“My husband’s past with brothels”
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He does if he wants this marriage to work. She looks at him differently because he’s a fan of fucking hookers. He can choose to ignore and not talk about it—and their marriage will continue to suffer as a result because she will feel like she doesn’t know him.
Refusing to discuss something important with your spouse because You Don’t Wanna is so childish and frankly selfish.
Kate —
It’s not that I think going to a brothel is a positive thing. If I thought it was, I guess I would have done so, I’ve been in Amsterdam and Hamburg and Munich and London and made a conscious decision not to do that. I also don’t see going to a legal, regulated brothel as awful or a sign that one doesn’t want a serious relationship or to relate to women as people. I know a lot of Westerners engage in sex tourism and are specifically seeking sex with a 12-year old girl or boy. That is very gross, but that doesn’t seem to describe LW’s husband. I think everyone agrees that sex trafficking, violent pimps, underage prostitutes, prostitution to feed an addiction, etc. are horrible. But Kate, I think you went ape shit over a situation which wasn’t that at all.In terms of not respecting women, I think of the two men that LW has had a relationship with, the six-year cheater is vastly more disrespectful of women. To me, conning women for sex or to have somebody to do your laundry, by pretending to care more about them than you actually do, while serially cheating is hugely disrespectful and not at all considering the woman as a person. It is one step up from getting her drunk, convincing you really care about her, and steering her into bed, while still able to think, but a bit fogged and operating under the drunken feeling that this might be the start of a relationship. IOW, to me seeking sex through lies from a woman who otherwise would not choose to have sex with you is a lot worse than paying a woman who is willingly selling sex in a legal brothel.
I think this young woman has already crossed the Rubicon. She married the guy and she had a daughter with him and he is helping to raise her son. She is going to be a seriously hurting single mom if she can’t get over the product of his snooping. We can argue about how well she knew her husband, or how happy she was to be married to him, but her texts seem to meet to say she was not unhappy and wants her marriage to continue.
I still don’t see what her husband can tell her. She is upset that he visited a brothel, because she finds the thought repugnant. I don’t think the specific why he went changes that. We can speculate: young, stranger in a strange land, perhaps feeling ethnic discrimination or knowing that he wasn’t going to stay in Australia or knowing he didn’t want a long-term with a non-Asian didn’t think it was fair or reasonable to start a romantic relationship, but was still a very horny 20-something.
It seems clear that he deeply regrets his past behavior and isn’t going to repeat that behavior. She snooped, she found something that revolts her. Really, what can he possibly say. You say he should at least tell her that it was one of the legal brothels. I agree with that. I’m not sure that matters enough to her. I’m fairly certain it would not matter enough to you, if you were in her position.
From what you’ve written here Kate, you have such a visceral reaction to a guy in a brothel, that I can’t imagine that anything your husband might say after you found he had been with a prostitute before you met him, would alter your feelings about that discovery one iota. It would be the same as learning he had been a mass murderer. No explanation possible. LW seems of somewhat, but not as severe, viewpoint. I think this is something she has to work on herself if she wants to stay married.
Hey, I was a young married and member of NOW, when a lot of feminists believed and frequently said ‘there is no difference between marriage and prostitution’. I guess that colors one’s view a bit. I’ve also known prostitutes who seemed to be positive women who had a choice in what they did with their lives. The daughter of the chairman of my county political party was a prostitute. She and her father were able to make peace over that decision and she sometimes attended events of our local political party. She was a normal person and did not strike me as at all unhappy.
Let’s say that he snoops through her emails and phone histories and finds out she had a large number of sexual partners before getting married (or larger than he considers appropriate). He is upset because he thinks that it implies a casual/transactional attitude about sex, which he considers to be something that should only be shared in a serious romantic relationship. She tells him that it was a different stage of her life that she feels bad about and doesn’t want to talk about it.
Would she be obligated to give him an accounting of the decision making that led to her having sex with a bunch of partners? Why she kept doing it? How she felt when she had casual sex? Why she stopped? Is it sufficient that it “matters a lot to him” ?
Completely agree with Firestar. Marriage doesn’t entitle you to grill your spouse about things that happened before you ever met them. Frankly that’s borderline abusive and again I find it hugely hypocritical that some folks here consider that ok because of their own views of prostitution. If visiting a brothel is a deal breaker she can get a divorce. Frankly, she’s the one who snooped and went through years of messages to find this information. There are issues here way beyond who he fucked in college.
I was going to type my thoughts on this… By why bother? Firestar, Ron, Fyodor, and juliecatherine all summed up my feelings rather well.
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But as for Northern Star. Oh, please! Your logic here is so non-existent. EXAMPLE — If some asshole dude thought it was “IMPORTANT” that his woman told him EVERYTHING SEXUAL THOUGHT SHE EVER EVEN HAD — MUCH LESS ACTED UPON… and she RIGHTLY simply didn’t wanna and thus refused to do so… would you call her petty and childish? Somehow, I think not.
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What is in the past — is the past. Marrying somebody doesn’t give anybody the right to constantly grill their partner to satisfy one’s own pathetic mindfucked insecurities that stem from their OWN fucked up and utterly dimwitted and stupid decisions — such as dating a serial cheater because you are too FUCKING pathetic and FUCKING frightened of being alone. That shit IS on you.Yeah, man, don’t talk about what bothers you, and just let things fester. Makes total sense to me! That’s what we always recommend, right? Non-communication with your spouse?
That’s totes gonna work. Yup!
How about don’t snoop and then don’t ask fucking questions that you obviously and clearly can’t fucking handle. PS — there is NOTHING he can say that will make her feel better about this. Why? She reeks of utter self righteousness and abject fucking bullshit.
.Yeah – I think there’s a lot of middle ground between – “prostitution is a theraptic thing between consenting adults that if you’re not okay with you’re a prude” and “virtually all prostitution is sex slavery and any one who engages in it objectifies other human beings for their sexual pleasure and is on par with a rapist”.
There is, as with most things in life, a lot of nuance there.
There is far too much abuse and coercion in prostitution. That is true, and anyone arguing otherwise is being willfully ignorant. It is also true however that some women enter into the sex willingly and without duress.
Should we prevent adult women who understand what they are doing, want to do what they are doing, and aren’t under threat or trying to feed an addiction or something, from being sex workers if that is their prerogative? I don’t think so.
While of course not a guarantee, you are more likely to find the latter in a regulated environment.
I also think its hyperbole to paint any man who seeks out paid sex as cold hearted and rapists. Some are, some truly do not care about the other person they have paid to use. But people are driven to seek out sex workers for lots of reason, sometimes it’s about loneliness and needing companionship, sometimes it’s someone with social issues who can’t connect with people the normal way. For many who seek out sex workers, the sex is actually secondary and the human connection the main driver.
Is it possible that these men are being willfully naive and pretend that they for talk themselves into believing the woman *they’ve* hired wants to be doing what she’s doing? Absolutely. And those mental gymnastics for self preservation does deserve condemnation, but I think you can be a good, desperately lonely person who does something wrong. Again, nuance.
I think it’s also possible to have a complex view of prostitution as a whole, while having standards for your personal relationships.
If my husband told me he had been to brothels in the past, it would throw me for sure, because at the very least it would make me question who he was and wonder what drove him to do that. That that piece of him was totally unknown to me. And while I can understand that not all prostitution is bad and not all sex workers are being forced into it, but a lot are and it would eat at me the possibility that my husband engaged in that.
But I’d like to think I’d have a conversation with him about it all instead of a new jerk response that he was a rapist I needed to leave asap. Why did you go to a brothel? What were you hoping to get? How did you view the women you interacted with? Did you think about whether or not they wanted to be there?
And then we’d go from there.
Maybe it will work and maybe it won’t, but there are some things that one has to work out for oneself, because the problem is really within oneself and not with one’s spouse/SO. Extreme jealousy for no reason? Grill your SO to your heart’s content, but it won’t change anything. There’s nothing a loyal SO can say which will calm the fears of the pathologically jealous. Very low self-esteem also isn’t going to be fixed by all the good treatment and compliments from a SO. Like anorexia, it is rooted within the person’s self image. The person, preferably with therapy, has to fix themselves.
The LW strikes me as still being in very defensive/reactive mode, because she was in a 6-year relationship in which she repeatedly discovered she had been cheated upon and yet stayed in the relationship. That seems to be what she is reacting to. She built up a profound sex of mistrust, in the cheater she stayed with, and washing over into any man. She forgave the ex apparently a huge number of times FOR WHAT HE DID TO HER TO BETRAY HER TRUST. That’s a problem within her and one that only she and a therapist can fix.
Her husband did nothing to her. She says he has treated her very well. To be this bent out of shape over something (legal) which happened well before he met her is ultimately on her. There is literally nothing he can say which will get her past this. She is still scared and not trusting her judgement because of her prior relationship. She violated her husband’s privacy and found something that upset her, but to treat that as super significant is to assume that people don’t change as they age, that there is no redemption for past errors, that you shouldn’t just judge people by what they are today. That just strikes me as very wrong and very narrow.
She’s responded multiple times. She never answered the question: how much has she told her husband about her past, especially her 6 years with serial cheater? She can’t reasonably demand, based upon her insecurities, more detail about his sexual history and feelings about everything he did with a requirement that he justify his actions, than she is willing to provide. Her increased concern, upsettedness, hysteria, whatever isn’t license for an unbalanced and obviously unwilling level of disclosure from him.
So, she accepts this guy as he is or she moves on and sees how well she can do as a single mom of two. No matter how well she handles that financially, she isn’t going to be ready for another relationship until she successfully deals with her own issues.
Honestly, willingly staying with a guy she had caught cheating repeatedly? For six years? Having a kid with the guy? Now holding her husband to an extremely higher standard? Nope, not fair, not realistic, really not rational.
I also don’t get this ‘we married very young’. She had been married to her husband for a year after a six year relationship with the cheater. She is the mother of two. She can’t be that young and she can’t be that inexperienced and naïve. She is now being super holier than thou with husband.
Also specific to this LW, I don’t have high aspirations for her marriage for reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not he went to brothels: she seems to barely know him and they don’t really know how to communicate with one another.
Hey Ron, I see that some of that is addressed to me, but it’s really long and I may not get to it.
