Should I cut her some slack for cheating?

[yours_forver]

I was told to get an unbiased opinion on this so... here goes. I have been in a 3 year relationship with a girl 7 years younger than me. Prior to the relationship I have had 6 other girlfriends, all of which cheated on me... Because of this I came into the relationship with some major trust issues. I let my girlfriend know this but not long after we started our relationship she went on a date with another guy and throughout the relationship has cheated four times. I have come to the conclusion that its just something that happens based on past experiences, unfortunately my trust for her is nil... she went through a period where she tried to prove her trust by opening up every aspect of her life to me to prove it was passed, that she would be faithful... Unfortunately she only opened up what she wanted and cheated again but hid it from me. After the fourth time she claimed she would be faithful, of course I don't believe her but because of her age (17) and the fact we are in a long distance relationship I don't know whether to cut her some slack.

 

Her friends tell me she is young its to be expected, my friends are constantly trying to set me up with other girls and don't understand my willingness to be faithful to an unfaithful girl.... anyway... We are currently on a break... my jealousy peeked and proved too much for both of us... I just wanted to know, from an unbiased opinion, whether I should cut her some slack because of her age and the long distance issue... or if I should call it quits. I do love this girl, and when things are good between us I feel like everything could work out... but her parents are strict religious types that restrict her every move... and because of this I think she has become used to do the wrong thing and hiding it... Is there any hope for her?... Also what can I do to learn to trust again? If not with my current girlfriend then any girl in the future…

[SweetypieEnlightenedOne]

Its very odd for me to respond to someone who I feel should find a woman his own age with all respect and Honesty to you, I am bothered about this. If my calculations are correct you are 24. That means if you take 7 years away that you were 21 and she was 14 years old. BUt since you came here for help, then that is what i'm gonna try my best to give you.

 

She is young and at this age you can't expect her to be settled. Most women this age are not sure what they want and may like to date around. Another key aspect about her age is that she may not have experienced enough to find out a direct approach to tell you that she is not ready to be tied down. Its just like a young boy at this age. THis is not something that is easy to get.

 

YOu want to be settled but your older, and the mentalitys are different. I think you need to let her date other people and let her get some of this out of her system. She is not ready for this, and she is telling you without tellin you that by the evidence of her 4 cheating experiences...........If she is 17 then she is either still in highschool or just came out. She is not ready to settle down like this. I don't understand (as I said earlier) how this relationship came to pass. Do her parents know about you? IF so and they have consented to this....then maybe I can be more open minided but if this is a hidden relationship then I will be very upset, but if it is consentual and the parents are ok with this then maybe talk to the mom, and ask her if she feels that this girl is not ready to settle with you. IF the parents don't know about you,...then maybe you have more issues then you know of. Not to mention the stress and what may happen if they find out.

 

 

Back to your question..

 

At 17 most woman think they are in love, but at that age honestly ...it is rare. IT is possible but extremely rare.

 

Hope I helped a bit

[yours_forver]

yeah unfortunately when we met she told me she was 17, when she was 14... by the time i found out her age i was already madly in love. The relationship has never been sexual... for my part anyway. Had i known the truth to start with things might have been different now... but you can't choose who you love. And her parents are strict jehovah's witnesses, they would let her date a guy of any age, just as long as he is a jehovah's witness... which i am not.

[Slypknot]

Bottom line is I think this decision should be based on your own personal esteem.

 

Do you honestly believe that you DESERVE to be with someone who can't seem to keep their pants on? How would you feel if you suddenly discovered one of her 'nights out' she brought back some gifts that keep on giving? (STD's) Do you believe that she's the last girl on the planet that will love you and make you happy? Hopefully not.

 

Hopefully you'll see that this girl is bringing you nothing but drama, pain and distractions (from what it sounds). Sure, when things are going well they feel really great. So does air to a drowning man, so does food to someone starving. If things are horrible/painfull most of the time then a little bit of relief feels like a world of goodness!...but it's not and you deserve way better.

 

Me personally - GONE. No if/ands/buts....gone. People who cheat are scared little people who can't handle being single but at the same time wanna shop like they are. They lie, are undependable and in the end almost always cause the other pain.

[yours_forver]

ha ha ha, love the analogies, so true... It's just hard to think that there is actually a girl out there that doesn't cheat when im yet to meet one. I'm sick of people excusing what she did because of her age, i never cheated when i was her age, but i guess our relationship was founded on her lies so it was doomed to start with... thanks for the advice.

[brandos lovechild]

Bro, listen to slypknot..SERIOUSLY !! He is telling you the truth.

 

NOONE should EVER forgive a cheater,it doesn't matter if she's 17 years old !!! Just because she's young,is that an excuse to have no morals ?! NO.

 

I've got a 17 year old girlfriend as well (im 19)..and the headaches they cause due to their will to be 'free' are MONSTROUS ! You know what i do ?

I give up caring about what she does on her nights out..i actually don't give a shit ! I don't call her or msg her to see if she's okay...If it's a girl's night out,she's on her own.

 

I do the same to her now as well. Whenever i go out..I DO WHAT I WANT WITH WHO I WANT..if she msgs me,i might msg back,might not .

 

DUDE..you've got to change your mindset with these women. It's the guys who get so emotionally involved that end up gettin screwed by them !

I care about my gf..but there's no way i'm going to let her upset me !!

I think you are putting too much of yourself into these relationships and the girls are gettin turned off by it.

 

FINALLY: DO NOT ALLOW THE HAPPINESS OF YOUR WOMAN TO DICTATE YOUR HAPPINESS ! Make the woman in your life someone to enjoy..not someone to rest your hopes on. Good Luck bro,try being a bit tougher perhaps?

[netman]

YF, my ex g/f cheated on, and her excuse to me was that she was "young". I was 19 and she was 17. She was my first love, so I was in so much shock when I found out she was cheating on me that I didn't know whether to leave her, stay, deal with it, etc.. I just hung around and just dealt with it, then I threatened to leave, but she begged me, and begged me to stay, so I did.

 

The relationship got better, but then I developed serious trust and insecurity issues that I still deal with to this day. I hung around for 4 more years, but it really screwed up my head. I turned into a jealous a$$hole b/f, and no matter what she did to prove herself, I never could really trust her again. I then began to cheat on her (she never found out, even to this say) to get back at her, but that only fulfulled my short term satisfaction for revenge. I'm in a wonderful relationship right now with a new g/f, but because of being burned in the past I have to fight myself to not compare her to my ex. I'm having a hard time giving her my 100% trust even though she deserves that and more. I work on my jealousy every day because I love this girl and I don't want to lose her over something that happened in the past. Good thing that my g/f is so wonderful and understanding. I love her soooo much!!!!! Anyway, let me get down from Cloud 9. hehehehe

 

Anyhow, back to your issue. I'm telling you my story so that you could maybe learn from it. I can tell that you already have serious trust issues since you've been constantly cheated on in the past. I think that you really need to put yourself first and decide what you think is important for you in your life and your relationships, which is probably trust, and I believe that once a girl cheats on you the trust is GONE.

 

No matter how much you love this girl, there's no way that it'll ever work. She cheated on you 4 times, and you're still hanging around so you're proving to her that you'll stick around no matter how many times she cheats on you. She probably lost all respect for you after the first time she cheated and you took her back. Being "young" is just an excuse to mask the real reason she's cheating. She's not honest enough to talk to and communicate with you about what's lacking in your relationship. Do you really want to be with someone like that?

 

I say move on and learn from this and get help for your trust issues. There's too many girls out there in this world to get stuck on one. I tell you the truth when I say that I love my girl so much, but if I found out that she ever lied to me or cheated on my it'll be over in a heartbeat. I love myself too much to go through that again.

[SweetypieEnlightenedOne]

slypknot.

 

 

I like that last part of your email..honestly you should make that like your quote or something! I have never heard it put better. Damn you got me smiling on that one...

[Emmylu]

I don't think age has anything to do with it. You didn't say if she slept around, but just that she dated other men. I don't think this is the same type of cheating as one cheating on a spouse. The problem is that she never commited herself to you. Her fault is in not being honest about what she wants - freedom to shop around some more, because she's afraid she'll lose you. If you rush your partner into an all-or-nothing scenario before she's ready, then...well... she won't be ready.

[brandos lovechild]

Emmylu,

 

To be fair tho,you would not give this advice to a female in the same situation ? or would you..i dunno?

[yours_forver]

Emmylu, it was a monogomous relationship, she knew i had an issue with relationships in the past ending because of cheating... And she did commit herself... claiming that the girls in my past were %$@#ed up because of what they did... yet... she did it four times more often... I have never taken a girl back in the past for cheating... If it were an issue of shopping around i had many opportunities to do the same...

 

But saying she "just" dated other men... if you are in a relationship... and you decide its exclusive... dating other people should not be an issue. Married or not, that is cheating.

[Genesis]

This girl is a baby and you are a grown man(I think).

 

She wants to be young and live her life, you are taking that away from her.

 

For GODS sakes she is only 17!! 17!!! At seventeen I was chewing gum, naive, and trying to figure out what college to go to. At that age she does not need to be tied down to some guy! If she wants to work things out I say go for it.

 

I think you robbed this girl of her childhood. I do not know, what to tell you. She is just a baby. She will want to date others, you are not giving her any other options right now. Let her go, and if she comes back to you it was meant to be. When she goes off the school she will have so many guys to date, it will be like a buffet. 4 of school years can really change a person. The woman I was at 17 is alot less mature , and wise as I am today. I think this relationship was a bad idea to begin with. It began with deception and lies. MEN YOU HAVE TO CHECK A GIRLS AGE BEFORE YOU DATE THEM!! LOOK AT THEIR DIVERS L. , Just be glade her parents did not put you in jail!!! MOVE ON, SHE CHEATED>

 

Good Luck, maybe when she grows up in about 2-5 more years you can get back together.

[um_ok]

1st of all u make me sound like i am the worst person in the world maybe you should mention some other stuff not only your side of the story . like for example that you are the one pretty much begging me to go and sleep with someone else but it has to be for you so i have to go take pictures .. and also how i never dated other men one was a kiss that i ran away from when i was almost going to go through with the hwole sleeping with someone else for u u thought it was hot until you found out who it was. the other was some guy i did go oon ONE date with i diidnt even kiss and that happened when we werent even serious at all yet . the other was someconcert kiss with some guy i didi t even know i coulda given him my number or somehting but NO .. abd the other noone considers cheating it was just me beeing stupid and flashing some guys you swear lkike i have been going out and f=cking ohter guys or something u shoulkdnt have left off the fact that you question me daily that u accuse me daily about every single person i even know that you go off at me for wanting to mess around with a chick go off at me telling me that is chetaing and that you got mad at me doing that that you go through all my personal private things like my cell phone my phone bill my email then accuse me that something someone saiid means that i must be cheating you didint mention how you yourself kept a "friendship" with a girl you thought was hot as and adorable when i told u it hurt me u talking to her and the fact that u ignored me to talk to her you promised me you would never even speak to her ever again and what happened i find out u have been "friends" w her all that time(over 2 years) and hiding it from me saying you hate her now that she was such a bitch .. n.e ways ..

 

just so this story isnt so one sided

[brandos lovechild]

Leave eachother the hell alone ! Providing what you say is the truth..you are both at fault. He is at fault because he has no business ofloading his insecurity problems on a 17 year old who still has alot of living to do...and 'um_ok' you obviously don't want to be in a relationship if u r kissing guys at concerts,goin on dates or wanting to "mess around with a chick" ( that is foul ). I couldn't think of a worse match than u2 ?

 

Don't destroy eachother. If you aren't happy,then get the hell out of the situation.

[brandos lovechild]

Leave eachother the hell alone ! Providing what you say is the truth..you are both at fault. He is at fault because he has no business ofloading his insecurity problems on a 17 year old who still has alot of living to do...and 'um_ok' you obviously don't want to be in a relationship if u r kissing guys at concerts,goin on dates or wanting to "mess around with a chick" ( that is foul ). I couldn't think of a worse match than u2 ?

 

Don't destroy eachother. If you aren't happy,then get the hell out of the situation.