Of course you are in a relationship at this time in your life, and a really good relationship at that. It took a long time to find that really amazing woman. She’s your best friend. You have even uttered the word “soulmate.”

It is a great connection. The sex is great. It could be a little better; it’s not as hot as it was with that crazy woman you used to date (because in reality you never end up staying with the crazy woman).

The reason why sex is so great with crazy girls is because it has to be. Who would stay with them is the sex wasn’t great?

So you’re with somebody who could be a little edgier in bed, but you’re satisfied. You don’t need much gentleman time in the shower alone. She satisfies most of your needs and desires.

So you set up your best friend’s bachelor party. You don’t want to do the cliched stripper because your buddy, who has not really grown up at all, wants to have “one last night” with another woman.

This, by the way, is a big dilemma for you. If you set this up, you’ll know everything that happened at that bachelor party and you’ll have to deal with knowing that when you have “couples night” with him and his wife in the future. You’ll also have to lie to your girlfriend and say that nothing happened.

So here you are. You make the call. You tell them that you need a blond and a brunette. You didn’t check them out at all because you’re not so into this, and because you are happy in your own adult adolescence and your own relationship.

So you get to the bachelor party, and what happens? The stripper did everything that that crazy ex of yours used to do. She is like a reincarnation of your crazy ex.

It ignites this feeling within you. You almost feel like an animal again.

Then you make the biggest mistake you can make. You start talking to her and she’s really nice (because the crazy ones are always nice in the beginning).

You think to yourself, “I’m really connecting with her. She likes me.” Guys always do that with strippers. They always think that strippers like them.

I love when men say “she really likes me” to me. No, she likes what’s inside your wallet.

So the stripper keeps coming back to you because you’re the guy who organized the party. She keeps making sure that everyone is having fun. You think you’re connecting with her in certain ways.

Then it’s the end of the night. Everyone is happy. Your best friend did what he shouldn’t have done with the stripper. The stripper looks at you and says, “You know, I could take care of you too just as an added tip.”

What do you do in that situation? Do you cross the line?

Your friends are all passed out drunk because, of course, you did the cliched bachelor party and rented a room. All your friends are all laid out all around the room like a bad scene from the movie The Hangover. The only thing missing is Mike Tyson and the tiger.

The stripper looks at you and leads you to the bedroom, because these women know exactly what to do. She throws you down down on the bed and starts massaging you.

What do you do in this situation? Your friends are all passed out. Nobody’s going to know. Do you cross the line?

My advice is this: don’t cross it!

If you have an open, honest and great relationship then don’t lie to her. Once you cross that line in a relationship where you cheat and get away with it — whether it’s with a stripper or on a business trip — you have a whole new addiction coming your way.

We’re men. We like new conquests. Not only that but if this woman is better in bed than your woman, you’re going to re-ignite old feelings for every crazy woman you’ve ever slept with in your life.

Don’t cross the line. You need to learn how to say no.

I know how hard it’s going to be in that situation. She’s hot and she smells great. Every stripper seems to smell great. She tells you it’s a freebie because she’s hot for you and because she probably thinks she connected with you. I understand all of that, but don’t do it.

Don’t cross the line, because once you cross that line you’ll always cross that line. You’ll ruin what might be the best relationship of your life.

If you do cross that line, then you need to really explore a little deeper what your relationship is all about. She might actually be lacking things that you need.

I have no problem saying no. The times I have crossed the line in my life, I know exactly the reason why I did it. I wasn’t happy in my relationship, and it was a wake-up call.

Now they’ve broken up, and she’s started calling you. She tells you she’s starting to have feelings for you. At the same time, your best friend still talks about her and wonders if he did something wrong.

You’re in love with your best friend’s ex, and she is in love with you. How do you handle this? What do you do in this situation?

I am somebody who truly believes that people are not possessions. If I break up with someone — and I have broken up with a lot of people — I have no problem with any of my friends dating my ex, falling in love with her and even marrying her.

This has, in fact, happened to me. My good friend Charlie is married to a woman I used to date. They started dating three years after I broke up with her, and I was perfectly fine with it.

So, if you have feelings for your best friend’s ex, here is what you need to do: you need to confirm your feelings with her.

Sit down with her and tell her exactly how you feel. You know she feels the same way about you, as you do about her. Have that heart-to-heart talk with her and then ask her, “What do we do about telling my buddy? I don’t want to lose my friendship with him, but yet I don’t want to act on my feelings for you.” Both of you know your friend extremely well, and together you will be able to come up with a way to tell him so that he will not be angry or hurt.

There are a lot of guys out there who truly feel that once they have dated a woman, she is off limits to all of their friends — no matter how long it’s been since they broke up. I think this is the most ridiculous thing in the entire world. We don’t own people; we just share our time with them.

Once you’ve had a conversation with your best friend’s ex, you’ll need to sit down with your friend, and do one of the toughest things in the world — have “the talk.”

When you sit down with him, first tell him that he is your best friend and talk about how amazing your friendship with him is and how much it means to you. Then, you’ll need to ask him how he would feel if you start dating his ex. You need to be honest, and tell him everything; about how you feel, and if you’re serious about her or still trying to figure this out.

He may be angry and upset at first. He may not want to see you for a week or two. In time, though, he is going to understand; so, if you need to, give him his space. He’s not with her anymore. He is out there dating, having fun and sleeping with other women. Eventually, he is going to get over it.

If this is an amazing woman with whom you have incredible chemistry, women like her don’t come around that often. You have every right to pursue a relationship with her.

This is one of the tough times of your adult adolescence. You’ll need to display complete and total honesty not only with yourself, but with a woman with whom you are in love and also with your friend. This is going to be a tough lesson, but a valuable one. Your ability to be honest and confront difficult conversations with two people you care about, even though they won’t be safe or easy conversations, will exhibit what sort of person you are.

So you’re in a relationship, and you do any of the following things:

• After getting a little tipsy in a bar, you swap spit and play some serious tonsil hockey with the hottie with whom you did a few shots

• You go to a happy ending rub ‘n tug massage parlor and, Heavens to Betsy, the female rubber tugs at you at you at the end of the massage.

• You go to a strip club, and the stripper grinds against you leaving a deposit on your jeans.

• You’re a woman who at a bachelorette party slowly kisses this cute guy you met that night.

• You are on vacation, and you perform oral sex but don’t have intercourse.

So where am I going with all this? What defines cheating . . . and what actions do or do not constitute cheating?

Some people think cheating only occurs if intercourse happens. Other people think cheating is when you just think about it.

Some people say just making out with someone is not cheating. Ask any man who goes to a rub ‘n tug, and he’ll tell you that he’s not cheating. He’ll say that’s not cheating . . . it’s a massage.

So today, we’re going to open up the forum and see what you guys think. What is cheating to you?
That’s the question of the day.

I want to correspond with all of you. I want to hear your thoughts on what constitutes cheating.

I once had this funny little thing that read: “It’s not cheating if you do it in another time zone.” This meant that if you live in New York City and you travel to Los Angeles, it’s 8:00 pm. Los Angeles time and 11:00 pm. New York time. So you basically have three hours to fool around before it’s 11:00 pm your time.

It’s like time travel. If you keep your watch on eastern time, then it’s like you never cheated (sort of like the five second rule – something falls on the floor and you can eat it if it hasn’t been there longer than five seconds).

Instead of the “five second rule,” this is the “three hour rule.” Other people have a different version of this rule: “It’s not cheating if you don’t speak the language.”

People cheat for all sorts of reasons. Let’s hear your definition of what cheating is, and then another day we’ll talk about why people cheat.

I don’t agree with either of the rules above. You can rationalize it any way you want, but my opinion is that the minute your lips lock with another person, you’ve cheated.

What’s your opinion on this issue . . . and don’t hold back! Looking forward to this discussion all day!

They don’t respond to it.

So finally, you send them a text a little later and go, “You know my buddies are in town, I’m going to out with them.” Then all of a sudden, about two hours later, right before you’re about to go out with your friends, she sends you a text and goes, “If you don’t take me to this restaurant tonight, and you don’t show up, we’re done. We’re over with.” They use guilt.

That’s what I call the guilters. There’s other times that the guilters will come in, too. You’ll be at dinner with a group of people because you’ve waited all day long for the person to call you back. You told the person that you’re going to hang out with her that night, but yet she doesn’t call you all day long, so all of a sudden, you’re out with your friends and then she texts you. And she says, “How come you’re not picking up the phone?” Well, I haven’t heard the phone ring because I’m out with my friends — you say in a text back.

Then all of a sudden they’ll go, “What do you mean you’re out with your friends? I hope you’re not at that restaurant you were going to take me tonight,” and of course you are at that restaurant because you wanted to eat there anyway.

So what happens next is that you say to them, “Well I happen to be there.” And all of a sudden she starts freaking out.

Dating And Guilt

She says “You were supposed to take me there tonight.” And then you text back — I’ve been texting you all day long, you never returned my text. And then she comes back and says, “Look if you really love me, you’ll leave your friends right now and pick me up.” But they never acknowledge the fact that they’ve ignored you all day long because they’re guilters. They know that they’ve been texted all day long.

They like to have complete control over you. It’s a power thing to them. They love to know that they have complete control over you.

A lot of women do this. And a lot of women do this. I call it vaginaitis. They truly believe that their vagina is more magical than any other vagina that’s out there. And they’ll threaten you that way sexually. They’ll tell you “Look, I am never going to sleep with you again, you’re disgusting, you’re fat, you’re whatever.” They’ll start insulting you. “You’ll never get another woman.” “No one will screw you like I screw you.” “Blah, blah, blah.” And they’ll do this all right after they decided that they wanted to fuck with you while you were having dinner with a friend.

So you know what my motto is to that? First off, I don’t believe in the power of the vagina because I truly believe that I have the power of the penis. Second, when I’m dealing with a woman like that, I like to basically spank her like a little baby. She’s a little toy. She’s a little kid.

So I like to punish her, and write this text back — and this is something you guys can use over and over again – “I offered to take you to this restaurant. For some odd reason or another, you decided to ignore my text. Now whatever game you’re playing right now, I don’t really enjoy it. If you’d like to have an adult relationship and treat each other as equals, then I’m open for it. But if you keep on playing these games, and you keep wanting to play this guilt game, then you can go find somebody else. So you know where I am. I’ll talk to you soon.”

Have you guys ever been plagued by the vaginaitis? Tell me about those stories today.

We’re getting to the real root of cheaters right now. You’ve been cheated on in the past.

If someone asks you what happened in your past relationship, is your answer something like this: “She was a great girl, but all of a sudden something happened and she started cheating on me. It was ridiculous. I don’t understand why she cheated on me. I did everything for her.”

Immediately, the person you’re saying this to is going to look at you and wonder what made that person cheat on you. When you’re cheated on, it means that there is something that’s not working between the two of you of which you are not aware.

To tell you the truth, I’ve never been cheated on, but I have cheated one time. I know exactly why I cheated on them. It was because the communication in our relationship was dead, over, done. I wasn’t happy anymore.

So if you tell someone on a first, second or third date that you’ve been cheated on, they’re going to really wonder about you. They are going to wonder why you didn’t realize why you were cheated on, and why you aren’t taking responsibility for your part in it.

A lot of people don’t understand that cheating is a two-way street. In order to push someone out the door to cheat, you must be pushing them one way or another.

There’s something that you’ve been doing in that situation. Maybe you were not aware of the person’s needs, wants, and desires. Maybe you wanted more out of the relationship than they did. It could be a number of different things.

So if you’ve been cheated on and someone asks you why that relationship ended, just say “It ended mutually” and leave it at that. As you get to know someone better, you can uncover the depth of your last relationships.

In the first couple of weeks, though, people are judging and looking and evaluating you. It’s not that you want to hide things, but you just want to get to know each other on a fresh face.

You don’t need to tell every negative detail of your past. You don’t need to dump everything about each other in the first few weeks. You want those first few weeks to really bond with each other, to build up the trust, so then you can talk about all that stuff later when you’re in a safe space with each other.

People are still judging in those first few weeks. So the next time someone asks you if you’ve ever been cheated on, just say “You know what? I have been, but it’s no big deal. I learned a lot from that. I really learned that my communication in that relationship wasn’t good and I take full responsibility for it.”

Take the high road in everything. Anytime you take the road of a victim, it means that you don’t know how to communicate properly with anybody else.

If you get cheated on, are you actually just as responsible as the person who did the cheating?

How does that question make you feel?

Does it make you want to listen?
Do you want to argue?
Do you want to post a comment right now on the blog?

Ahhhh, but you can’t post until you listen to this podcast and find out exactly what I’m saying here.

Click here to listen now:

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My answer to people who ask me about this is always the same. I tell them to date as many people as they can handle in their life.

If you can handle dating six people at one time in your life, then do it and enjoy yourself. Date as many people as you possibly can until you find the person with whom you truly click, the one who makes you want to see them again (and only them).

There’s no reason that you should not date as many people as you can handle. If you can handle dating three people at once, then date three people at once. If you can only handle dating one person at a time, though, you should only date one person at a time.

There are no rules about this. People always ask me if they are “allowed” to date more than one person at a time. The answer is, absolutely! Do whatever you want. This is your life.

If you are dating multiple people, there is one thing I want you to be sure to do. You need to keep track of what you have said to each person and what you have talked about with each person. Keep a journal so that you can really start to get deeper about what attracts you to each person. By doing this, you will not only learn more about yourself but you may actually see which one you want to give a better chance.

Have you ever been in a relationship, and you just knew something you were doing – whether on a conscious or subconscious level – was not the right thing but you did it anyway? I am not talking about cheating (because I think cheating is 100% wrong).

I am talking about other things. I am talking about getting in touch with a friend and talking about your personal business with other people (or whatever it might be). Then, when confronted with it, you lie right to someone’s face about it.

Do you realize that whenever you tell a lie in life, you will get caught? You will always get caught in lies.

I learned something a long time ago: It is hard to keep a lie straight, but it is easy to keep the truth straight. It is easy to keep the truth straight because you don’t have to remember stories.

You never have to remember alibis. You never have to remember anything.

When you tell the truth, there is nothing to remember but the truth. The real truth, along with the real feelings and the real emotions behind it.

When it comes to a lie, you always have to “cover your tracks.” You have to remember what you said to each person.

Lies are not worth it. Lies are destructive in relationships, and they will never get you anywhere.

So, when you are out there right now trying to meet somebody, remember what I’m telling you here about the truth. It’s always easier.

Sometimes the truth might be hard to say in the moment. Telling the truth in that moment, however difficult it is, will mean you never have to go back and apologize about it later.

When you’re dating somebody, what are the boundaries?

Recently a woman I know had an “intuition” that “something was up” with her boyfriend, and that intuition led her to check her boyfriend’s email without his knowledge or consent. What she did was basically read through all of his emails until she found some information she didn’t like.

What constitutes a violation of someone’s privacy? When, if ever, are you justified in violating someone’s privacy?

If you have an “intuition” about something, does that give you the right to start digging through someone’s drawers? To start reading through their email? To start listening to their voicemail messages?

I mean, think about this. Someone has an email account which they use for both work and personal messages. By going into that account, you are violating the trust that person has with all of his business clients, business associates, friends and family members . . . all because you had some kind of “intuition” that he was doing something wrong.

Beyond violating the trust of all those people, investigating an “intuition” by reading someone’s emails or listening to their voicemail messages can be misleading because you are only getting about 20% of the story. Your perception of what you read or hear is all wrong.

Relationships are really hard. We’re all out there looking to meet somebody. Once we find somebody, though, where and how do we draw the line about privacy and trust?

Of course lying is not good. I’ve been guilty of it. We’ve all been guilty of it. We have all lied in certain situations to avoid hurting someone or to avoid talking about something we think may hurt someone. So although we lie to protect someone, when the lie is exposed (which it almost always inevitably is) we end up digging a deeper hole.

I’ve come to believe that although it is sometimes really hard to say, the truth is always better than a lie. It has been my experience that every time I tell a “little white lie” to someone because I was afraid to tell them what was really happening to avoid hurting them, that I always end up getting caught. Then when I do get caught, not only do you end up hurting that person anyway but you end up hurting yourself even more.

In life, what you fear will actually manifest – but it will manifest at an even higher level than what you feared. So whatever you were trying to protect the other person from by lying to them will seem worse than if you had just been open and honest about it from the get-go, because you will have to dig yourself out of the “lying” hole.

So lying in a relationship is something you should never do. It’s a tough thing. Sometimes we think we’re protecting somebody and we’re not.

Something equally bad you should never do in a relationship is violate the other person’s privacy. To violate someone’s privacy is to violate their trust.

You should NEVER dig through someone’s personal emails, look through someone’s wallet or listen to someone’s voicemail messages . . . ESPECIALLY if you’ve done it before and you promised never to do it again. If someone has decided to trust you even after you’ve broken their trust once, and then you you break their trust again and again, then you have a relationship that either cannot survive or at a minimum will need significant repair.

So even if you have some type of “intuition” that somebody is doing something wrong, it is better to confront that person openly about it and slug it out with them than to violate their privacy and their trust searching for answers behind their back. Even if that person doesn’t respond to your attempts to talk about it the first, second or third time, chances are that you will get to talk about it.

Consider that the other person may be struggling with something deep or something very emotional, and that may be the reason they have been hesitant to discuss something with you. Whatever the reason is that has caused their hesitation, you need to be prepared to be open to what they have to say.

So many of us definitely have communication issues in our relationships. A lot of us feel things we’ve never felt before with somebody, so we get scared.

When you’re scared in this way, you feel tense and you retreat to what’s safe instead of facing that fear openly with the other person. For some that fear may manifest itself by snooping in the other person’s private things, while for others it may manifest itself by lying to the other person. Neither one is right.

The best thing to do in a relationship is to try and keep your communication open as much as possible. We’ve all got issues. We’ve all got baggage. What you need to do is work through that baggage on your own and openly with your partner. Violating someone’s trust will never take a relationship to a better place.