When I was in college a friend of mine stole (yes, I know!) an old Everyman copy of Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder from the library: it was a 1920’s oxblood leather-bound copy, beautiful and exciting.

I always coveted that book and remembered it.

20 years later I was telling a friend in another city about it. She managed to score a copy of it for my birthday, and gave it to me.

Less than a week later my college friend, whom I hadn’t spoken to in a decade or more, sent me the stolen copy in the mail. It was packaged carefully with a note saying he remembered how much I loved the book, saying he’d tried to give it back to the college library but they didn’t really want it as they’d moved to mostly digital systems and weren’t currently expanding their fiction collection.

So now I have two copies: they’re both my favorite.

Used to be, in some sections of some societies, that saving sex for marriage was for both parties’ protection. If someone was going to eventually make that decision that “you’re not my type”, they didn’t get to test-drive you all the way to Prague and back: a man was expected to have enough self-knowledge to know (or at least make a reasonable guess) that it wasn’t going to work out before he polished his torpedo below your decks.

It was, at least officially, considered scoundrel’s behavior to have sex and then return someone to the shelf to go shopping again.

That was only ever officially true, rarely in practice; and it didn’t last for good reasons. But consider how things have changed.

Dating is at least as much about having sex as it is about finding a life-partner now. Women are now entitled to the same level of self-determination: they also are entitled to sex and to consider and reject a partner based on any criteria that seems good to them.

That’s arguably progress.

Is that “okay”?

You’re experiencing the down-side after having experienced the up-side. When people start selecting, they’re capable of rejecting.

Look, I have female friends that treat me this way, and my wife is super chill with it because my wife has guy friends like this and I’m super chill with that.

But.

If she’s not chill, it’s time to make hard choices.

Goodreads, like pretty much everything on your phone, is a surveillance app that attempts to sell you and your preferences. Now and then, either because of a glitchy algorithm or because Harlequin put down substantial cash this month, it will attempt to nudge your tastes.

Does a vacuum “exist” in this sense? Does “darkness”? They are words we use to describe what is essentially an absence of something: but absences of things do describe an actual existing state: it’s just a state defined by absence.

Probably generally true.

The more you know about any period or culture though the less you’re bound by such stereotypes. Egyptian and Roman towns and medieval cathedrals, all now bare stone, were riots of color. As Jimmy Carr says, “we think, ‘Oh, they lived in ruins!’ Well, not at the time!”

You missed my point, but I don’t disagree with anything you say here.

There's no one-size-fits-all answer for this.

If I can, though I'd like to offer you a different vision for relationships than the monogamy-in-thought-and-mind-and-heart-and-body-or-else model that dominates in most of these subs.

My wife and I are both on our second marriages, and happier than we've ever been.

In each of our previous marriages there was deception and cheating and all the misery you're going through now. The natural reaction to which is, "I can't trust you anymore. Out you go."

But we were friends for seven years or so before we got together, and we talked about our feelings and our relationships together constantly, and one of the things that we discovered was, we were discovering that there's more intimacy for us in actually sharing such moments as the one your boyfriend had: a hot person attracted him, showed an interest. That happens to me and my wife a lot: and our reaction begins with, "Of course they were attracted to you: I find you incredibly sexy, why would they not?"

It's not always comfortable to know your spouse / partner found someone else attractive and did the natural thing and flirted a little, or even a lot. But it's REALLY consoling to know, "He / She is going to tell me everything."

Why don't people tell each other immediately about this kind of thing? Usually because of guilt or shame. Even if it doesn't go anywhere (your boyfriend belatedly toed the line), a person can feel he's failed some very difficult standard. Overcoming that takes real personal strength in both partners.

And that's because it requires a lack of mutual shame: you don't give those million signals that "You fucked up and now you're gonna pay." It takes enormous self-confidence. Most of all it takes enormous trust in a relationship and trust in our partners that we spent almost a decade building before we even kissed. We knew we'd tell each other the truth, because we knew that as soon as we started lying to each other, we'd be right back where we were before, unhappy, mistrustful, and most of all, lacking the intimacy that makes us happy together.

Nobody can tell you what you SHOULD do in this case except yourself: it's your self-image and your admiration for your partner that's at stake here, not mine and not Reddit's. Do what's authentic to you.

But there's more than one way to construct monogamy. There's more than one way to structure trust.

Usually once or twice a day, but (1) on rough or stressful days we take a pass; and (2) we've both been in relationships before where we made mistakes that lowered the average below what we want, and resolved not to make that mistake together.