[ad_1]
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Hi, Doc!
Here are the facts:
– long distance relationship for five years
– had a shared Google drive where we saved nudes, lewds, love letters, etc.
– the ex pays for it, but we both uploaded stuff to it and had the password
– we broke up over a year ago
– I got a new phone right after the breakup and didn’t add our shared account and didn’t think much about it
– I didn’t ask him to delete anything when we broke up
– we don’t talk now
– I had to wipe my old phone and opened the Google drive folder and can see that he’s accessing our videos and photos often
Do I just delete anything I uploaded? Delete the whole thing? Ask him to delete it?
I trust him not to distribute any of it, but like. Privatize your spank bank so it’s at least not hanging out in a place where I can see that you’re still jerking it to me.
Thanks for any insight,
G Drive Spy
I’m going to be honest, GDS, the question of “what does one do about shared nudes after a breakup” can be a thorny one.
Every relationship ever has… let’s call them mementos, it sounds so much better than “leftovers” or something, that need to be dealt with. Because I’m Gen-X, the more common post break-up challenges involved things like splitting up the record collection or doing a sort of hostage exchange of various belongings that ended up at your exes place. Sometimes it may have involved things like “so how do we split custody of the dog?”
The nice thing about these was that it was fairly cut and dry. You could argue about who got to keep the copy of Dolittle or accept that your favorite hoodie was now the exit tax for the relationship, but that’s more or less where it ended. Losing some of your stuff in the break up could sting, but (barring custody of said dog) it was more or less a cut-and-dry situation. You accept the loss, mourn the missing sentimental value of some of those keepsakes, but it was a rare occasion indeed that anything from the relationship itself was likely to come back to haunt you.
(Well… besides your ex, that is).
While the saga of Pamela and Tommy Lee became a national story (and hideous invasion of privacy besides), the likelihood of things like nude photos or videos of you and your partner biting you in the ass was vanishingly unlikely.
(Plus, unless you had a darkroom in your spare bathroom or REALLY had a thing for Polaroids, the barrier to entry for having nude photos meant accepting that the pimply teenagers working the Fotomat were gonna make extras.)
But as sexting becomes an increasingly common part of dating and relationships, cheap digital storage and the ubiquity of camera phones, the odds of your pics never going away – or worse, escaping into the wild – are much higher. And along with the sex-negative bullshit stigma that comes with the possibility of pics getting out, it’s lead to new and unexpected post-break up etiquette questions. Is it ethical to keep them after the break up? If they’re in a shared drive, who do they technically belong to? What about if your ex doesn’t ask you to get rid of them? And what do you do if you find out your ex is still spanking it to them?
Now, for you, GDS I think the big question comes down to “what aspect of this situation is bothering you?”, which will ultimately decide the best approach. Is it a matter of knowing that he still has a sort of lingering sexual connection to you by proxy? Is it the mere existence of the photos themselves? Or just “dude, I don’t need to know what you’re up to with my pics?”
If its the latter, then the easiest thing to do is just, y’know… not log into the drive. Unless there’s a really compelling reason to keep having regular access to the drive, you should be able to remove yourself from the People With Access list without much fuss. Just right click on the drive on your “shared with me” page, hit share, find our name and select “remove access”. Now you never have to worry about seeing just how often he’s viewing your pics or videos and he can keep making withdrawals from the spank bank without involving you.
However, if it’s more an issue that he has the pictures at all, then you’re likely going to have some sort of communication with your ex. The question is “how much contact are you willing to have”.
You don’t say if the break up was particularly acrimonious or if you and he are on good or bad terms. The complete lack of contact would suggest that you’re at least neutral towards one another. If that’s the case, I think an email or text saying “hey, I saw my pics were still on the cloud drive, I’d really prefer that you delete them” would be in order.
However, it’s ultimately going to depend on whether you trust him to actually delete them. After all, there’s no way to know for sure that he doesn’t just move the files instead of deleting them permanently, or doesn’t make a show of deleting them but recovering them later. If you do reach out and the files disappear from the drive, you’ll have to weigh the possibility that they’ll still exist, just in a place that you don’t know about. If you’re ok with that possibility, then I’d suggest sending that email.
Deleting them yourself is an option, but it’s a potentially aggressive one that could backfire, depending on circumstances. If you just up and delete the pictures and videos yourself, then odds are good you’re going to end up getting a call or email. If he’s accessing them often, he’s going to notice that they’re gone and it won’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened.
Plus, there’s a non-zero chance that he has copies elsewhere, which would mean that this an notable but ultimately futile gesture.
(And if he’s an especially tricksy hobbitses, he may well have noticed that you’d logged in recently. He could very well lock the permissions on those files and prevent you from deleting them before you have a chance.)
Of course, if you’re feeling slightly puckish, you could log back in, upload a text file titled “Dude, I tell you’re still spanking it to these, maybe move ’em elsewhere” before removing yourself from the drive. It wouldn’t mean he’s going to delete them, but at least you’d get some satisfaction of tweaking his nose slightly before you go.
But at the end of the day, if you two ended things on decent enough terms, I’d suggest a quick email. As a general rule, I’m in favor of making your wishes known, clearly and directly. It won’t ensure that he deletes them for good, but at the very least you will make it clear where you stand.
Good luck.
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
I’m young now, but haven’t found love yet, and I’m scared I never will. I just wanted to know, is it scientifically impossible for a postmenopausal woman to find true love/sexually please a man? Because studies and evolutionary psychology seems to think so.
And, is it scientifically impossible for a woman with a rectangle body type to do those things? Be honest with me, because I sometimes don’t believe men who are positive about these types of women.
Signed,
Screwed Over by Evolutionary Psychology
Here’s the thing about evo-psych, SOEP: the people who yell about it the most tend to know the least about either evolution or psychology. A lot of evo-psych is basically Flinstonization, pretending that evolution just happens to set things up for 21st century social mores and that how we meet, mate and otherwise conduct our lives is somehow completely immune to influence by culture and circumstance and other social pressures, while also ignoring… pretty much everything else.
I mean, which is more likely: that women used to prioritize marrying men who were financially well off because they evolved to look for someone with the wherewithal to provide for offspring… or because women were culturally (and legally, in many cases) prohibited from owning property, having access to capital and credit or even their own bank accounts?
So my first suggestion is to quit looking at “science” – and my use of scare-quotes is deliberate here – that says something is “impossible”. To start with, there’s a long and glorious history of things that are science has “proven” to be impossible that were… well, demonstrably not true. Doubly so where women were concerned. Considering how many times doctors have “discovered” the true size and shape of the clitoris, I take a dim view of folks who will insist that science “proves” that it’s impossible for women of a certain age or body type or what-have-you to find love.
The question of whether a post-menopausal woman could find true love or please a man sexually is honestly absurd on it’s face. I mean… did going through menopause line the inside of her genitals with sandpaper, cause her hands and feet to fall off and her mouth to slam shut?
But surely nobody could possibly love or desire a woman who – in MRA parlance – “hit the wall”, right? Dunno, but Cindy Gallop, Cher, Megan Mullalley, Mariah Carey and Gabrielle Union all say “hello”. Like the bumblebee that supposedly shouldn’t be able to fly, they’re all out there ignoring that their relationships are supposed to be “impossible”.
The same is true with body types. Just as women are fully capable of finding dudes who don’t look like Greek statues to be smoking hot, men as a group find many different body types to be desirable. The idea that men are “programed” by evolution to “only” like bodies whose measurements fit within a certain ratio is horseshittery of the first order.
Are there body types that tend to be more popular? Of course. But that’s always going to be true… and which body types are currently a la mode varies. Compare the supermodels of today to the models of the 60s and 70s, the bombshells of the 50s vs. the 90s and so on. Hell, look at classical art and see how often the “ideal” body has changed due to any number of factors, from fashion to class and wealth.
I’m not entirely sure where you’re getting this information – though I’ve got some suspicions – but I’d suggest that maybe you’ll be happier hanging out in other places, with a better class of person than whomever really wants you to think that you should be grateful for whatever scraps of attention they deign to throw you.
You’re not cursed, you’re not damned, you haven’t been fucked by the fickle finger of fate and evo-psych, especially what you’ll find online, is 90% bullshit, 8% actual science and 4% inability to understand math or statistics.
Oh, and one more thing. Someone being positive about “these types of women” as you’re calling them isn’t lying to you. You are falling for a fallacy that Natalie Wynn refers to as “masochistic epistemology” – the belief that whatever hurts is true, and it must be true because it hurts. This is, to use the technical term, bullshit, and you should seriously examine the agenda of whomever told you that any of this was valid. Whatever it is or was, I can promise you: it wasn’t a deep and abiding commitment to truth or scientific rigor.
Good luck.
[ad_2]
www.doctornerdlove.com
