Tricky one this one, and gets more complicated down the page. It started off on Reddit but my source for it is on Instagram, here. If you have difficulty reading the pictures, clicking on them will open them tumescent.
Suffice to say that the advice given on both Reddit and Instagram was either that he was cheating on her with someone else or she was the side trick and he was spending the weekends with his wife. And that would seem to be the obvious explanation for the boyfriend vanishing every weekend and fibbing. But there's a plot twist...
Which is that she had it out with him and demanded to know what he was actually doing every weekend. When she did this he told her that what he was doing was volunteering in an animal rescue centre. The reason he hadn't told her was that he likes doing things to be helpful for other people and animals but had got bullied about it as an undergraduate. The experience had been so bad that he'd changed over to only doing things in a secret way and not talking about it.
I have a particular reaction to this that I think may not be shared by everyone: certainly the girlfriend found this very sweet and will decide what she wants to do. Although frankly if you're the sort of person who asks advice about your personal life on an internet forum you may not make your own mind up.
My instant reaction is that I'm not sure how this reflects on him or the relationship. While I totally appreciate how being bullied twists your life and motivates you to do strange things, I hope that he can move on from thinking that he would have to hide anything from his girlfriend. Frankly he's not putting the relationship first, this could still be seen as deceptive and she would be quite reasonable to feel very hurt that he didn't trust her enough to tell her what he was doing.
My concern would be that this might suggest a pattern of him thinking about his own needs and not hers: basically he's not thinking of them as a couple. I would still look on this as a red flag for her depending on how things progress after him coming clean. I hope she can communicate the effect this had on her and he can start trusting her.
Because with a 🍆 like that it would be so great if he was emotionally literate as well!
Well, that was a bit of a twist. I must admit, I didn't think he was having an affair - rather that he was in some sort of club (RPG/cosplay or perhaps something a bit seedy) and was somewhat ashamed of it, or worried about what the OP would think. I wonder if he dropped any hints with her to see what her reaction was as a prelude to telling her?
ReplyDeleteWhichever, three years is a long time, and I'm with you on this one.
Ooh now I feel ever so slightly bad that I was just assuming he was a cheating bastard. Not very bad, just slightly and it's already passed.
DeleteI could tell by the setup it wasn't going to be the typical other family/you're just the side piece-schtick and oddly enough I did visualize this guy cleaning dog kennels though I'm not sure why. Still, his excuse for not telling her stinks worse than a pile of dogshit! Everyone gets bullied about things that matter to them at some point or another throughout their life and whether we're conscious of it or not, we're constantly seeking "our tribe(s)", individuals with which we can find kinship with regardless of blood or class. He's held the OP in a flight pattern of his making for three years and felt no shame in that? I don't think his heart is in the right place; not in helping the animal rescue and not it his relationship with the OP. It's rare to see someone diligently maintain a corrosive nature for so long unless they're fully convinced that what they're doing is justifiable. I don't know what his area of research is for work, but the OP and the animal rescue mission work are "pet projects" for his own personal research study.
ReplyDeleteThank you for saying this. One of the reasons I posted about this was I was actually in two minds whether I was being fair to him when I was thinking that he was being unreasonable to the OP by hiding this. He's actually left a bit of a nasty taste because treating her badly because he was doing something kind just feels slightly manipulative too me, but of course I haven't met them so am not sure.
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