I have just spoken with my best friend, who is miserable and alone in Marrakesh, where she is working. She’s sad because her partner has not phoned her for over a week — he’s uncontactably on a rock tour in Australia/New Zealand. She suspects he is screwing the catering girl/backing singer/production assistant. Meanwhile he has left all his belongings in her flat here in London — for which I have a key. What (preferably harsh) action do you suggest she take? (Waiting and seeing is not an option!)
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 9:30 am
MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. This Ask Lynn column is being promoted at Match on Yahoo this week…
This week Lynn answers What Should I Do in L.A. who’s stymied by a boyfriend who portrays himself as single online. But since he’s never met the women he chats with IRL, it’s not so much the cybercrime, it’s the coverup:
The first time I caught him, he said it was because he needed someone to talk to. The second time, he said he was trying to catch me cheating.
Yes, this one is more about trust issues than cheating. Read the full letter at Yahoo, then add your two cents in the comments below.
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 9:53 am
MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. This Ask Lynn column is being promoted at Match on Yahoo this week…
This week we have the flipside of last week’s letter: Brian is dating a woman he met online and hasn’t taken his profile down — and now he’s being accused of cheating with another online dater…
Although I never asked Rita for a date or even for her phone number, I did talk with her about life, my personality and what I want in a relationship, etc. Now I find out that both of them are friends — and that I’m in the doghouse.
So, is he cheating? Should his girlfriend be concerned? Check out the full letter and advice, then add your two cents below!
Currently making the rounds: a thoroughly modern tale of revenge via Netflix. As Helena Popkin reports at MSNBC:
It takes a cuckold of true imagination, and at least a passing knowledge of the Netflix movie-suggesting algorithm to strike out in a subtle and personal way, it wins the (somewhat horrified) admiration of Web community Reddit, the primordial ooze of current Internet creativity.
“My girlfriend cheated on me, so I rated movies in her netflix account until I reached the desired result,” wrote Reddit user Contra3, who posted the…screen grab [at right] as evidence of his handiwork.
As you’ll see, a theme has emerged among the movies Netflix now thinks Girlfriend Non Grata will <3, such as The Scarlet Letter, Unfaithful, and, well, Whore. While BG generally objects to revenge (and, for that matter, to using “whore” and “slut” as insults), I gotta say this one made me crack a smile. So now the bar’s set pretty high. Next time you contemplate revenge, ask yourself: is my scheme as clever/elegant/no-one-(else)-gets-hurt as Contra3’s? (And does it involve Bambi?)
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 9:28 am
MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. This Ask Lynn column is being promoted at Match on Yahoo this week…
This week Lynn helps a gal who says All Confidence is Gone because she found out her boyfriend has an active profile on an online dating site…
Things have been really great between us, so I’m confused about why he’s looking elsewhere. I’m so furious right now — part of me wants to post an active profile just like he did, just to spite him.
Wait, what was she doing when she found the profile? Anyway, see how Lynn would handle the sitch by reading the full letter at Yahoo, then come back here to comment below!
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?
Wow. C-Span hasn’t been this hard to watch/look away from since, well, you know. In case you missed it, via TPM Livewire:
The Daily Caller reports what they call the “wonkiest, nerdiest Internet revenge ever.” Allow us to add “social conservative-iest” to that list of adjectives.
Todd Seavey and Helen Rittelmeyer, contributors to “Proud To Be Right,” a collection of essays written by “voices of the next conservative generation” and edited by Jonah Goldberg, appeared at a panel promoting the book this weekend. They sat next to each other, and Seavey’s critique of Rittelmeyer’s political philosophy turned into Seavey basically calling Rittelmeyer a two-timing cheat.
“It might come as a surprise to some of you that we dated for two years,” Seavey said. “[Not because] we have ideological differences, but because there are probably some people in this room who also dated Helen during those two years, given how tumultuous it got.”
Rittelmeyer tries her best to keep her cool as Seavey just unloads on her. There’s not much else to really say about this, except that once you start watching, you’ll have a hard time looking away.
Keep your man by letting him stray? So, according to CNN, advises Australian memoirist Holly Hill, who writes, “One of the main things that I have learned is that a woman that negotiates infidelity with her partner is far more powerful than a woman who is sitting home wondering why he’s late from the office Christmas party,” she says. Most powerful of all, BG would submit, is the woman who chooses a guy who doesn’t cheat.
Of course, in Hill’s insultingly dim view of the opposite sex, fellas like that are few and far between. (“Men are hard-wired to betray women on the long-term.”) Look, I know cheating is depressingly common. And if a couple makes “an arrangement” that works for them, then geh gezunt a heit. But — yes — monogamy is a choice. So when a couple makes that choice, I’d call that negotiated fidelity. That’s a much better place to start.
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 8:41 am
MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. Meaning that you can find MSN/Match.com’s “Ask Lynn†columns –penned by BG’s alter ego — over at Happen now as well.
This week Lynn answers What Should I Do in L.A. who’s stymied by a boyfriend who portrays himself as single online. But since he’s never met the women he chats with IRL, it’s not so much the cybercrime, it’s the coverup:
The first time I caught him, he said it was because he needed someone to talk to. The second time, he said he was trying to catch me cheating.
Yes, this one is more about trust issues than cheating. Read the full letter at Happen magazine, then add your two cents in the comments below.
Filed under: blogs,media — posted by Breakup Girl @ 1:27 am
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,†saysIan 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.â€)
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?
e-mail to a friend in need
Guilty in absentia on May 25, 1998…
