I’m 27-year-old Italian guy. I just got out of a situationship with a woman five years older than me. It was a total mess. She wanted everything to revolve around her and be in control of everything because she had bad relationships in the past. She wanted to date other people, but I was always against it. Not because I wanted to control her, but because she literally said she enjoyed “betraying and lying for fun.” We argued a lot about her love of talking about her exes. That was her favorite argument. She thought I was jealous, but I was just annoyed about being constantly compared to guys from her past and those comparisons stung because — spoiler alert — the sex we had wasn’t that great.

To make matters worse, she would complain to me during sex that all the men in her life had “performance issues” with her. Sometimes when I couldn’t get hard — mostly because images of her exes were playing in my head — she would have a literal panic attack. And then there was this double standard: She would go on and on about how big this ex’s cock was and how amazing sex with this other ex was, but she didn’t want to hear about any of my past sexual encounters. I told her all of this made me feel bad about myself, but she felt that since we weren’t a “real” couple she didn’t have to take my feelings into consideration.

Every one of her stories was about she betrayed her exes and messed up these monogamous relationships but somehow she was the victim. I finally told her that I didn’t want to hear another word about her past. She didn’t like that and expected me to apologize for what I had said, but I never did. After that, I left her. Do you think I did the right thing? Am I an asshole for leaving her?

Unpleasant Situationship Ends Disastrously

You’re not an asshole for leaving, USED, but staying as long as you did — well, I don’t wanna call you an idiot for staying as long as you did (as you’re a reader), but staying with this woman for more than five minutes was an idiotic thing to do.

She bragged about betraying her exes and lying to their faces for fun. She compared you to her exes (unfavorably!) during sex (!!!) and then had a meltdown when you couldn’t stay hard while she insulted you. She claimed she didn’t owe you consideration or even kindness because you weren’t a “real” couple. (Decent people are kind to their one-night stands.) That’s not the behavior of someone who’s had some bad experiences with previous partners and needs a little extra care and consideration from their current partner. That’s the behavior of an emotionally abusive asshole in victim drag.

Now, usually when someone sticks around despite their partner being awful, USED, it’s because the sex is amazing or they did something stupid that makes walking away impossibly hard — they married the awful person and/or scrambled their DNA together. But in your case, USED, the sex was lousy, she was lousier, and you weren’t married and didn’t have kids. This woman wasn’t even your girlfriend! So, the question you should be asking yourself isn’t, “Am I the asshole for leaving,” but rather, “Why did I put up with this shit for so long?” You’re gonna need to figure out the answer to that question before you get with/on/in someone else — and promise me you’ll grab your pants and run the next time someone puts down your dick while you’re trying to use it. (Some men like that sort of thing, DOM, but you’re not one of them.)

Again, you did the right thing by leaving. Now you need to do the hard thing: learn from this experience. Playing games is not romance and traumatic past experiences (real or imaginary) are not Get-Out-of-Human-Decency-Free cards. And if someone you’re fucking has only shitty things to say about their exes — if someone is the common denominator in a whole bunch of shitty relationships — then the person you’re fucking is almost certainly the shitty one.

 I’m hoping you can put me in a better headspace about external pressure on my relationship. I’ve got a fantastic partner; we are sharing a life together and we are very happy. The challenge I face is that we own a nightclub where we encounter loads of single people. There’s music, there’s alcohol, there’s dancing — it all sounds fun, I know. Shockingly, I am not worried that my partner has a wandering eye. He’s well known in our little island town and respected here by everyone. But on many occasions, some woman has openly flirted with him, touched him suggestively, looked at him seductively — or worse — right in front of me. He deflects these advances, and he always tells these women that he is mine. My issue is with my anger I have towards these women as I feel they are testing me. I’m doing my best to let it go, even though it still gets to me. I would like to not let my emotions make me their bitch but some of these girls are clearly testing me. What can I say in these situations that is both diplomatic and firm without creating friction?

Peace Not Beast

Are you sure these women are testing you?

I mean, if the women who’ve hit on your boyfriend at the club are locals who know you’re together — and they know you’re exclusive — they may be testing you. But if these women are strangers or tourists, how are they supposed to know the hot guy serving them drinks has a girlfriend?

If we’re talking locals, you shouldn’t worry about being polite or diplomatic — you have every right to blow up — but you don’t wanna drive off regular paying customers either, right? And the alcohol isn’t “there,” PNB. You’re selling alcohol and profiting from its sale. Since booze is known to lower people’s inhibitions in ways that can impact their judgment, some tolerance for small errors of judgment and other tolerable party fouls — and flirting with a hot-but-taken guy counts as both — are a cost of doing business. So, if we’re talking locals, I would advise you to stick to withering looks and let your boyfriend continue doing the shutting down.

If they’re tourists… yeah, a tourist isn’t gonna know your boyfriend is taken; a tourist who makes a pass at your boyfriend is only guilty of shooting her shot. And as sex-and-relationship problems go, PNB, “all these fucking bitches wants to fuck my boyfriend” is a pretty good problem to have. (I know the feeling.) So long as your boyfriend can be trusted not to bang two tourist girls at a time in the walk-in beer cooler — and it sounds like he can be trusted not to do that — I think you should take the high road and the compliment. Laugh and tell the tourist your boyfriend is taken, offer her a shot and toast her great taste in men, and then point her in the direction of someone who can fuck the shit out of her in your beer cooler.

Read the rest of this week's column here! And this week on the Lovecast: A gay man was raised Mormon, and got the hell out. Now he’s living his best gay life, with a boyfriend he loves. But he never had a slutty phase, and worries that the only way to truly exorcise the Mormon mentality is to break free.

On this week’s show, Dan interviews Sacha Coward—a historian and writer specializing in LGBTQ+ history. His book Queer as Folklore makes perfect June reading. He and Dan talked about The Little Mermaid as trans allegory, how pornographic unicorns are, and the perverse straightness of the Nosferatu re-make. LISTEN HERE!