Boyfriend Has Split Personality

Dear Ask a DnD Monster:

My boyfriend of a year and a half is a wonderful man. We live together, have a lot of mutual friends and interests, and we just get along great.

However, I'm concerned that he has a very different personality with his male friends that he had from before we met. Nearly all of them are sexist, cheating, womanizing guys. My boyfriend has admitted to cheating and philandering during some of his past relationships as well, but he has always been faithful to me, as far as I know.

My problem is that, since he keeps in touch with these old friends, I have a hard time trusting my boyfriend. I have stumbled upon a few emails where he has joined in with his friends joking about his friend who "hit that the other night" or "scored" or cheated on their significant other. I even saw one email where he sent a photo of his ex-girlfriend to one of them saying, "She was so hot. You wish you could get that."

I know that my boyfriend is committed to me and is just playing along with his old friends, but I find these conversations creepy. They aren't about me, but I keep wondering when this will start affecting our relationship. Am I being paranoid? Should I just base our relationship on how he is with me and not worry about him joking around with his old friends? Knowing this about him has made it hard for me to trust him.

Thanks for the help,

WonderingAboutHisSecondLife

Answer From: a Tojanida

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Dear SecondLife:

You don't need multiple apertures in your shell to see that this relationship is headed for a very hard time.

Out here on the Elemental Plane of Water, we sometimes talk about the "perfect storm," where a number of factors happen to be in just the right place to produce the biggest disaster. On the one paddle, your boyfriend sounds like a jackass who puts his best behavior on when he's around you. It may come as a shock to learn that sexist, cheating men don't magically transform just by dating someone. People can change, sure, but it takes a lot of desire and deliberate effort to work on it.

On the other paddle, instead of talking to him about it, you've gone through his email and you're asking an aquatic Outsider for advice, so how trustworthy does that make you, exactly? It's the perfect storm. You're a paranoid girlfriend who expects the worst and will sneak around behind your boyfriend's back to find evidence that the worst is happening, and he's just the guy whose jerk tendencies will serve said evidence right up.

If you have any desire of saving this relationship, you need to make a successful melee bite or claw attack (try to pass it off as foreplay - he sounds like he'd be into that), then engage your Improved Grab ability to haul him away from his allies. Once this is done, you need to talk to him about your misgivings. He probably won't take, "I was going through your email," very well, but it can be a good chance to admit your own faults, too, and maybe he'll be more willing to listen about his own behavior. Present it like the two of you need to work on your respective issues, together, instead of it being all about him. If he's not willing to work together with you, then what are you two doing, exactly?

If he releases a cloud of ink and runs, consider yourself lucky. You'll only be blinded for one round as opposed to a year and a half, which is a big improvement on your situation, and he probably would have ended up cheating on you at some point if he hadn't already.

Epthir, the Tojanida