agonyaunt | (no subject)

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DEAR ABBY: My fiancee has been married twice and insists on maintaining contact with four prior sexual partners (other than husbands). Most of the contact is by Facebook, instant message and cellphone. But one former partner is a high school classmate she sees every year at class "get-togethers."

I think what she's doing is inappropriate and will certainly be so after we are married. She insists they are just "friends" and I am being immature and "untrusting." She's adamant that she is unwilling to cease contact with these former sexual partners (now friends) under any circumstances. What's a guy to do? -- CROWDED IN FLORIDA

DEAR CROWDED: A "guy" either accepts what his fiancee is telling him -- that these old flames are just friends now -- or he terminates the engagement and starts searching for a woman he believes he CAN trust.

https://www.arcamax.com/healthandspirit/lifeadvice/dearabby/s-2728107

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LW's fiancee can do better. Seriously, who wants to be with somebody who boils down everybody you've ever met into "sexual partner" and "not sexual partner", and then tells you which of them you can still be friends with?

Dude doesn't even have the decency to say honestly "I don't trust you", no, he pretends it's about how appropriate it all is. You know what's inappropriate? Being a jealous, controlling jerk.

Good heavens, she sees one of them once a year when her class has its yearly reunion! Whatever shall we do!

Edited 2022-09-29 03:24 (UTC)

Exactly this.

(My MOTHER got weird about insisting that I shouldn’t have male friends when I was married, unless they were part of a couple and we all socialized together.)

SO weird, and honestly, insulting to everybody involved.

Ah, the vague universal "appropriate" rather than owning his own feelings. Sheesh, dude, maybe you should be glad your fiancee doesn't demonize her exes?

Correction from 2023: "doesn't demonize most of her exes"

Yeah, my advice to this guy is, "She keeps in touch with exes? Good news, then! There's at least a chance she'll still be talking to you next year!"

Does it count as demonizing him when the characterization is accurate? Really, he did it to himself.

"former sexual partners (now friends)" - a telling way to phrase it. I bet his fiancee would say "still friends," not "now friends," and there's a difference.

one former partner is a high school classmate she sees every year at class "get-togethers."

Does he mean, you know, 'class reunions'? As opposed to, oh, literal orgies of nostalgia for the lost times of youth? which he seems to be loading in the subtext?

Anyway, he is being jealous of her high school boyfriend!!!

We wonder whether this is not so much about 'being on terms of friendship with former partners' as actually having had former partners and being on amiable terms. I note we do not hear anything about his track record...

Gee, dude, thanks for confirming that you'd be a controlling husband!

This is a very 50s-style form of possessiveness. There really was a crapton of advice about not being close with former attachments.

It ain't the 50s anymore, guy. Cope.

There was also a difference in the 50s where people really were not expected to be at all monogamous until they were engaged. It was normal to have several romantic relationships going fairly seriously at the same time while you decided if you wanted to marry any of them, and it's kind of weird how we sort of silently lost that over the last couple of generations, to where now there's a norm of serial monogamy through your entire dating life. Which doesn't make the possessiveness any better, but it does read a little different in the context of "you need to *actually* break up with your other partners when you get engaged" than in a context where they are clearly already exes.

My dad tells the story of when he was 22 and dating three young women who were sisters; one day he took one of the sisters out in the afternoon, brought her home, and picked up another sister to go out in the evening. No one thought it was odd.

I've also heard a story from a college friend about two groups of girls from difference cultures in her high school in the 1980s -- Group A thought that Group B was promiscuous because they had sex with their boyfriends, and Group B thought that Group A was promiscuous because they dated several boys at once instead of going steady with one boy.

I think this may be coming back a little(or maybe that's just my circle)? It's not fully accepted but it is happening.

It feels like there is a distinction between 'talking' and 'dating'.

I know 2 people that are or have been 'talking' to multiple people at a time. Getting to know each other, small dates, etc. but not being fully committed as a romantic partner. There can be easily ended.

Then there is 'dating', which I would consider myself to be doing. We had the leg up of all ready being friends before asking each other out (mostly allowing us to skip any 'takling' phase). We see ourselves as pretty much a solidified relationship. We both want to get married but not seeing it as a must makes it feel more legitimate than it probably would have in the past.

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