Seriously. What’s gotten into Cary Tennis? He’s given some good advice for once:
One night, after talking about a friend of ours who met his girlfriend in a threesome, he asked me if I had ever been in one. It didn’t occur to me to lie, particularly about something I consider so minor, so I answered honestly and told him yes.
After that, everything changed. The night I told him I’d had a threesome, he cried and said he felt sick. He became so angry with me that he began to pick at me, and it seems like everything I do is wrong. Overnight, I went from being in a relationship that made me even more confident and happy with myself to being in a relationship that brings me down and constantly reminds me of my shortcomings. . .
I can’t keep feeling so ashamed of a past I had come to terms with, but I also can’t bring myself to give up on someone that I love so much. Before the threesome fiasco, we’d been talking about marriage and our future, and now I wonder how he could have meant any of that. If he loved me so much, how could his love and respect for me be so conditional? Is there anything he can do to get over this, or am I going to have to forget about how good things used to be and move on?
Regretting Telling
Dear Regretting,
This guy is nuts. What’s wrong with having a threesome?
No, don’t marry him. Get away from him. He sounds crazy. Not to be too judgmental, but really. . . .
I don’t know how you deal with the hurt of this ending, but obviously you cannot be with someone the rest of your life who can’t deal with something from your past like that.
OK, so maybe it was dumb to tell him. But you found out something. You found out he’s nuts.
Color me stunned. Go on with your bad self, Cary! You almost sound like Dan Savage.
I’ve written before on how and why I believe that it’s not really anyone’s business what I got up to sexually before I met them unless there was some kind of aftereffect — disease, unexplained short people running around, what have you — that might affect my partner; and while that’s the kind of information I might very well share with a partner voluntarily, I don’t consider it something to be demanded of me. This guy clearly has issues, clearly has insecurities, and clearly wants to have something to hold over his girlfriend’s head (or else he might, you know, actually have gone to therapy and done something there).
But the thing that really got me was the part of the letter where the girlfriend was saying that they’d been discussing marriage. They were discussing marriage, and yet she didn’t know about this sacredness, this insecurity, and all his rules about sex. Probably because they’d never discussed that. It never fails to surprise me how many people get married without asking some pretty damn basic questions and raising some pretty damn basic points of discussion (like, say, whether there will be a TV in the bedroom). Or, say, whether to have kids.