I Slept With Someone I Shouldn’t Have. What Do I Do Now?

Hi Doc,

I’ve appreciated your advice over the years and I’m wondering if you can help me with the issue I’m dealing with currently. I am a straight woman in my early 30s, and everyone involved here is also in their early 30s.

The whole story is long, but the short version is I messed up about a year ago. I have a long-term acquaintance, G. G had a girlfriend for most of the time I knew him, A. Last year G and I slept together. Before we hooked up G told me he and A had broken up some time ago and were on good terms. I was foolish enough to just take what he said at face value.

After we slept together G told me that he and A were more “on a break” than broken up and she would “freak out” if she ever found out about us. A few months later G and A got back together and even though I asked him not to, G told A about the hook up. A has not freaked out (at least not at me) but she very clearly dislikes me. G, A and I have never really been friends, just friendly acquaintances, but we have a ton of mutual friends through a niche shared interest, so I see them all the time.

I feel stupid and embarrassed about the whole thing, and have a lot of anxiety when I go out now that I did not have before. I don’t think either G or A has told anyone else but I am constantly afraid one of them will as a way to get me excluded. Though my community claims to be progressive the reality is slut-shaming is still prevalent. I have a close group of friends who would stand by me, but the larger group I’m not so sure about. I know G is a fuckface, but still I feel like this whole thing is all my fault and I deserve whatever consequences I face. Like I should have known a guy like him would basically say anything for the chance to get laid, and I should have put a stop to it.

I’ve had moments after being around them where I’ve considered giving up on our shared interest altogether, but that would mean losing a huge part of my identity. I have not dated or slept with anyone since G and I don’t think I will anytime soon. I often feel like I want to date again but then I remember the embarrassment and betrayal I felt after G and decide I need more time. I feel like I’m constantly fighting to “prove” that I deserve to be part of this community both to myself and to G and A. At least half the time I feel like I’m losing.

And I guess that’s where I could use your help, proving to myself that I do deserve to be part of this scene and not letting all the bullshit impact me the way it has so far. I feel like there has to be a better way of putting this than “proving I’m worthy” but that’s the only way I can think to phrase it at the moment. Any advice would be appreciated.

Heartbreak Motel

Let’s be clear from the jump, HM: this is a G problem, not a you problem. In fact, I think the biggest issue here is that you’re taking on blame that’s not actually yours and the folks who know you (and G, and A) should understand this.

So, let me point out what I see, as someone who has no connection to the social circles you three run in: you slept with someone who lied to you about his relationship status. Or, “was less than clear” about their relationship status, if someone is inclined to nitpick or try to lawyer their way out of trouble.

(We’ll come back to that in a moment, I have thoughts on this.)

He then revealed to you, after the fact, that he wasn’t completely honest about his relationship status and oh hey, now he needs you to keep his secret for him because his girlfriend would freak about it. Of course, he then went on to tell other folks after having asked you to keep his secret and now you feel like shit.

Seems pretty open and shut to me, quite frankly. Dude lied to you, you believed him because you didn’t expect him to lie to you… that’s a pretty clear-cut case of him being The Asshole here and you’re in the clear.

“But Doc,” I hear  you cry: “I know G’s a fuckface and would say anything to get laid. I should’ve known better!” To which I respond: he lied to you. So answer me this: if one person lies and the other person believes them, who’s ultimately at fault? The person who lied, or the person who they deceived? We don’t – or shouldn’t – hold people to a standard where we expect them to conduct interviews and due diligence investigations before we believe them, especially when they’re talking about their relationships or being single. Taking the blame on yourself for believing a liar is holding yourself to a nigh-impossible standard. After all, even chronic and habitual liars don’t lie about everything… and the best liars mix enough truth into their lies to make them that much more convincing. Unless G goes beyond “fuckface” and into “if he tells you there are 24 hours in a day, you should go check” levels of lying, it’s not unreasonable that you took him at his word that he and A broke up.

But they hadn’t and at best he’s playing semantic games with you – and definitely in such a way that lead a reasonable person to believe exactly what he wanted them to believe. Even if we accept that he didn’t technically lie to you and just framed things in such a way that you could infer one thing when reality was another… it’s still on him. He actively deceived you and then waited until after the fact to reveal the truth in such a way that you feel complicit and are required to keep this a secret because it would screw up his life. That in and of itself would constitute what many of my lawyer friends would refer to as a “consciousness of guilt”.

And here’s the thing: I can see ways that this would be less of a breach of trust. If, y’know. I squint. There’re ways that I could see that things happened in good (ok, decent) faith that then became the paving stones in the proverbial road to hell. I could see, for example, a world where G and A agreed that they were “on a break”, but had very different ideas of what that meant. After all, there’s a reason why the “We were on a break” argument became a cornerstone of Friends; it’s a conflict that resonates with a lot of folks. One person’s “break” means “this relationship is done, we are effectively single with an option to get back together”,  while it means “we are not seeing, talking or interacting with each other for a period of time, but our relationship is still in effect” to another. And, of course, if you didn’t define terms, it’s somewhat understandable that everybody might have a different idea of what it meant.

So, it’s not impossible that he could, in good faith, have assumed that “on a break” was synonymous with “break up” but slightly less permanent and only afterwards realized that this might have been a mistake. People – men and women both – have made dumb decisions under the influence of being incredibly hornt up. It’s not impossible that, in the cold light of “just got off”, he realized that A would lose her shit if she knew the two of you slept together. I could see him scrambling and making what was ultimately a bad call in a moment of panic when he wasn’t thinking clearly.

This happens more often than people realize, even with folks who have the best of intentions. This is why I’m a big believer in Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. We like to assume that we’re all rational actors, but many times we end up making choices out of anger, fear, ignorance or just plain old fashioned dickful thinking. We’re are flawed humans, brains are just electric tapioca soaked in random chemicals and what we think are reasoned choices are usually made by our emotions and we retcon the logic we used to get there after the fact.

Of course, that also applies to you, too. The idea that you “should have” known better, that you “should have” realized what this was and that you “should have” put a stop to it? That’s all post-hoc rationalization; you made a decision with the best information you had at the time. Now you have new information that would’ve affected your decision… but you’re treating this as though you had that information this whole time and you didn’t.

Now all of that having been said: while I could see a world where this is the result of poor choices being made in good faith, I kinda doubt it. Especially since your timeline here makes it sound like the sheets hadn’t even started to cool before he told you “oh, by the way…” It would be one thing if, days later he realized that he made a mistake and was in low-key damage control mode. But from the way you lay things out, it sounds like it was almost a “roll off one another, take a deep sigh and then saying ‘so, did I say ‘broken up?’ I really meant on a break.’” But even if it were only a day or two later, it certainly sounds like he decided to come clean only after he got what he wanted because he knew that telling you straight up would mean that he didn’t get laid.

But it’s still a “him” problem, not a “you” problem. Your blaming yourself like this with those after-the-fact “shoulda woulda coulda” reasons sounds to me like you’ve already bought into what other people would say if they knew and that you ultimately agree that this is somehow your fault. So, while I can understand why you might feel like you need to give up your community and shared interest because of this, it’s coming from a place where you’ve assumed that you’ll get the blame and that they’re right to blame you for this instead of his for being deceptive.

This is why I want to be clear: sleeping with someone you probably shouldn’t have – and I stress, in good faith that he was telling you the truth – does not mean you don’t “deserve” your place in the community. At worst, you’re “guilty” of believing someone who lied to you. That’s it. Anything beyond that is to reach to a level of responsibility that nobody could measure up to. If, for example, it were your fault for believing G and not automatically assuming he’s a lying liar who tells lies… shouldn’t that mean that A is also at fault for being in a relationship with a lying liar in the first place? How does A get off the hook for believing a liar when you don’t? After all, at that point, doesn’t the “fact” (and please note the big sarcastic quote marks around ‘fact’) that he’s a liar and a cheat mean that she’s partially responsible for being cheated on? Or is she somehow absolved from the responsibility of investigating all of his claims?

To be sure, I’d be a liar myself if I didn’t say that it’s certainly possible that people would see it that way; people are irrational and will freely ascribe blame based on vibes rather than on facts and logic, especially if they don’t want to examine those actions too closely. But if – if – your friends and community is that hypocritical, that is a sign that you need much better friends and a much better community. It would sting like bullet ants on your tender bits, yeah… but it would also mean that ultimately you’d be leaving shitty friends and a shitty situation behind.

So you want my advice? Stop trying to “prove” anything here. You don’t need to be “worthy”, either to be believed or for you yourself to believe that you were done dirty here. It’s not as though bad shit doesn’t happen to the “worthy” (for whatever weird definition of ‘worthy’ you want to use) as much as the “unworthy”. That’s a pure intellectual fallacy. You have nothing to prove because at the end of the day, one of two things happened: either G made a bad call and realized it afterwards, or G lied to you and you and A are the wronged parties here. Doubly so if G also played fast and loose with the story he told A about what happened. And, frankly, I don’t think that’s a stretch.

So my advice would be to hold your head up high and realize that this isn’t on you. If he made a poor choice, that’s unfortunate and he’s going to have to deal with the consequences and try to do better next time. If he lied to you (or “was less than forthcoming”), then it’s his fault, not yours. And if G is so known as a lying liar that you should never have believed him, then it’s equally true that everyone else shouldn’t believe him if he says this is all your fault somehow. And if they do believe him and blame you for believing this known liar? Then that’s also on them, and their selective skepticism says more about their bullshit than about anything you did.

By all means, take time to heal from this. The pain, humiliation and betrayal you’re feeling are all real and valid. That’s all an understandable feeling; you’re a reasonable person who went through some unreasonable shit. However, the blame for it lies on him, not you, and taking that on just makes you feel worse for no reason. Get space from G – even if it’s just being polite, distant and elsewhere during events where he and A are around – forgive yourself for making a decision you wouldn’t have made if you had more information and give yourself closure. This wasn’t your fault, it was his.

And one more thing. While I’m sure there’re folks who would have suggestions about how you could “get out in front of” any gossip or revelations, I don’t think that’s helpful. Unless he (or A) has or is likely to start sharing this around, trying to get out in front is as likely to backfire and drive attention to the gossip as it is to deflect or redirect. I think the best thing you can do is live your values and your integrity, rather than take on blame that is not yours. The people who know you and know you to be an upright woman of integrity will understand that you aren’t about chasing other people’s boyfriends. And the ones who would think that you’re a lying Jezebel? That’s their bullshit to deal with.

Good luck.

Dr. NerdLove, 

I am in a long-term and very happy relationship. My boyfriend and I are happy, our sex life is great, and we are both still very much attracted to each other. We still go on date nights and have lots of fun together in whatever we do. We’ve both never cheated on each other and trust each other so much.

My question is why then so I sometimes dream about being with other men?

Yes, these are usually men I am attracted to in some way, but it has never crossed my mind to ever cheat on my boyfriend. Some of these dreams we’re just kidding, but other dreams it goes all the way (I do also still have dreams like this with my boyfriend, too!)

What is wrong with me?

Get Out of My Dreams

Nothing’s wrong with you, GOMD. You’re just a person with a brain and a sex drive.

There’re two things to keep in mind here.

The first is that while dreams may be influenced by our thoughts and emotions, they are ultimately – to misapply some Shakespeare – a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We assign meaning to dreams because we’re a pattern-seeking species and we ascribe meaning and significance to randomness all the time. Yeah, we have dreams that correlate to things going on in our waking lives… but we also have dreams that are completely and utterly random, with no more meaning or significance than our brains hitting “shuffle” and throwing all sorts of weird imagery at us while they dump the RAM cache at the end of the day.

One night you’ll find yourself being chased by dinosaurs that’re destroying your city, another night you may find yourself having sex with someone who you would never have sex with in real life. It’s chaos, it’s illogical, and it means very little. And this is before we get into the various things that affect our sleep and how well or easily we access REM sleep.

It’s worth remembering: our dream imagery is fueled by our culture. So many dreams feel universal – “going to class and oops I’m naked”, “I have an exam and I haven’t studied!”, “My teeth are all falling out”, etc. – because they come from the same cultural template. It’s easy to assume that dreaming about X means Y because we’ve already got those associations; public nudity is shameful and taboo, failing exams have dire consequences and so forth. So the things we see when we dream have far less to do with our subconscious trying to send us messages so much as cultural imagery that lines up with specific emotional states or anxieties.

(There are, interestingly, some things that are more common than others, such as snakes and teeth falling out. But then again, there’re snakes on every continent except Antarctica and teeth are inherently connected to general health, so it’s understandable that those would crop up so frequently.)

The second is that the strength and happiness of your relationship has nothing to do with your desire or attraction to other people. You can love your boyfriend to pieces and the two of you can bang until you have orgasms so hard your eyes pop out of your head and you can and will want to bang other people. That’s not a sign that you’re weak, that you don’t love your boyfriend or you’re not satisfied with everything. It’s a sign that you have a libido. Not even an unusually active libido, just one at all. No one person can be all things to another person, nor is anyone so “enough” that you never find other people attractive or think lusty thoughts about them. That’s not how we’re wired as a species. We can – and do – choose whether or not to act on those thoughts or attractions. We make arrangements with our partners about if and how we can act on those feelings, if at all. But the state of being in love or being in a relationship doesn’t mean that we quit having them. Blaming yourself or accepting blame for having them is just pointless masochism, and trying to force ourselves to not have them is an exercise in futility.

So if you have dreams about banging someone who’s not your boyfriend? It doesn’t mean anything other than “you had a dream that you banged someone who wasn’t your boyfriend”. Maybe you find them hot, maybe you don’t… there’s really not any meaning to it other than what you bring to it. My advice is to just shrug your shoulders and say “huh, that was weird” and then move on about your day.

And if the dreams leave you feeling horny and unfulfilled when you wake up? Sounds like a good opportunity to take that energy and plow it into your boyfriend. That’s way more enjoyable than playing Freud and forgetting that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Good luck.