That ain’t right on November 30, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I would just like to start by saying you have a brilliant page here…..

Well I’m 16 and I am dating a 33 year old man. We have been together for 5 months nearly. But the problem is not me or him, it’s everyone else. No one I know can understand or accept it. They all believe he is using me and that he doesn’t care for me. I don’t know what to think anymore because it feels as if both sides are brainwashing me. I believe he does care for me, and pray that he wouldn’t be just using me, as I lost my virginity to this man.

I sometimes hope I am not with him just so I can feel special and wanted, becuase he definitely makes me feel good about myself. My mother doesn’t know, but my friend’s can’t praise me for him anyway.

The only major problem in this relationship is that he wants it to be a secret…he doesn’t want other people knowing of it, and when we meet each other it’s always in secret, non-populated areas. Plus I must admit all he wants to do all the time is talk about sex and when we will be doing it next. But he always tells me he loves me. I’m so confused…

I just want to know is there anyway that this man could really be in love with me?

— Feeling Used

BG takes the question seriously after the jump!

Dear Breakup Girl,

This is a weird one because it is not a traditional relationship, it is an affair. I am married and seeing someone who works for my husband. When we first talked about having an affair we both agreed that this was just a sexual, brief affair. I don’t want to break up because the sex is great (and he is gorgeous and fun). However, I know that if I don’t break up, he will be the one to tell me (very politely, civilized, etc., because I am his boss’ wife) that he doesn’t want to see me anymore and then I will feel like your Papua New Guinea widowers hut is not near enough. What to do? Should I have great sex with him one last time and end up on a high note, or try to keep buying time in a relationship that is going nowhere? We can’t afford to end up bitterly because he is my husband’s right hand man and we have to see each other socially all the time.

— C

Dear C,

I don’t really see the difference between the two “approaches” you suggest, at least in terms of trying to stay civil. In a sense, Higgins has more to lose than you — I’m pretty sure that no matter what happens, he’ll keep it real, at least in public. That’s the least of your worries. I’m more worried about the fact that you have to see your husband socially all the time. I mean, most of the “I’m cheating!” letters I get have to do with what the affair means for the marriage. You’re wondering what the affair means for the affair. And for your feelings. Weird. Maybe you two have some sort of arrangement; otherwise, your husband definitely knows about this, or he is living in some hut in Papua New Denial. Or maybe you are. Whatever happens with the affair, handle whatever you need to handle in the traditional relationship too, please. Okay?

Love,
Breakup Girl

This advice was originally published November 16, 1998.

Getting over it on October 5, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Here’s a tough one. I can’t believe I’m writing, but I’m looking for some sort of outlet here, for a problem that no one seems to want to acknowledge or address: how to get over the end of an affair so I can move on with my life.

You see, I’ve been in a virtually sexless marriage for almost 7 years. We got married very young (23/22), and even though we were sexually active, and enjoyably so, before we got married, my attraction to him started to wane before we got married. Trying to be mature and patient, I attributed this to the new responsibilities we faced as adults and believed that we would get back on track once we were living together and got our lives moving. Unfortunately, we never ending up addressing the problem, and basically avoided sex and never really developed a sexual relationship in our marriage. In the meantime, we continued to build a good marriage in many other ways, and have been loving, compatible companions.

Anyway, here’s the real crisis (or the additional one): several months ago I had a very brief affair. I had felt so lost for so many years, had doubted my basically ability to feel desire, and once I did, and had the opportunity, I took it. I never thought I was the kind of person who would be unfaithful in a relationship, but now I’ve learned that it’s not really a “kind of person” kind of thing. The other guy was going through a divorce, and we had been friends at work for several years, and suddenly things started happening, and we both let it happen, fully conscious (I do take full responsibility and won’t fall back on the “it just happened” excuse). Anyway, he ended things, saying it was too hard for him that I wasn’t fully available to him, and that he knew I needed to work things through with my husband and find out where all that was going, and he wanted us to continue our friendship and put up some boundaries between us. I agreed in theory, but felt so lost and confused and rejected in a way, knowing all the while it didn’t make any sense, but feeling hurt all the same. Well, I couldn’t handle any of it — the deception, the doubts I was feeling about my attraction to my husband, the confusion, and when my husband asked me, I told him the truth. He was devastated, shocked beyond belief, and actually became violent and smashed things in our apartment and went to my office to dig around and find out who the guy was, and went to his house and punched him. He is not usually a violent person, though he has always been very jealous, but I must say that this was out of character for him (and me, as well, or so I thought).

(more…)

Coming clean on July 6, 1998...

Dear Breakup Girl,

I have a boyfriend in Japan, and I live in Seattle. We have decided to stay together for the summer and we aren’t supposed to be seeing other people. I, however, have met someone and I don’t know if I should tell my boyfriend or not. It’s just a summer thing and I still love my boyfriend very much. It’s just hard to go from being with someone everyday and then not seeing them for three months. If I told him, I know he would be very upset and would most likely break up with me. What should I do?

— Bridgett

Dear Bridgett,

If you break up with Summer Thing now, like before you even finish reading this letter, then you don’t have to tell your boyfriend. If you let it go until just before Japan Air flight #123 hits the ground, you do have to tell him.

Okay, now that you’re back, let me elaborate. (more…)

Still suspicious on July 6, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

All right, here’s the dilly: I’ve been with my girlfriend for nigh 3 years now. Recently, we both went through major upheavels in our lives, during which we fought & came close to ending things. During that time, she started seeing another guy. I found out because I came over for Valentine’s Day and he sent her flowers saying they had started something beautiful. Anyway, I freaked, and she told me that they had just gone on a couple of dates, nothing serious. From V-Day until recently, I had always been suspicious she was still seeing him, but whenever I asked, she told me she wasn’t and that I was being paranoid. Which, I believed, because she never lies, even when it’s the easy thing. One time I tried snooping but was caught so the only thing I accomplished was ruining her trust.

Last week, one of her good friends (who isn’t the smartest person) told me (she doesn’t know it though) that I was correct. She was seeing this guy, slept with him, etc. and lied to me when I asked. Another friend of hers told me that they did have something for a while, but it was over and that she digs me again and is head over heels. So what do I do? I don’t want to ruin my gf’s friendship on account of her friend being an airhead. At the same time, I “triumphed” over the other guy, because now everything between us is wonderful. Is there a reason to bring up these past issues? On the other hand, she lied when I confronted her and made it look like I was the person that was wrong, and she managed to make me believe it. What’s to say it won’t happen again? I don’t want to be in a relationship where I can’t trust her when we aren’t getting along.

Should I leave well enough alone or do I dig until I get the truth at the probable expense of the relationship between us and between her friends?

–J

The

Handling the truth on April 27, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

If you know your friend’s boyfriend or husband is cheating on her, is it your bound duty to inform her of this fact? In this particular case, I don’t know him very well, or maybe I’d try to talk to him about it. I’ve been in this situation (knowing about the affair) before, and both times the cheated-on wife/girlfriend was very angry that people knew her man was cheating before she did. Felt like a fool. But honestly, who am I to decide she ought to know? Another guy I know was cheating on his wife, but ultimately broke off the affair and went back to her. In that situation, I’m not sure she’d have been better off knowing. She has the man, and he’s making an effort to work things out even if he is living a lie. What do you think: is full disclosure always best?

— Lilygirl

(more…)

We all know that Facebook offers up-to-the-minute tracking of your (and everyone’s) relationship status. But could Facebook actually predict your breakup (and etc.) before it happens? It’s not psychic; nor, as science goes, is it rocket: remember, Facebook knows how and with whom you spend (or don’t spend) your virtual time. As the blog AllFacebook reports:

It’s an inside half-truth that many friends of Mark Zuckerberg have told me over the years: Facebook knows when a relationship is about to end. My response was to always ask more questions as it actually sounded like a legitimate possibility. In David Kirkpatrick’s soon to be released book, “The Facebook Effect“, Kirkpatrick confirms that relationship patterns were something that Mark Zuckerberg often toyed with.

In the book, Kirkpatrick writes:

As the service’s engineers built more and more tools that could uncover such insights, Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators.

Are you busy chatting with another girl instead of your girlfriend? Are you being tagged in a lot of photos with the same person? Facebook has a lot of information about who you are viewing regularly (or lusting over) as well as what your communication patterns are. While the company is not actively charting most users’ communication patterns for determining the future of your relationship, they are actively monitoring your behavior on the site to determine what should be displayed in the feed.

Of course, 33 percent, while impressive, is not scary accurate. And there’s a wide margin of error. Depending on how you use Facebook, for example, your lovah’s profile might be the one you look at least, given that you, you know, see them. (In fact, at least one expert says partners shouldn’t be “friends” in the first place. (“It’s a terrible idea for spouses to be Facebook friends with each other,” says Ian Kerner, Ph.D., co-author, with Heidi Raykeil, of [best self-help title EVER!] Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents’ Guide to Getting It On Again. “Relationships are already filled with enough banality. I want to preserve what little mystery there is, which means I don’t need to see my wife’s latest check-in with her third-grade pals on her Superwall.”)

That said — though BG eschews unexamined anti-FB or “technology is eeevil” pile-on — we do know that, given its endless started-out-innocent opps for flirting and reconnecting with the one(s) who got away, Facebook can also = Homewreck. So it’s not like Facebook would need to uncrumple the receipts on your dresser to know what’s up.

And so, AllFacebook wonders, could there be an app for this?

Could you imagine using the site and then receiving a notification that the system has automatically determined that your relationship could be on thin ice? While it may provide useful to know, it would be extremely creepy to find out. For now, I wouldn’t expect to see any “relationship strength tool” integrated into the site, but it’s definitely interesting to know that it’s potentially something Facebook could project. Would you want to know how strong your relationship is based on your own Facebook behavior?

But here’s the real question:

Don’t you probably already know how strong it is without Facebook telling you?

Have you ever lied that you have cancer to get out of a relationship? What if the relationship is already pretty out-there, as in the case of the 19-year-old lad dating the wife of Northern Ireland’s First Minister? Young Kirk McCambley told Mrs. Robinson (yep, that’s her name!) he had testicular cancer to end the affair.

In honor of Ireland’s sex scandal, The Globe And Mail‘s Dave McGinn susses out what lies might be okay to tell when breaking up. And when Ireland calls, BG answers:

“A white lie that is okay to tell is one where what you are really doing is trying to preserve the other person’s feelings. A whopper is where you’re just trying to not even deal with this at all. You’re trying to save yourself,” says Lynn Harris, co-founder of the relationship advice website BreakupGirl.net.

Read the article here and tell us your own breakup whoppers!

From today’s New York Times:

Text messages are the new lipstick on the collar, the mislaid credit card bill. Instantaneous and seemingly casual, they can be confirmation of a clandestine affair, a record of the not-so-discreet who sometimes forget that everything digital leaves a footprint.

This became painfully obvious a week ago when a woman who claims to have had an affair with Tiger Woods told a celebrity publication that he had sent her flirty text messages, some of which were published. It follows on the heels of politicians who ran afoul of text I.Q., including a former Detroit mayor who went to prison after his steamy text messages to an aide were revealed, and Senator John Ensign of Nevada, whose affair with a former employee was confirmed by an incriminating text message.

Unlike earlier eras when a dalliance might be suspected but not confirmed, nowadays text messages provide proof. Divorce lawyers say they have seen an increase in cases in the past year where a wronged spouse has offered text messages to show that a partner has strayed. The American Bar Association began offering seminars this fall for marital attorneys on how to use electronic evidence — text messages, browsing history and social networks — in proving a case.

Read the rest here. Of course, this also totally happened on Glee.

Adultery lurks everywhere, among celeb couples and political leaders, our neighbors and even, on a bad day, our own relationships. New York Magazine, following up on the Spitzer scandal in its own back yard, recently weighed in on the matter, with a lot to say about American culture and the perhaps untenable emphasis we put on monogamy.

According to writer Susan Squire, marriage wasn’t made to handle all this pressure in the first place. The average life span is far greater now than it was 100 years ago, and back in those days, marriage was a more formal institution for breeding and family purposes only. It’s becoming more and more difficult for partners in a marriage to get the variety and sexual attention that they need. The American burden is the ideal that marriage should provide romantic love forever. “Marriage involves routine, and routine kills passion,” Squire says. Sometimes partners see an affair as the only way out of that rut.

That’s why Mira Kirshenbaum, clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute in Boston, suggests that not all cheaters are evil trolls. (more…)