Franco said:
Zaxxon23,
Zaxxon23 said:
Franco said:
The only thing to watch out for is if she suddenly starts skipping hanging out with you to "go out with the girls." This is usually a red flag worth noting, and you can take action at this point if you feel like you need to.
How would you address this with her?
Ideally, you'd never find yourself in a situation where your girlfriend is attempting to skip time to hang out with you to hang out with the girls instead. It means you've already messed up somewhere in managing the relationship, and she's not putting "spend time with my boyfriend" as a priority over "spend time with the girls."
You can attempt to address it directly and call her out on it, but that also might just result in pouring salt on the wound -- it depends on her personality. Instead, you want to run the relationship in a way where she views you as the stronger, dominant man so that she doesn't feel the need to do this to you.
So the real answer here is, "set the correct precedent from the beginning by running the relationship correctly."
- Franco
Yes, however it's not always as cut and dried. In the situation I've found myself in...the girl is a single mom, 40 years old, more than half her time is staying at home with her kid, and the other less than half of the time she's developed over the past three years as spending time with her girlfriends as part of getting over a 10-year relationship that failed. So when she goes out I don't feel that she's being manipulative or malevolent...rather that she already had a life before meeting me and she is understandably having a tough time just ditching that life to be with a guy she's only known a few months. Truth be told she's consistently given me more than half of her available free time on a regular basis, so she's clearly making appropriate investments to be with me.
That being said, she spends a significant portion of the free time she has at bars. Her framing of it is as spending time with the girlfriends, and truth be told I actually believe her. From everything I've seen through time hanging out with her at the bar to her facebook updates, and everything else I see, she really is consistently spending time with the same girlfriends, primarily talking about girl things (problems at work, boyfriend stuff, mom stuff, generally girly chitchat), and not out there to "party" or hookup, but just to hang with friends away from home. It's just that it's done at a bar, which is really common here in Dallas, particularly since most every bar is also a restaurant since there used to actually be a law that over 40% of sales from a bar in DFW were required to be food sales, thus the really heavy bar culture here.
So I'm finding it very tough to come to grips with the situation considering all the warnings here on GC about dating girls who drink (and truth be told she is indeed a drinker...not heavy but daily). I trust her, I just don't trust where she hangs out. And having enough experience picking up girls with boyfriends and husbands, there's no way I can ever truly trust her to remain faithful when she's under the influence at a bar, with horny guys around, and with a few of her girlfriends (one in particular) who are much more condusive to flirting and hookups.
In respect to the question I asked earlier, there was one night in particular that she consistently flaked on, and it was a somewhat complicated situation. On this specific day (Tuesdays), she works all day, then has a few hours free, then has to work overnight for change control (an IT thing); and found over time that she'd rather just have a few drinks and talk for a bit with her friends rather than be with me and likely engage in sex (which with me is a fairly big investment for lots of girls as I tend to go real long and am rather big so it's more like exercise for them sometimes lol). So while it's understandable that this wasn't a good night to her, I did take offense at the flaking as I feel that I should since the flaking is disrespectful even if her reasons for doing so are fairly understandable. And what makes this challenging is that she doesn't want me involved with her child (which I fully support) until we've been together longer, and since she always has her kid on Mondays and Thursdays, and every other weekend, it creates this huge challenge where she's consistently flaking on our one free night to get together during the week (Wednesdays she has always hung out with the same friend as that's their only night they can meet).
Anyways, this whole thing caused a serious strain in our relationship and we're on a break now because of it. I'm finding myself at a bit of a crisis point because due to my work schedule bars tend to be one of the few places I can reliably find women at (I really need to do some more weekend day game), and with the bar culture here in Dallas I find myself wondering if it's really as cut and dried as "don't date a girl who drinks or goes to the bars". I in fact want a girl I can go to bars with for fun, live music, and socializing. But it seems the tradeoff to that is those girls also tend to have girlfriends who also go to the bars together, and that creates hookup possibilities I don't like. So it's like I want my cake and to eat it too. Seems like I can't win here lest I become controlling, and that's as good a way to lose a girl as anything. And on the other hand I can't in good conscience let my girl go out to the bars alone lest I appear weak by allowing her to engage in activities that create unnecessary temptations to cheat. Not to mention it frankly makes me jealous as fuck if she's out there at a bar without me late at night. I despise feeling jealous but given my experience there's just no way I can't feel jealous if she's out there at a bar late at night even if it is likely innocent.
What to do? Is it just simply not possible to date this kind of woman without forcing her to give up the lifestyle she's accustomed to? Or just to not even date these girls in the first place (and thus remove a significant portion of the dating pool from consideration)? I do tend to be a one girl at a time sort of guy, so this kind of situation is really untenable for a relationship. I suppose I can fix by dating multiple girls at any one time and only doing a relationship under the condition that the nights out without me stop. But I'm curious about other thoughts. Is it possible (and healthy) to develop a medium ground for these kinds of situations? Or maybe I just need to give up on single moms altogether, although that's pretty darn tough when you get in your 40s.
