DEAR AUNTY VIC #18
I cheated on my situationship, became friends with benefits with a new guy, and then he hooked up with someone else. I feel like I was the player, but now I'm the one who got played. Advice please?
First off, it sounds like you got yourself onto the relationship train without ever intending to buy a ticket. You probably felt trapped and found yourself thinking, “Fuck, I don’t want this person to be my partner.”
To be honest, I think that is a bullshit excuse for cheating. Sorry, not sorry. The reality is you can get off this relationship train any time you want. All it takes is a chat to your partner, asking, “Hey, where are we heading? I don’t know if we’ve got tickets to the same destination.” Your partner might respond, “Well, I’m going to married-with-two-kids-extra-exclusive-ville”, and you’d respond, “Sorry, I want to go to sex-every-Saturday-and-non-exclusive-town.” And at that point, you get off the fucking train.
It appears that you decided to take an emergency exit instead of communicating your destination to your partner. Your partner viewed your relationship as exclusive, but you didn't want it to be that way. As a result, you made a quick move and got involved with someone else during a night out, which sent a clear signal that you weren't interested in pursuing an exclusive relationship. This allowed you to avoid having the difficult conversation about wanting to arrive at different destinations. While you technically labelled the relationship a ‘situationship’, hinting at questionable exclusivity, the fact that you acknowledged your actions as ‘cheating’ implies that exclusivity was expected. In other words, you knew what you were doing.
Maybe it’s only now, after your friends with benefits situation, that you can see how fucked up things can get. Failing to communicate about exclusivity and expectations in any relationship (casual or serious) is only going to end in messy, hurt feelings. It seems that you lacked the courage to communicate your feelings to your situationship when you didn't want to be exclusive. Now, you're also struggling to find the courage to assert to your friend with benefits that you do want an exclusive relationship.
If I have interpreted this entirely wrong, and that you had told your situationship that you were not exclusive: you didn’t cheat! Don’t tell yourself that! If you and your friend with benefits did have a conversation that you were exclusive, and then they hooked up with someone else, SCRAM!
In order to be successful, any type of relationship (exclusive or not) requires both parties to be clear in what they want and be able to articulate that desire. If you have a track record of finding this difficult to do, or seem to attract people that find this difficult to do, it’s time to park the fuck up. Be single, discover yourself and your desires. Don’t be that person who is repetitively hurting people, or getting hurt, simply because you aren’t emotionally mature enough to communicate or understand what you want. It’s okay to be single. In fact, it sounds like being single is the most healthy thing you can do right now.