people are actually happy with what is going on. We’re imagining a scenario where partner A is getting sex somewhere else, and partner B is happy with no sex and unaware of partner A’s activities. Is it impossible to imagine that A and B are both basically fine with what they perceive their relationship to be? I’m not talking about a couple agreeing that they ought to split but that they should stay together for the kids, I’m talking about a situation with asymmetric information where one partner thinks it is better for everyone is the situation stays as it is.
Maybe the whole scenario isn’t believable. Maybe, somewhere inside B always actually knows. Maybe every A is a scumbag who doesn’t care about their children’s happy homelife but just doesn’t want to get caught. If Dan Savage thinks this kind of scenario really exists then I’m more likely to think he knows what he’s talking about than anyone in this discussion on boingboing. If that scenario does exist then we aren’t talking about kids being exposed to bickering or being taught that it’s okay for parents to not love each other. Their parents do love each other, and now that the sex pressure is off the table they get along great.
I love one of my exes but there is no way I’d want to be in a relationship with them again. But if we had to raise a kid together I think we could do quite well at that. I know that’s not the same.
We all know people’s sexual relationships don’t have anything to do with their ability to raise children. I think it’s extremely far-fetched to say that two people can’t get along over a long period of time if one of them has a big secret from the other. Do corrupt cops come home and tell their partners about the money they pocketed? Do you think Mengele told his wife about what he did in the death camps? (Yeah, I just Godwined the Ashley Madison thread)
A relationship in which one person is perpetually lying to the other isn’t a perfect relationship, but it can obviously work. A non-sexual relationship can obviously be the basis for raising children. I feel like we throw the word “marriage” in there and all of the sudden these things aren’t true anymore.
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So…it turns out it was an ingenious scam. Very few real women, fake ones to induce the punters, assume that they would all be too embarrassed to reveal it was fake so more mugs would get conned into forking out cash. And even if they asked to be deleted (for more money) the records were kept on file, presumably in case they could be sold later.
Oh Canada! It looks like the morals of your Prime Minister are trickling down.
Now please can someone do a similar data leak on Facebook to find out what they are really up to. Not that the users will take any notice, but the European Commission might.
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I’d say, give her permission, fully meaning it, and see if she offers it back. If openness is what you want, you might get it, and if you don’t get it, you’ll know where you stand anyway.
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I had a friend who was terribly sexually abused when she was young. She married at age 18 a very nice man who she had enough sex with to produce 3 children and very little more sex than that.
Her kids are lovely and they enjoyed being a family together. They raised their kids into their teens together parenting in an intensive style - breastfeeding until the kids were 3 or 4, homeschooling them to the point of reading novels at night together when the kids were teenagers.
Then she realized she was gay. She fell in love with another (married) woman and came out. She ended the marriage late in life.
She’s told me she believes her ex is also gay but just couldn’t admit it to himself.
I’m not saying they had a great marriage between the two of them, but it seemed like having a family was more important to them both than their own personal satisfaction with the relationship. Given her own personal history, raising three great kids (I knew her youngest and she was in fact a great kid) was probably a better outcome than most others with her past, and her husband must have been a big part of creating that stable space for the children.She and her ex-husband remain good friends.
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I don’t buy this “no good marriages end in divorce” idea. Marriages go through stressful times, and sometimes it doesn’t seem worth it. That doesn’t mean that it was necessarily always doomed to failure, or that it can’t get better, or that there aren’t ways to turn things around even at that point. Maybe divorce is the best option in the circumstances, but there are good relationships that are set up to fail because of patterns of behaviour - where those are changed, there’s plenty of hope for a happy relationship. A lot of what Louis CK says is him playing an act, but he doesn’t make it sound like the marriage was what didn’t work in this case.
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Exactly.
Sidestepping the privacy issues, this gets into prior reports of AM being shady as hell, but I had no idea the numbers were that bad. Only 1200 or less ladies who have used their services, and who knows how many of those might be sex workers or scammers (I imagine more than a few.)
I imagine most of these dating sites are complete Potemkin Villages, with automated sockpuppets.
I’d be really interested to find how they handled “customer service” with these sham accounts.
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I mean, if the marriage is good, why would the people involved agree to stop it?
Sure, but divorce doesn’t mean it was always doomed to failure, or that it couldn’t get better, it just means that the partners agree it isn’t working here and now.
Divorce can be an admission that these patterns won’t change - maybe they can’t, maybe the people are unwilling to try, but at any rate, they’re not going to foreseeably change, and maybe they’ve done enough damage where it wouldn’t matter even if they did. A happy relationship can be a divorced relationship - there’s still something in the person you like enough to have married them at one point in time, after all.
A divorce isn’t a bad thing, it’s the first sign of a bad thing getting a little bit better. If it wasn’t a bad thing, there wouldn’t be a divorce.
Heck and old coworker of mine after his last divorce a few years later mentioned getting a new house with insert same name of person who was the ex of that marriage. Yep they were back living together and happy just not married. I don’t know what kind of fooling around deal they have but they are happier as friends living together so who am I to say anything other than to jokingly tsk at him about that ‘isn’t being a good catholic boy’ as he does a lot of volunteer IT work for his parish.
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Welp 
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My point is that marriage is a longer term commitment than the here and now. I’m certainly not claiming that all couples should stick together, but I have seen a number of relationships break apart because of poor communication, lack of conflict resolution strategies, external pressure and other issues that aren’t really at the heart of the marriage itself, and have no need to be permanent. I spent a pretty bleak year after leaving my faith where as far as my wife was concerned, I might as well have had an affair. I was offered a job hundreds of miles away (I was unemployed at the time) and didn’t take it because I didn’t think I’d want to come back. At this point we’re closer than we’ve ever been - it’s something you can get past, as long as there’s something to build on in the first place.
Sure, but divorce doesn’t mean it was always doomed to failure, or that it couldn’t get better, it just means that the partners agree it isn’t working here and now.
Fine, I’m not saying that divorce is the worst thing you can do or that it means the end of the relationship altogether. Sometimes being able to split up when you have had enough means that things don’t have to get ugly. On the other hand, Louis CK seems to admit that he let himself go and stopped putting so much effort into the relationship, then was surprised to find himself on his own. Divorce may be a better outcome than continuing in that situation, but the situation itself was completely avoidable, if that’s a reasonable representation of what happened.
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[quote=“slybevel, post:166, topic:64480”]
give her permission
[/quote]?
i’m the one who is supposed to have been deprived, she doesn’t want anything for herself. it is the occasionally spoken regrets from her that i never experienced someone else that is driving the tiny oddity in my relationship.
As you say, it’s not about her, it’s about you. Making an offer to open the conversation can be a prudent approach. Especially when such an offer effectively costs you nothing.
To be clear, I am not talking about people in any variant of an open relationship.
I guess I find it really hard to believe partner B can be completely unaware of of partner A’s activities, and I find it even harder to believe that partner A is as happy as B might be, after all, to keep his/her partner unaware takes effort, money and time not dedicated to partner B.
Could this hypothetical relationship be stable? Yes, but it relies on spherical partner A willingly deceiving spherical partner B and being totally OK with it. This is by definition an unhealthy relationship, and I can believe that someone can compartmentalize this facet of his/her life. I don’t believe that people can do this without also adopting other behaviors and attitudes that support said compartmentalization.
Partner A might not buy a horse ranch but is definitely spending money on hotels, gifts, travel and ancillaries.
Furthermore partner B can be OK without sex, but needs to be naive to believe that partner A doesn’t care about it. Even if this wasn’t so, partner B would still need to square this no need for sex when with a partner who does want it. B can be negligent, uncaring or willing to turn a blind eye. Any combination of these traits between A and B will necessarily have different dynamics, none in which sex is the only significant variable.
TL;DR
The practice of cheating does not permit the fine tuning of the other variables in the relationship needed to keep up appearances without some cold calculation on the part of at least one of the partners. A relationship like this has more problems than just sex.
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Have you ever mistakenly believed you were in love with someone? You’ve certainly seen people claim to be in love when its only lust.
Well, you can also mistakenly believe you’ve fallen out of love. Its not even particularly hard.
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Seriously, you’re robbing one party of affection, time, honest communication, and respect beyond the sex.
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Are her spoken regrets actually about you or are they about her own insecurities?
Best to make sure before you assume at face value and find out otherwise, or it’s only going to make things worse.
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this has been going on for nearly 20 years. her regrets may reflect some insecurity but they seem mostly directed at my loss of opportunity. i’ve really had no desire to stray. on the other hand, if a unicorn wandered into my path it might prompt me to find out how real the regrets are. still, i’m basically content with my life. it would have to be quite the unicorn to nudge me from my very large comfort zone.
No good lives end in suicide?
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As someone happily married, I don’t think I’d agree with that. Every relationship changes. Every relationship ends. You wake up in the morning next to someone you care about and you make the active decision to keep this marriage going. If it isn’t working anymore, then you make the same active decision to end it. Your marriage when you’ve been married for a month is different than when you’ve been married for 30 years - it’s not the same relationship.
Divorce isn’t forever - if you did something impetuous, you can always revisit that decision. I mean, you might not be able to heal the marriage because you have shown yourself to be controlled by momentary emotions
Certainly from the perspective of the person responsible for the deed, this is true. In the situation of a marriage, the only people who are responsible for the deed do need to agree on this for a divorce to happen.
