BANS

Profanity = Ban


Sarcasitc Comments = Ban


I will not allow this or any forum to go in the wrong direction - its an advice for and I will not have pointless banter on here.

I presume that this comment was the result of the thread started by hkmodlove a couple of hours ago. While it certainly was a provocative thread, I didn't see anything profane on it. I would agree that a couple of posts fell into the category of pointless banter, but why is that grounds for pulling down the entire thread? Or banning anyone?


Hkmodlove bravely raised an issue that undoubtedly has run through the minds of many spouses here. I've met other spouse who clearly had the same thoughts, and in all honesty I have had them myself. Even though a post may be anonymous, it still can be very hard to expose your innermost desires and needs. Since SHE did not break any of your rules, she deserved the opportunity to receive some legitimate responses. You could have deleted any improper posts without taking down the whole thread.

Cujo you make it sound like this woman was just a poor victim trying to get some help. Ohh woa is me. I'm so unhappy I think I'll find someone else to bang. If a guy had of written that could you imagine the responses? It was a completely inappropriate thread anyway. Where else do you think the conversation was going to lead to? Did you really expect constructive advice to be offered to this little girl?


This is a forum for advice on relationships - not advice on how to pick up a lazy shag because you've had a "values" labotomy. Ed was absolutely right to turf this ludicrous & transparent thread.


So you've had thoughts on cheating on your spouse. Good for you. here's an idea - talk them through with your spouse and then see how keen you are to go forward with it. Better yet - involve the kids in the discussion because ultimately they'll be the ones who pay for the fact your feeling a little sad and lonely.


Astounding response - really ! I'd like to hear from the men & women who've had their families ripped apart by cheating and see if they would like to offer some advice to these moronic twits who think they're owed a shag by the world because there partners bust their asses earning a living, and are presumed to be having affairs simply because they dont spend their nights at home.


Ed - keep turfing this garbage out.

The thread itself had no place on here and as happens when such content doesnt come down immediately it only encourages more questionable comments which inevitably lead to insults which in this case involved profanity.


Please note the new name for our forums - Advice Forums and the new more specific rules both recently launched - these are not Pointless Banter Forums, Chat Rooms, or Insult Forums....


The rules have been very stricly enforced and we have had very few bans in the past month or so - and more participation.


Any attempts to turn any of the forums in the wrong direction will result in immediate bans.

Sabbster, before you go jumping all over people, perhaps you should stop and consider that you probably don't know where they are coming from.

You want to hear from someone whose family has been ripped apart by cheating? Here you go.


On December 23, 2004, I discovered that my spouse was having an affair. That affair continued at least into the spring of last year, and for all I know may still be going on. And I'm 95% sure that has not been the only one. When confronted, my spouse was defiant and refused to end the relationship. I have never received any genuine expression of regret or reassurance that it was just a passing thing. I cannot remember the last time I heard "I love you." It hurts and is humiliating, but I have stuck it out because of our son, whom I want to grow up with both of his natural parents. My spouse knows I feel this way and, I think, takes advantage of it. (We're from different countries, so if we break up we likely will end up living far apart.)


I thus have talked with my spouse about cheating any number of times. I have not, however, brought my child into those discussions. Instead I deal with the situation the best I can and do everything possible not to let my son know what's going on - even to the extent of covering up for my cheating spouse.


A lot of people who post on this website provide intelligent, thoughtful, and sympathetic advice to people going through tough times (speaking of which, where are you mpl? I hope he didn't get banned!), even when most outside observers might think that their issues are a bit unusual, to put it kndly. A thoughtful post can point out that somone is off base without challenging that person's character.


Who, may I ask, are you to question my values or those of hkmodlove, whose actual situation you similarly can only guess at? If under these circumstances you want to criticize me for having thoughts about cheating on my spouse, go ahead. I can live with myself.


You probably can accurately guess what I would like to say to you, but that would certainly get me banned!

By the way, Ed, if you're going to ban those who insult others, please note that sabbster called me a "moronic twit."

That does not refer to you specifically, its more a general comment about those who I aim to drive off these forums...

Well, I guess you could read it that way, but that's giving sabbster the benefit of the doubt that you did not give the original thread.


And if you are trying to get rid of those who "think the world owes them a shag", then I guess you'll need only the Women Only forum in the future.

We have clearly stated rules that prohibit profanity - it does not matter if it is partially blocked out or not.


Our goal is to offer a premium web site and to ultimately compete with the largest media, online or otherwise, in the region (particularly once our new site launches in a couple of months)


Because our message boards are real time it is crucial that we act quickly to censor anything that might effect our image because you never know who might be tuning in to one of the threads...


My suggestion if you want to discuss womens issues is to make use of the womens forum.


Re: Expat gatherings check out the gatherings forum

Cujo


For your reference only. I'm a 44yr old guy who last year discovered that my wife had been playing around here in Hong Kong. We had a nice little life going on if you take out the normal ups & downs of marriage until we arrived here. then, yes, I had to start travelling alot. I didnt want to but that was part of the deal and we both signed up for it. We were warned and we were confident we could work it through.


Six months into it my ex wife, feelinf lonely and depressed (I find out afterwards - all i got was happy faces) starts screwing around with a stay at home husband of a friend of ours. He eds up heading back to england and she, in a love sick trance, follows him and DRAGS MY TWO KIDS WITH HER. Obvious thing happens - he dumps her and now she is begging everyday to come back.


There is obviously more to this but I wanted you to understand that the last position I come at this from is one of ignorance. I have a passionate hatred for any person who puts themselves and their sex drive above the care & well being of the family unit. Do I understand people cheating? Of course I do if there are extenuating circumstances. If the partner is a right royal bastard/bitch and never shows any affection, friendship, concern, tenderness etc then yes I can see how it could happen. But women who are simply lonely and have otherwise solid marriages really need to take a good long hard look at themselves as does that poster who came on here and tried to defend herself by taking the position "I know my husband cheats" If she knows that THEN WHY THE HELL IS SHE STILL WITH HIM !!! Yeah - great idea - I'll cheat too then it's all square with the house right? Lets not address the issues with the marriage - lets just BANG anyone we feel like.


BTW Cujo - I did NOT call you a moronic twit. Nor did I directly question YOUR values as much as I did the original poster. And I am astounded that after your posting you could endorse this womans view in any way shape or form.


I dont post much on here but when I see this tragic crap it really burns me. Apologies to those others of you who may have cheated under exceptional circumstances - do not want to tarnish all with the same brush.

Ed

I can't argue with a rule against profanity, but banishment for relatively tame profanity that is partially blocked out seems like an excessive punishment to me. Nor should that profanity or any pointless banter be grounds for pulling down the entire thread. Indeed, I think that the postings on this thread by Justin Credible, sabbster, lululolo, and mpl have proven my point that the thread you removed could have generated some thoughtful advice and discussion on a topic that is relevant to the users of this site. If certain posts under that thread were inappropriate, then those posts could have been deleted individually. Moreover, this is the appropriate forum for that discussion, not the Women Only forum. I believe that all of the posts in this thread, with the exception of that from lululolo, are from men. Yes, that includes me.


sabbster

I now understand better where you are coming from, and I truly sympathise with your situation. Indeed, I would say your experience was even worse than mine, since my wife at least did not run off with our son.


If you go back and re-read my posts, I think you will have to agree that I have not endorsed the idea of cheating on one's spouse. My original post argues only that hkmodlove's thread was a legitimate topic for discussion in this forum. The topic obviously caught the attention of a number of us, and had it remained on-line we could be posting these comments under that thread. Like Justin Credible, I also was working on a response to hkmodlove's initial posting when the thread vanished. (My response was something along the lines that I presume she could find someone interested in her, but she needed to stop and think through all of the potential consequences of an affair, particularly how it could affect her children.)



In my subsequent response to your initial post, I merely pointed out that you did not have enough information about the particulars of my situation or that of hkmodlove to chastise us for having thoughts about cheating. Even you, in your last post, have conceded that there may be situations in which cheating is understandable, if not justifiable. I agree that hkmodlove's initial post was perhaps more suggestive than it needed to be, but in her subsequent posts she emphatically denied trying to solicit dates and seemed genuinely surprised at some of the reactions. Moreover, in her first post hkmodlove asked whether she should talk to her husband about having an open relationship before doing anything - a strong indication that their relationship is already far from idyllic and that she thinks her husband won't object. I may be overly trusting, but was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and take her comments at face value.


Finally, sabbster, I realize that you did not specifically call me a "moronic twit," but I think that an objective reader of your first post would infer that you included me in that category. Likewise, if you were saying that hkmodlove had had a "values lobotomy" because she had considered cheating on her spouse, then logically you were applying that label to me also since I had admitted to the same thoughts.


(BTW, did everyone else think it was a bit creepy that, literally within minutes after hkmodlove started her thread, someone sent her a PM in response? If that was what it seemed to be, then that's the kind of person that Ed should be aiming to drive out of the forums.)


mpl

Thanks for the support. If I have managed to lure you back into active participation in this forum, I will have done a big favor to all those who use it. And while we're on the subject of extra-marital affairs, how is it going for the couple that were giving you fits late last year?

Cujo - I'm done with the discussion with you. We very clearly hold different views on this and you're unable to see the extraordinary selfishness that went into the original post. And no - you DONT understand my situation - needless to say that I am a guy who WILL NOT just brush aside cheating for the sake of the kids. Do you have any idea the damage you may be doing to your kids by putting up with your wife's infidelity? What example are you setting them?


MPL - When you get a clue about having a family ripped apart, then by all means jump on your soapbox. You say you're a divorcee - I say bollocks! If you were a divorcee living away from your kids you'd have at least some perspective on my situation but you dont.


Yes I'm mad. I'm sick of seeing children on here playing adults, posting about serious issues like its a game. Because there's always some moron out there who will actually follow the advice they're given on here and it may be a couple of young innocent kids who end up paying for some twits retarded advice on here.


As for Ed? The longer he keeps booting this trash out the better. He seems like the only person on here prepared to make a stand against it.

Gee whiz, sabbster, I truly thought that our views weren't that far apart, at least on the cheating issue. You generally don't condone cheating - neither do I. I said that there were sometimes circumstances that made it understandable - you seemed to concede that point in your last post. So what's the problem?


We may differ on whether a cheating spouse should be forgiven, but I don't see that as a question of values or character. I know that many people are unable to forgive a cheating spouse. But many people do, and I suspect that the number who do is much greater than most people realize, because most people who try to work through the problem don't publicize it.


Let me assure you that my son's interests are absolutely the top priority in the decisions I have made for my life. He knows absolutely nothing about what has gone on, and if I have my way he never will. Outwardly, at least, my wife and I get along fine - we don't bicker more than any other couple and we regularly do things as a family - so neither our son nor our friends have any reason to suspect that our relationship is less than ideal. If my wife and I become unable to act civilly with one another for WHATEVER reason, then obviously I will reassess whether remaining married makes sense for our son's perspective.


Moreover, I would not say that I am "putting up" with my wife's infidelity. The other guy has always lived in another country, so the opportunities for the two of them to hook up were always pretty limited, and now almost non-existent. I nevertheless can assure you that I have done everything in my power to stop it, and on several occassions have been on the very precipice of leaving. For me, however, there is absolutely no way I will leave without my son, and of course I cannot be sure that I would get custody if my wife and I were to divorce. If my wife and I were from the same city so that the worse case scenario in the event of a divorce was that my son would live across town, then I suspect that we would already be divorced. As I noted in an earlier post, however, that's not our case.


I apologize to everyone for writing such long posts on this subject. I certainly don't feel the need to justify my decisions to sabbster or anyone else on this forum, but since the issues were raised I decided to set out my perspective in the hope that it will be beneficial to someone else grappling with these matters.


I note that sabbster, like me, has rarely posted in this forum, but apparently, again like me, follows it at least semi-regularly. That seems a bit odd, because it's not the kind of site that I would expect busy professionals to pay much attention to. So I suspect there are a substantial number of us who are dealing with difficult life situations and who find therapeutic value in reading these forums, either because they help us realize that we are not the only ones facing these types of problems or because we get different perspectives that we hadn't thought of before. It's from that perspective that I still think Ed erred in pulling down the previous thread. Even if hkmodlove's post was selfish, as both sabbster and mpl suggested it was, it should have stayed up. If it had, then perhaps sabbster could have responded directly to her with a rhetorical slap across the face, and she - and perhaps many others - would have stopped and said "Oh yeah! What was I thinking?" If someone was offended by her original post, a well thought out post pointing out why she was being selfish would have been a better way of responding to her than censorship.

Quick note here... any thread that is likely to generate unacceptable replies due to its provocative nature will likely come down - as we saw from that thread the madness quickly poured in resulting in a number of suspensions...

Hmmm. I just re-read my first post on this thread, and upon reflection I can see why sabbster may have taken it as an endorsement of hkmodlove's original post. When I wrote that "she deserved the opportunity to receive some legitimate responses," I truly was not thinking about responses giving her tips on the best techniques for finding a lover and engaging in an extra-marital affair. I did indeed, to answer one of sabbster's first questions, expect that some people would have posted serious and sound advice. I guess I should have worded my posting more carefully.

But, Ed - this is a forum about "dating, boyfriends/girlfriends, and marriage." Provocative issues are inherent in the subject matter.

I may have come across a little harsh I know. As I stated this is a touchy point for me. MPL I see your point and I apologies if you're situation is truly what you claim. I've re-read a few of your posts on here and it sounds genuine enough so I apologise for the insinuation.


Cujo we'll agree to disagree and I'll get off the high horse. By the way the reason I dont contribute much is because of the subjects that get raised. Most of them are absolutely ludicrous but I enjoy speakers corner and glance at this forum occassionaly. Honestly most of the posts sound like teenagers. There's maybe one post a month that is a genuine problem - the rest are garbage about why people dont respond to notes, how do i get him to call me, why doesnt he like me etc. Forum should be renamed High School. But it does provide insight every now and then. So I'll watch my comments.

Understood - and we draw the line when a replies to a question start to make work for me (i.e. endless warnings and deletions) - if that happens then the entire thread will likely come off

Well at least, sabbster, I think we've narrowed our points of disagreement down to the issue of whether the original thread should have been taken down. I even agree with your characterization of most of the threads in the Relationships forum. And now it seems that we've gotten a tiny bit of movement out of Ed himself! That's pretty good progress, if you ask me.


JC(PD) - thanks for your perspective. I agree

that having happy parents living apart is better than miserable parents living together. However, while I certainly did have had some miserable times over the whole matter, I'm past that. Nor do I think that my wife is miserable. We generally get along alright and I am absolutely sure that my son suspects nothing. Again, if that situation changes, or if I discover that she is cheating again, then I will have to readdress the question of divorce. Even I have my limits.


And you're close as to my motivations. At the risk of sounding maudlin, my father died when I was 6 y.o., and my mother remarried a raging lunatic. Think Jack Nicholson in The Shining (without the axe). No exaggeration. Well, okay, a little exaggeration, but not much.


Anyhow, now that we've ironed out all of our differences on this thread, why don't we all move over to the thread on "What is Cheating" and get that settled once and for all!

Cujo, I understand that you and your wife are not miserable and want to stay married because of your son.


However, kids are very perceptive and even though you try to hide things from them, they can sense when things are not right between parents.


Anyway, I want to wish you all the best and hope everything works out for you and your family.

Ed -- instead of deleting the thread, can't a thread be locked (after offensive remarks have been removed)?


Does this forum not have that capability? Never heard of such a thing.

Cujo; was hasty in my judgement of you I think so please forgive the hostility. Hope this post provides context.


Justin (and others); Just for clarity i should explain that I was actually that guy who never did cheat. Believe it or not - dont care. She assumed I probably was because of some guff that all expat guys over here do. That came out after I caught her. She reasoned that because I was away all the time with women from my office that I must have been shagging them. The true situation was that I loved her. We had been together for 12 years and in that time I had never once contemplated sleeping around despite having the odd opportunity from time to time. I took a role over here in HK because from a compensation perspective it was going to set us up for life. We spoke in depth before moving across from london and it was well understood that I would be working crazy hours for three years. I actually declined the offer to come over here at first but she was adamant that she could handle it and even chastised me for assuming she couldn't. It was going to set us up financially very well and pay for the kids education, pay off our house etc. We still talk everyday and she will be coming back with our kids for CNY so i can see them. But the pain is just too great. It's not my ego it's just that I feel completely cheated. Like we were a team yet when it got tough, instead of talking about it or allowing me the chance to resign (which I would have done in a heartbeat for her) she shagged a guy whom i considered a friend of mine. Now this guys wife & I are still here without our spouses, both trying to come to terms with what happened. She's ready to take him back and he'll be moving back to HK in a month or so. He told her that screwing my wife was just a boredom thing and she came onto him hard - seducing him. Not sure how I'll react when i see him. Not well is my guess.


So I hope this goes a little to explaining my reaction. I have full understanding of people who stray out of necessity or trauma, but to do it just because you're bored and lonely is probably the most selfish and callous act a spouse can inflict. How would I ever sleep in the same bed with her again knowing what happened. When she left she told me that this other creep made her feel things i had never made her feel. How am i supposed to move past that? I worked every day in my marriage and my family to provide the best possible life for her and the kids. I was part of a family unit and now I have lost everything. Sure I could get it back but what would i be getting back? The love of my life turned out to be a selfish woman who shags just to make herself feel better. I'm no superstar in bed but she never once communicated that I wasnt filling her needs at all. So where was my chance to fix things before it came to this? Didnt i deserve a chance to help her find what she evidently found with this other guy?


So ladies if you're reading this please understand something. If you think your husband is cheating just because he works silly hours you are probably wrong. Not every guy is a sex starved kretin. Some of us love our families and our kids and work to provide them with a better future. We may lose sight of your needs from time to time but that can be fixed with a discussion or two. I still maintain that the original poster who started this thread deserves our contempt and derision, as do any women who feel the need to destroy their partners simply because they are too gutless to verbalise their needs.


MPL; understand your point on judging but I'm sure you'd agree based on your previous posts that alot of the stuff raised on these forums is really more suitable for children to discuss rather than adults. Still I will simply stick to avoiding posting responses. That way my judgement will be passive. I've PM'd you I think but not sure if it worked though.

Justin - thankyou for your PM. Have sent you one back. BTW - great name.