On the subject of condiments...

[Thorn]

my god, you are so theatrical! "turned her life upside down" since when? "innocent girlfriend" where? "glorious detail" my foot.

you are telling a histrionic tale - and then telling me what i need to do in that tale. it's a bit of a conversation killer. stultifies honest dialogue.

You didn't impact her life to the point where you could say it had been turned upside down?

Is she still with this man?

I am not telling you what you need to do. I am telling you what I think you did do. I based it upon what you wrote.

You said: "when i got disgusted with the slimy situation and contacted the woman to inform her that her shithead bf was fucking around with me...."

Why were you disgusted? You seem to imply later it was his actions that were responsible. Was that the case?

Would you have contacted her if you hadn't been disgusted with the situation?

Am I correct that that you were angry at him at the time you decided to speak to her about his affair with you?

======

Searching for motives behind other people's actions was part and parcel of what I did for a living for many years. I am sorry if my long term experience in that area caused me to have questions here about your own. I am more than willing to drop it, but I would suggest[here is where I am saying what you ought to do ] that at some point some introspection, perhaps, might be a good thing on your part.

I would ask that you ask yourself, "Why?". If you find that in any way you were angry at him? If you wouldn't have told her had you not been angry with him? If you would have continued the affair and not been disgusted had it not been for being angry with him? If all were going well with him would you not have contacted his girl-friend?

If the answers to any of these questions is yes you need to re-think your motivation and thus your intent; then ask yourself if you used her to hurt him, just as he used your sister to hurt you?

You know I wish you well.

Most respectfully...

 

[Thorn]

II don't think we can hold informers accountable for the pain of the informed simply because they told the truth. Now, they might be held accountable for other things (like fucking my fiance and helping her lie to me about it), just not that.

The truth is a mighty weapon when its edge is used to cut the psyche of another. It can damage even more deeply than a lie because a lie can be deflected if the receiver can see through it and determine it is a lie. The truth can not be seen though and its pain not diverted in such a manner.

Human beings harm each other with the truth all the time. Especially in scenarios where damaging a third party is used in order to harm or coerce another. What do you think "blackmail" is if not precisely that?

When the intent of the informer is to hurt or profit first and inform second you are damn skippy we can hold the informer accountable for the damage done.

 

[wolf5958]

that sounds so especially shitty, being hurt by not one but two people who are dear to you. if you don't mind me asking, in your situation would you have preferred that either of them was honest with you about things - or do you think it would have been better to not have known at all? xo

It is like anything in life, sometimes ignorance is bliss. Had i not found and read her journals I would have never known. Life would have gone on uninterupted. I can not say how I would have felt had they told me at the time. What I do know is at that time my friend was using me to alibi his other affairs from his wife. My wife was sending me out driving for friends. In the end both were using me. I am not one to trust easy, these are people who at that time had earned my trust.

So now I keep a very small circle of friends, I trust very few, and I watch my back.

 

[SubmissiveAngel]

You need to fix the part where you decided it was OK to turn some one's life upside down because blah blah blah, etc etc.

.....

I am not telling you what you need to do. I am telling you what I think you did do.

 

[SubmissiveAngel]

dear thorn

i gather that this unwavering effort of yours is leading towards the 'ahah' moment, when i 'admit' that i wanted to hurt shithead, and you thunder "you are damn skippy we can hold you accountable for the damage done!"

the funny thing is i never said (or even so much as hinted) otherwise. and you of course don't know what damage was or wasn't done. obviously you are working off of some script that you are familiar with - perhaps intimately familiar with - but please don't superimpose it onto my story!

rather than your judgements, i'd much prefer to hear from you about you.

 

[SubmissiveAngel]

A true friend will suffer inside and kill the sentiment slowly, choosing instead the emotional sacrifice.

unless, of course, you are a true friend to your spouse, and your sentiment is to create a relationship with someone else.

 

[wolf5958]

wolf, this only confirms again to me what a great and noble person that you are.

I don't want to pass judgment on your late wife, as I don't know the circumstances and the confusing situations she may have found herself in. However, I can't stay without mentioning that your former best friend was apparently a true shithead and scumbag.

While, you can't blame love (it is only human to fall in love with your friend's wife), creating a relationship with her is not a manly thing to do. At least not in my eyes. A true friend will suffer inside and kill the sentiment slowly, choosing instead the emotional sacrifice.

Well I only mentioned this one time but there were others as well. I guess a leopard can not change their spots after all. She was good at keeping secerts. It was after her death that I found the journals. Something inside me screamed don't look, but I did.

I look at the times that she had affairs and I think of what I was doing. Funny many times I could have had an oppertunity to have a fling but choose not to. Something having to do with loyality.

It is all water under the bridge. I can not change the past, so why try to. As far as hurting others it would not make me feel any better all it would do is make others suffer with me. It may not be fair but one thing I know is if I have someones secert to protect, I will do so no matter the cost. It is just how I am and I won't let someone else change me.

If you look up the job and duties of a wolf, you'll find it is his job to protect and gaurd I guess I chose my name well long ago.

 

[SubmissiveAngel]

It is like anything in life, sometimes ignorance is bliss. Had i not found and read her journals I would have never known.

when i was first involved with my husband, i kept a journal. at that time, i had ambivalence about my relationship with him (driven in large part by my desire to return to my former life.) years after our divorce, when he and i had occasion to discuss things, he admitted that he had read the journal - and that all of his subsequent beliefs about me and our relationship rested on those few words. as a result, he was never able to see how much in love with him i was, or to believe me when i made my commitment to him and our relationship.

the secret that he kept, about reading the journal, kept him from ever knowing what was on my heart, or feeling safe in our relationship. i still wish he had been open with me - not so much about reading the fucking thing, but about his subsequent beliefs and fears. i am grateful that we were able to talk about it after the fact, because it did give us the kind of closure you were unable to experience with your wife.

 

[Ruv Me Rong Time!!]

Your English is great. I was just pointing out that you can hate the playa and the game.

Psychology is a valid area of study, but so is economics (or anthropology, or sociology, or ...)

Psycolology = tea leaves or chicken bones

the other two are sciences

 

[Ruv Me Rong Time!!]

Regardless of how she finds out about the hobby.. its my fault and my responsibility for engaging in it. The blame for my behavior can lay only at my feet. Would i be really pissed at the messenger... sure.. but ultimately.. the buck stops here..

 

[justme]

However, if she's the reason jm is back in our fold, may their relationship last forever and ever. (Didn't I say that I am a selfish fuck.)

Not that you could possibly care, but narcissism compels me to point out that I'm back to sort out a few things that have been going on in my head, not because I've started paying for sex again.

 

[justme]

is no one else here going to answer my question? maybe nobody wants to talk about being on the receiving end of this stuff.

Fortunately I've never been on the receiving side, but I think that I'd probably react by trying to reclaim the power I'd lost by living in a false world by simply blaming myself for being so "easily" duped. Having witnessed this reaction from a close distance, I can say it makes the whole thing more tragic.

 

[justme]

The point is, you FEEL hurt by his actions -- but if it weren't for his sloppiness, you wouldn't KNOW about his actions, and so you wouldn't FEEL hurt.

Since we're all cheaters here, we view the main issue as preventing harm as a result.

Survivorship Bias!

I'm not sure you can really measure the care with which someone constructs a deception by the success of that deception. That ignores chance. It's like saying someone who spends half their earnings on lottery tickets for five years and then hits for $100 million is a financial genius. They're the same idiot they were before they won.

And so once you accept that, no matter how careful you're being, there is some chance that your deception will fail then I'm not certain how you can advocate shooting even a malicious messenger.

Put another way: wouldn't you want to know?

 

[justme]

or do you think it would have been better to not have known at all? xo

My point is that you never get to chose this as an option because you might find out some other way.

 

[justme]

The truth is a mighty weapon when its edge is used to cut the psyche of another. It can damage even more deeply than a lie because a lie can be deflected if the receiver can see through it and determine it is a lie. The truth can not be seen though and its pain not diverted in such a manner.

Of course the truth can hurt. I acknowledged that. But I'd rather be done with it than have impending doom looming over me.

Seriously, Thorn, if you want to talk about self-inspection, how enamored of duplicity does someone have to be to compare being shot to being told the truth?

 

[wolf5958]

when i was first involved with my husband, i kept a journal. at that time, i had ambivalence about my relationship with him (driven in large part by my desire to return to my former life.) years after our divorce, when he and i had occasion to discuss things, he admitted that he had read the journal - and that all of his subsequent beliefs about me and our relationship rested on those few words. as a result, he was never able to see how much in love with him i was, or to believe me when i made my commitment to him and our relationship.

the secret that he kept, about reading the journal, kept him from ever knowing what was on my heart, or feeling safe in our relationship. i still wish he had been open with me - not so much about reading the fucking thing, but about his subsequent beliefs and fears. i am grateful that we were able to talk about it after the fact, because it did give us the kind of closure you were unable to experience with your wife.

Just maybe it is why I still have the hurt. To add insult to injury in my own stupid way I have tryed to open communication with my friend he now ignores me completely. I never faced him in anger or was looking for a pound of flesh. In the end he mangaed to cut me off from the rest of our little group. I had never thought of him as the leader but yet he has closed the ranks with me on the outside.

Ok to be honest here I do once in a while get vindictive thoughts in my head. I just hope that someday he will get what he deserves, but it will never be me doing it.

How is it said "what comes around goes around?"

 

[justlooking]

Put another way: wouldn't you want to know?

FIRST RESPONSE: Honestly, no.

SECOND RESPONSE: Maybe it matters what it is. If it's something meaningless like seeing prostitutes or getting massages with happy endings or hanging out in Chippendales or something, I'd rather not know. If it's something meaningful like having an affair with my best friend, probably yes.

I'll say this for Wolf's situation, though: once she's dead, I'd rather not know anything about anything (although nothing would have been able to stop me from reading those journals, either).

 

[Thorn]

i gather that this unwavering effort of yours is leading towards the 'ahah' moment, when i 'admit' that i wanted to hurt shithead, and you thunder "you are damn skippy we can hold you accountable for the damage done!"

the funny thing is i never said (or even so much as hinted) otherwise. and you of course don't know what damage was or wasn't done. obviously you are working off of some script that you are familiar with - perhaps intimately familiar with - but please don't superimpose it onto my story!

rather than your judgements, i'd much prefer to hear from you about you.

Just for the record, I'm not looking to you for any gotcha moment. I posted it only for the reason I stated, to cause people to think.

We have, in these things we do to please ourselves, as much potential for damage as for joy. It occurs to me that the best way to minimize the damage and maximize the joy is a little fore-thought. So here, located in one forum, are a series of threads to give people reason to go, "Hmmmmm". To think about what they do, how they do it, and to make the way, hopefully, easier for everyone concerned.

If we are all practicing with an eye toward minimizing the damage we cause it doesn't just help the persons involved. Sure, they receive direct benefit, but we don't do these things in a vacuum. Shrapnel is flying all over the place and the less of it there is the less likely we are to get hit with someone else's goings on and the safer we all are in this "thing of ours".

That's my only purpose. I promise.

It doesn't matter what side one comes down on in these discussions. It matters only that they are discussed and thought about. Something that, when it comes to the immediate gratification impulses directly associated with sexual desire and connected activity we sometimes see little evidence of.

As I said, that is actually the whole reason for the creation of this forum and what we cover in it. So thank you very much [truly] for contributing something to think about which may actually help others, however they decide about what they have read for their own lives when all is said and done.

 

[Thorn]

Of course the truth can hurt. I acknowledged that. But I'd rather be done with it than have impending doom looming over me.

That is a personal choice that is removed by the person presenting the truth in situations like we are discussing.

Seriously, Thorn, if you want to talk about self-inspection, how enamored of duplicity does someone have to be to compare being shot to being told the truth?

????

I don't think I have ever seen a duplicitous analogy? I've just seen ones that work and ones that don't.

And even if one could be, I have seen much damage in 25 years of cleaning up the messes caused by people to each other. Much more of it by people declaring to be delivering truths, whether that be the case or not, than by people using guns. So I state there is some justification born in personal observation in the analogy used.

 

[marcinny]

unless, of course, you are a true friend to your spouse, and your sentiment is to create a relationship with someone else.

That does not concern me personally as I don't consider commercial transactions "relationships" and one of the sentiments there is about making me a better partner for my SO.