So, I need your help. I live in Japan and I've been seeing a new girl for a couple of months now. She's hot, my Japanese is improving daily, the sex is mind blowing—everything is pretty much awesome, except for one thing. Many of her friends are men. Within her set of male friends, both foreign and Japanese, she has a number of admirers who are pretty open about how they would like to date and/or sleep with her. Since we started seeing each other, she has gone out with these male friends on a couple of occasions for one-on-one dinners and after-dinner drinks, which I consider date-like activity and which makes me uncomfortable. She told me that one of her friends, who she has known for 10 years, asks her to come home with him every time they go out, including last week when they got hammered together at a transsexual hostess bar. Another good friend of hers has been in love with her since college. A third example is a guy who is coming to Japan in October largely just to see her. The list goes on.

Now, I do not want to be a controlling, jealous asshole who tells my girlfriend who she can and can't see and when and where she can go with them, but, on the other hand, I really don't fucking derive pleasure from the thought of her going out and getting drunk with dudes who clearly want to bang her. Obviously, she has a right to have her friends and she says she's not attracted to them, but I would like to find a balance between her desire to keep her male friends and my desire to not go insane every time she goes out drinking with one of them. How do I stop these feelings of jealousy, Dan? I'm not particularly acting on them, but the thought of her going out with other dudes drives me nuts. Do I have a right to tell her to tell them to fuck off? I don't feel that I do. Is there a way to keep us both happy? I trust her, but cheating often seems like a matter of timing and opportunity rather than an act of malice or betrayal, and I'm not sure I like the amount of opportunities she has. Help me out, Dan!!

Not Into Cuckolding

My response after the jump...

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This isn't about your girlfriend's "right" to have male friends, NIC, but about her apparent need to be surrounded by scores of frustrated, lovesick, miserable males.

Think, NIC: if she isn't attracted to any of the men in her life—none save you, if she's to be believed/trusted (I'm assuming, for the sake of this argument/answer, that your girlfriend isn't a high-priced callgirl in the GFE business)—why does she string these other men along? Why the dinners? Why the drinks? Why the date-like behaviors? Why fill these men, one drink/dinner/date-like-behavior at a time, with false hope?

It's not about the ego boost. She could get all the ego boosts she needs during a night out with her girlfriends. Your girlfriend—consciously or subconsciously—gets off on making the men in her life miserable. And I'm not just talking about the men she isn't fucking, SIC: she's making you miserable too. On purpose. And I'm pretty sure that if you weren't bothered by her behavior—if it didn't drive you nuts, make you jealous, and prompt you to send desperate letters to American agony aunts—she wouldn't be dating you.

So, hey, go ahead and tell her to tell them to fuck off, SIC, but the odds are good that she'll either dump you or force you to dump her if you make a demand like that. Because nothing she's doing—all those frustrated suitors, that one jealousy-crazed boyfriend—is unintentional. In other words...

Being with her means being miserable. If you don't wanna be miserable, don't be with her.