Don’t Be That Guy… in Your Relationship

Not all relationships are the stuff of fairytales. Just like men, women can be annoying, shitty and bad in bed. It shouldn’t even need to be said, but when you’re dissatisfied with how things are going with a woman (or any partner), there are some perfectly reasonable ways of approaching it that don’t involve harebrained schemes or elaborate lies. Unless you’re these dudes… all of whom happen to be British.

Level Down

Yes, everyone needs a night out away from the old ball and chain on occasion. Flirting with other people on such nights, within reason, is a perfectly legitimate way to remind yourself that you’re still a person inside there somewhere.

But if your flirtations tend to be so steamy that you’re afraid to see anyone your partner knows, you should probably rethink your relationship. Alternatively, you could ask the nightclub where you hang out to ban your girlfriend’s dad so you can chat up other women there without being busted. That is totally what a dude did recently, The Daily Mail reported.

Messaging the club on Facebook, called Level Nightclub in Bolton, U.K., dude asked if they would go so far as to make up an excuse to keep the dad out, because he “can’t relax chatting to other girls knowing he might be in there.” He included a picture of the girlfriend’s father. “Are you joking?!” the club responded. “I’m dead serious pal,” he wrote back. Not to mention stupid. The club posted the exchange on Facebook to mock him.

Find another club, dude. Also: Find another girlfriend.

Bedding Away With It

Don’t want to respond to a woman’s texts while you’re out with your friends? Understandable. But there’s no need to pretend you’re home in bed about to fall asleep — let alone to stage a photo of the bedtime scene. But that is precisely what a 20-year-old named James Greatorex did.

He claims he was trying to hang out with his friends at a bar when a girl he was chatting with via text “continuously sent [him] naked pictures of herself which I really didn’t enjoy,” he told the Metro UK. His friends decided that he should send back a photo of himself going to sleep to convince her to stop. So they helped him stage it by holding up his coat behind him to look like a bed and pillow, and using another coat to look like a blanket. Then he tweeted out his handiwork:

In fairness, it’s not a bad job, all told. Greatorex insisted the prank was a joke, and that he eventually told the girl he sent it to that he was kidding, and she thought it was funny, too.

While this is hardly an egregious offense, we need more info to parse how moronic he is. When he says he didn’t enjoy her naked pictures, does he mean he didn’t like her and wasn’t attracted to her and didn’t want the pictures, or that he did like her and the pictures, but felt it was rude that she was sending them while he was hanging out with friends?

There’s a Grand Canyon of difference between those two situations. The former would demand that he either explicitly tell her to stop sending naked pics or stop seeing her entirely. The latter — he likes her and just wanted to be left alone for the night, she wasn’t respecting it, so he pranked her — might fall perfectly within the realm of shit two people do to each other. She might’ve even have had that one coming.

Either way, not everyone felt his approach was so ingenious:

But Greatorex (can’t be his real name, can it?) is only 20, which means his brain literally hasn’t formed completely yet. We’re letting him off with a warning.

A Wingman and a Prayer

So there’s this guy named Steve. Steve gripes constantly about his girlfriend, whom he finds boring, shy and dull in bed. His friend Dave, eager to get him to shut up, suggests that he end the relationship. Steve simply can’t — he doesn’t have the balls. Dave suggests that Steve just fuck someone else — that would do the trick. But how could Steve make it so his awful girlfriend catches him, rather than have to admit his infidelity? Dave offers an ingenious twist: Steve should fuck another woman, then get that woman to call up his girlfriend and let her break the news! That’ll show her! All they need is a willing lady! Dave has an idea about that, too: He’ll approach a complete stranger and ask her to help his bro out. All he has to do is explain how awful the girlfriend is — what woman wouldn’t want to assist?

That actually happened to a woman who runs the Wine Gang Twitter account in the United Kingdom, according to The Sun. The woman was contacted by a guy named Dave Hope, asking her to sleep with his friend Steve in order to get back at Steve’s allegedly terrible girlfriend. Instead, the woman tweeted out the entire conversation via screenshots. She has since deleted the original tweet containing the conversation, saying she realizes that by using the guy’s name and his friend’s name, she may be inadvertently identifying and humiliating the girlfriend in question.

“My intention was only ever to call out Steve/Dave for the cunts that they are, not to hurt the girl further than it seems she will be,” she writes. Still, some men weren’t happy with her exposé of Dave’s efforts to score some revenge tail for Steve.

No good deed goes unpunished.

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Tracy Moore

Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.