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If you want to be in a great relationship — the kind that could become a marriage — you need to let this one go.
Catching him in bed with another woman? One of your friends, even?
You ought to have kicked him to the curb the second time you caught him online. When does he have time to go to bars and meet chicks, if you are joined at the hip? Otherwise, I think he might not be a good fit for you, even if the sex is amazing. I agree with Meredith; this guy does sound awful.
I think you should break things off now. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. He is shoveling garbage onto you and you have turned into a toxic waste dump. End this relationship and take a long cleansing meditative retreat.
And the likelihood that it will result in actual cheating is very low. But yet there you are stuck again. Get unstuck and never, ever again settle for a man who does not respect you. Neither the images nor the site were immediately familiar to us. The pictures hadn't been taken from our social network profiles, nor had Patrick and I ever online-dated. Of course, that's where my mind went first: Was my live-in boyfriend of five-plus years maintaining a double life filled with Internet honeys?
But how would that work -- he doesn't even know how to send an instant message. Within a few moments, though, it dawned on me what I was looking at.
In , a photographer friend, Jenny, had snapped some photos of us around the house for her portfolio. When the shoot was over, we signed model release forms with the vague notion that she might offer the pictures to a stock photo agency. But we never thought anyone would actually buy them.
At first, being an inadvertent star of an online dating ad campaign seemed hilarious, and I reveled in the joke, posting screenshots on Facebook and dominating the proverbial water cooler at my workplace, the Bay Citizen.
But the ads continued to run through the fall and winter, and gradually they came to haunt me. Looking at the New York Times website over the shoulder of my boss, I'd spy Patrick, seemingly the happiest, most single guy amid other happy, supposedly single guys. Acquaintances and friends sent concerned emails and Facebook messages.
I was just looking at something on NY Mag and saw this ad -- isn't that your boyfriend in here? Maybe just a look-alike? In any case, wanted to share Even more troubling was the notion that pictures of Patrick and me were floating around the ether, out of our grasp and susceptible to any insult or manipulation. For example, Jenny hadn't taken many solo shots of us. In order to slot our faces into separate grids of smiling men and women, the dating service may have had to snip a happy-together image in half.
Is that even allowed? What else could a stock agency client do to my picture?
Some Internet research taught me that examples of unfortunate stock-photo use abound. One 9-year-old girl was featured on an anti-abortion billboard without her knowledge. In another case, a farmer sued Getty Images, among others, after a picture of him holding a goose appeared on joke birthday cards.
She told me the same thing as Frankel, with an added dose of condescension. He could not recall any court cases deciding in favor of a model who had signed away her rights as unambiguously as I had. Managing your emotions is something that you will be glad you did later down the road as opposed to going bat shit crazy on him. For now, I'm glad to know that if my boyfriend has to appear on another online dating ad, I might get to be right there with him, frozen in Internet amber as a "trendy couple holding hands. At this moment, today, right now, you are most likely more invested and farther ahead in this relationship than he is. Do not be the reason it fails.
And in a case very similar to my own, a married woman sued Match. Were she and I victims of anything other than our own stupidity? And if so, whom should I be suing -- and for how much dough? To begin answering these questions, I needed to know who, exactly, was selling my image. At this point, Patrick didn't care much about the ads, except to point out that he looked really, really good as a single guy. So far, so good — until we were both looking at something on his laptop, and a dating website came up as one of his most visited sites.
I asked him about this, and told him that while I had no wish to pry into his personal life, the question for me was whether he was looking to keep his options open for now, it being early days. A quick Google search on his user name revealed another three, all with very recent logins. At that stage I was ready to end the relationship and leave him to it. It is true that lots of people set up online dating profiles without ever taking action or using them to meet someone.