Am I Being Jealous & Possessive, Or Just Setting Reasonable & Healthy Boundaries?

How to know if you are being jealous and possessive or if you are setting reasonable and healthy boundaries.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer who has been following me for two years and has read 3% Man seven times. He and his girlfriend of three years recently moved in together in a new city in Europe that they just moved to. His girlfriend has a male coworker that she texts with often and who he has met.

However, his girlfriend wants to go clubbing sometimes and is giving him some push-back when he says it’s inappropriate for his girlfriend to be going out clubbing without him and hanging out with single men from work who are obviously trying to sleep with her. He asks if he is setting reasonable and healthy boundaries or if he is being jealous and possessive. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

This particular guy, he says he’s been following my work for two years and he’s read 3% Man for the seventh time as we speak. So he’s got a girlfriend of three years and they live in Europe. Recently, they moved to a new city together and she followed him. I guess they’re also engaged because he refers to her as his girlfriend. Later in the email, he refers to her as his fiancee. So apparently there is a male co-worker that she works with who, obviously, he’s probably trying to get into her pants and trying the nice guy route and all be the friend type of route and we’ll hang out kind of thing.

The dude that wrote the email actually met him, and he and his fiance met this dude for a drink. So she’s constantly texting with this guy, and on top of that, she’s gone out clubbing. Apparently they were out, I guess after they had the beer or whatever. The guy was going to go to the club and she wanted to go to the club. This guy’s a surgeon, so he’s not just some average schmuck. He’s a guy that does well.

So this girl is with him. Should appreciate the fact that she’s with a high quality, high status dude, but if you look at her actions between the fact that she’s giving out her phone number to male co-workers and giving them the green light to text her and the green light to invite her out to clubs, and the fact that she’s going out to clubs, she’s engaged.

When I was younger, what’s interesting, especially the last few years, these things should be common sense. I mean, I knew this stuff in my 20s, when you have a girlfriend and you’re in a relationship and she’s staying the night all the time. She’s not going to want to go out and go clubbing with other dudes that aren’t you. It’s pretty common sense if your girl is going out, clubbing and hanging out with single men from work and giving out her number and texting all hours of the day and night, you don’t really have a girlfriend. You have a friends with benefits that’s pretending to be your girlfriend, but in essence, she’s kind of locked you up as a sexual partner while she looks for somebody else that stimulates her emotions more because it’s clear from the way she’s behaving, she doesn’t really respect this guy’s authority.

Then when we get to where he talks about her father and the way her father is, then it’ll make more sense as to why her behavior is the way it is, because her dad’s really soft and she pushes him around. So she’s used to getting her way with men, and she’s used to having them cave and she’s probably a little spoiled.

So this email just illustrates how a father’s relationship with his daughter influences her when she’s an adult, and especially the relationship she has with other men. So this guy’s got a bit of an issue here, and I’ve been through his email and he’s definitely not being jealous and possessive. This is obvious for respect. If you’re going to be in a committed, loyal, monogamous relationship, neither one of the two of you are going to go out and behave like single people. The guy is not going to go out and give his phone number to the hot nurse from the hospital that’s got a crush on him, or go out drinking or clubbing with the other nurses without his fiance. That’s common sense.

You’re not going to do stupid shit like that, but guys that are in relationship with girls that don’t respect them or don’t respect men, you’re going to have to set and enforce a healthy boundary. If the girl wants to continue to violate it, it’s you. There’s nothing you can do with that. You’re not going to turn a hoe into a housewife if you’re looking at her as your future wife and mother of your children, and you’re living together, and she followed you to another city in Europe, and yet she’s trying to live like a single girl those are not compatible. So something is definitely off in this relationship.

Viewer’s Email:

Hello Dear Coach,

Thank you so much for all of your work. I’m following you since two years and I’m reading the book for the 7th time as we speak. I’ll try to be short, I really hope you can answer this.

Me and my girlfriend of 3 years recently move together in a new city of Europe, it was mainly my choice and I told her that I wanted by my side, So she decided to follow me.

We are a good couple, I’m son of divorced, her parents are still together and always loving and respectful to each other. However, the father is not very masculine and sometimes she gets irritated with him, only rarely disrespecting him.

So it’s obvious at times she doesn’t respect his authority. How does that affect the girl? Will she respect this guy’s authority or not? Because she’s saying and doing all kinds of inappropriate things. Then when he calls her out on it, she says, “You’re being controlling and jealous. You don’t trust me.” “If you’re going to be my fiance and potentially the mother of my children, you’re not going to be getting mad at me, because I’m not excited about you, going clubbing with single men from the office who obviously want to fuck you.”

“That tells me that you want to behave like you’re single. That tells me that I got a friends with benefits or a girl I’m in an open relationship with. Certainly not a fiance, certainly not the mother of my children. The fact that we’re even having this conversation, this is common sense. You want to be in a relationship with me and you want to be a family, yet you want to go clubbing and you’re giving out your number to other single men from the office to text with them all hours of the night and day. That’s not appropriate.”

Ladies, don’t do that. Girls that have friends with benefits, or that in that are in an open relationship or that have fuck buddies, that’s how they behave. Not somebody that moved across Europe and lives with you and you’re engaged to. Come on.

Things were going great, we get along a lot, she is very feminine and we share similar values. We are planning a future together.

Recently we had an issue, since we moved she changed work and there is a guy at work that immediately asked her number, he even asked if he can move with us because he was looking for an apartment. In that occasion, she asked me what I thought about it and I said that to me it would be inappropriate than a man stays into our home, and when I’m out at work at nights (I am a surgeon working in a hospital) he is in the same house with my fiancé looking movies on the sofa, etc. So I stated that I didn’t want that, and she complied with that.

I mean, just the fact that, “Oh, this nice guy from the office, he’s just a friend. You don’t have to worry. Can he move in with us?” I read that and I’m just thinking, are you fucking stupid? Is she stupid? Are you dating a low IQ woman? That’s what I think. Like, really? She’s asked you that with a straight face, OK.

After, one night we were out having dinner and than he wrote her to ask her if she and I wanted to go have some drink together. I find perfectly reasonable to have a beer with this coworker as long as I’m there so we went.

Yeah, I mean, she should not be doing these things there, but the fact that he’s texting your fiancé at night, “Oh let’s meet. I’m going to move in with both you,” probably because he wants to get closer to your girl, because there are dudes that are like that. They think, “Hey, if I live with the two of them, then I can fuck her when he’s not around.” Basically what she’s doing is giving him the green light, “Oh, let’s go clubbing. Here’s my number. Let’s come meet my fiance for a drink.” “Hey, it’s just friends, honey. He’s just a friend. You don’t have to worry about him.”

After a bit they (It was two of them, the co-worker and a friend of him) wanted to go clubbing, but I wasn’t felling so I told my fiancé, “Let’s go home,” and she in the end said that she actually wanted to go dancing, and went.

I would have been like, “Babe, we’re engaged to be married, and now you’re telling me you want to go clubbing with two single men from your office? We can go home tonight, and you can pack your things and put them in your car, and then you can go clubbing and do whatever the fuck you want, but you’re not going to be my fiancé anymore. I don’t think so. That’s a ridiculous request.”

So a woman who’s in love with her boyfriend is going to be,”OK honey,” and she’s going to go home with him. This tells me she’s not in love with this guy, so I know he’s been following me for a while, but this is obviously a reality check because her attraction and her interest is not where it needs to be. The fact that she, instead of going home with her man and having sex and sleeping in each other’s arms all night, the potential father of her child, who happens to be a surgeon, she’d rather go clubbing with some douche-bag from the office. Yeah, that’s not good.

I went back home feeling very disappointed from her behavior.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be happy about that at all.

When she returned home I confronted her telling that what she did was not loving, I was very upset I also cried…

Come on, man.

…About it because I was not feeling loved, and she apologized and told me that she had done wrong going, we made passionate love and it was over. I than told her that I don’t want her to be out with male friends that are single, because I don’t do it with single nursed from work and she wouldn’t like it.

Yeah, that’s all. That’s a line in the sand. It’s like, “Do not ever give out your number to single men from your office again. If you want to be my fiancé, you want to get married, you want to have a family together, you’re not going to be giving other men the green light to hit on you.” “Oh, it’s just a friend.” “Don’t tell me that bullshit. I’m not fucking stupid. You came to me with a straight face and wanted this guy to move in with us. Do you think I’m stupid? Seriously?”

You have to have some tact with this. I mean, obviously I’m pretty harsh because this is a video, I’m like shaking, “Dude, wake the fuck up.” These are not the actions of a woman who’s head over heels in love with you and can’t wait to have babies that look like you.

So far so good, it looked like solved. After some months, this friend from work(which in a way keeps texting her)…

So he’s still texting her all the time. You should have checked her on that. You should have been like, “You shouldn’t be texting other dudes from work.”

…Asked her out for a Saturday morning telling her if she could go with him buying some eyeglasses.

Telling her if she could go with him to buy some eyeglasses. If I knew this guy, I’d be like, “Dude, don’t be texting my fucking fiancé at 10:00 at night asking her to go eyeglass shopping with you. You do that again…” It’s like, you jerk out. Not in this guy’s ass. “Psych! Not stupid. I know you know what this guy is trying to do.” He’s trying to butter him up, trying to get you to let your guard down so you’ll let your fiancé go out and do things to her so he can get the green light to plow her strawberry fields.

The vibe he’s getting from your fiancé is, “Keep trying, I like it. Eventually you play your cards right, you’re going to get my pants.” That’s basically the vibe that your fiancé is giving this guy. That’s why he’s so bold and in-your-face. That’s why he asked to move in, because then when it happened, “Oh, it just happens. We were alone. This is meant to be. It’s meant to be. It just happened. His penis ended up beside me. I couldn’t say no.”

Here is were we had another fight. She told me from the beginning: “You will not like what I’m going to tell you, but Bob asked me to go with him…“ And I said that I didn’t like that at all. She replied that it’s a day thing, that he is a feminine guy that he never touched or try to touch her, that he never makes innuendo, and he is genuinely just a friend, and that I was being unreasonable not wanting her to go.

It’s like, this guy is a beta male and he’s buttering you up. “He’s buttering me up. He’s trying to get on her good side. So we’ll let our guard down.” Then when he gets a little too many drinks in him, he’s going to go for it. “The fact that you’re wanting me to go along with this, I have serious doubts on whether or not you’re the right woman for me. I do not want to be married or engaged to a woman who thinks this behavior is OK and with a straight face says I’m being unreasonable. You sound like you want to be single and like you want to sleep with this guy. If that’s what you want, you can pack your stuff and you can go move in with him and never speak to me again.”

She is very respectful, other times after our argument she invited me to dance the other time that she went to club, and she made sure that at least one of her GIRL-friend was there, otherwise she wouldn’t go.

My question is: Is it right to me that I put the boundary that I don’t want her to go out with this friend even in the daytime to do simple stuff, or am I being controlling and possessive?

This guy is not interested in being her friend. He’s trying to fuck your fiancé . He’s trying to steal your fiancé. He’s a snake. That’s why he’s effeminate and he’s girly because he’s a beta male. He’s trying to fly under the radar and get everybody feeling good. He’s totally harmless. It’s like he’s not there because he needs her as a friend. He’s there because he wants to fuck your fiancé, dude.

“Block his number. I don’t ever want to hear this fucking guy’s name again. If I ever see him, I’m going to pull him aside and I’m going to have a nice, firm and stern word with this dude and let him know to stay the fuck away from my fiancé. You need to tell them the same thing. If you’re going to continue to give him or other men the green light to try to seduce you, we’re not getting married. You better get your pull your head out of your fucking ass.”

Obviously, tactfully you want to say us, but I’m speaking to you, the dude, because this is not OK what she’s doing.

She claims that this let her feel like she is no longer free and I know how important is freedom in love.

Bob

Yeah, throwing it in your face, but going out with other men from the office, texting with other men like, no way, this is not OK. It’s not OK because it’s clear. Anybody watching this video is going to say the same thing in the comments. Please do comment below.

Dude, wake the fuck up. This guy is trying to seduce and rip off your fiancé. Don’t let the nice guy beta male, overly effeminate act fool you. Deep down, he feels he deserves your fiancé and she should be with him instead of you. That’s what’s really going on.

Dude, you’re a surgeon. Your income earning potential is only going to continue to go up. If your girlfriend thinks this behavior is OK dude, you should be dating somebody way better, way hotter, and not be putting up with this shit. So you need to have a heart-to-heart with this woman, because she seems to think it’s OK to act single.

Also, when you’re going through the book, you should recognize that your girl, your fiancé, is not in love with you. She does not respect and admire you. She does not act like she won the lottery and she’s grateful to have you. It’s like you’re almost kind of a placeholder, almost like she’s just going along with it.

Again, instead of going home with her fiancé to make love, she decides to go clubbing. Now granted, they did have sex later that night, but that shit should have never happened in the first place. I’ve never, ever, in my 53 fucking years of my life, ever had a girlfriend or even my wife when we were together want to go out with other single dudes one-on-one without me there. Not a single one ever did shit like that. Not how you behave in a relationship.

That’s how you behave when you’re single. It’s just a fact of life. If she doesn’t like it, then obviously she doesn’t have the same value system as you. Definitely something to think about, but you better get your shit together, dude. You better put some boundaries down and she better comply, or else you throw her ass to the streets.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.