Advice for a Friend

by Nicholas Allen — September 25, 2007

Today I once again turn to my shrewdly insightful readers for a bit of advice on the women’s perspective on things. Actually, the advice isn’t for me but for a friend of mine. (Okay, I know that sounds like a really lame ruse—but I swear; it really is for a friend!)

One of my closest friends recently got out of a long-term relationship with a woman. It was one of those relationships that was bad for years (literally) before he finally broke up with her. Understandably, my friend is a little leery of jumping into another relationship right away. In the last couple of months, however, he started dating a really great girl. Things progressed fairly quickly to the point where they are now together four or five nights a week, and sleeping together on a regular basis.

He’s not seeing anybody else, but he seems to be reserving the right to do so. He doesn’t refer to this new girl (who all of his friends love, by the way, because she seems to make him pretty happy) as his "girlfriend," and the two of them haven’t had a conversation about exclusivity yet. He says he thinks they’ll probably get around to discussing it "officially" sometime in January.

Now, I don’t claim to know everything—or even anything—about women. But it seems unlikely to me that he’ll be seeing and sleeping with this girl on a regular basis for six or seven months before it first occurs to her that maybe they should discuss not seeing other people. I can’t help but think that, given how much time they’re spending together, she might already be assuming that they’re not seeing other people. My feeling is that most of the women I’ve known would rip me limb-from-limb (and then complain to all their girlfriends about what an ass I was) if we had been having sex with each other four or five times a week—every week—for two or three months, and then they suddenly found out I’d been dating other woman on our "off" nights. Heck, as a guy I might even feel betrayed if I found out that the girl in question was dating other men on the two nights a week we weren’t together.

My take on it is that, whether he likes it or not, my friend’s got a girlfriend at this point. And if he’s really committed to remaining uncommitted, now is the time to speak up and have the discussion with her. Otherwise, he runs the very grave risk of doing wrong by her. My friend argues that she hasn’t brought the subject up either, so if she’s going along on the assumption that they’re exclusive, it’s as much her fault as it is his. I think that’s true—up to a point. I mean, it might be really stupid to leave your front door unlocked when you go out at night, but that still doesn’t make it okay for someone to come in and rob your house. In other words, failing to protect yourself adequately still doesn’t make it okay for someone to do something that ends up hurting you.

But what do I know? Maybe women look at these things differently than I think they do. So I turn the question over to you. What do you think?

Nicholas Allen is a writer and columnist based in Manhattan. To read all of his blogs, click here.