he didn't cheat, but he also wasn't faithful

and how the f*ck do we actually define fidelity?

Dear Anna,

Is it reasonable to expect my boyfriend to be faithful all the time? I’ve been with my boyfriend for two years and recently went long-distance after living in the same city for most of our relationship. I live in NYC and he just moved to LA to go to business school and things were going well until he went to Vegas with a bunch of school friends last weekend. He told me about the trip and we were in constant contact throughout it, but then this week after he got back, I got a DM from a woman who said that her friend and my boyfriend were getting very intimate while they were all out clubbing and spending all their time together separated from the group.

I confronted him about this, and he confessed to it, but said that nothing beyond dancing happened and that they were just friends. He apologized and said it didn’t mean anything and that he really only did it because he was feeling lonely because he’s not used to me being so far away.

I don’t know why but I just don’t believe him. I can’t tell if I’m overreacting to some drunken dancing in a club or if this is the first sign of something worse to come. It’s been hard over the last two months watching him create this whole social circle in his new life without me and I feel like maybe the trust hasn’t been broken, but it’s been cracked a little. Is it crazy for me to expect him to be one hundred percent faithful when we’re so far apart? Do I even have the right definition of faithful?

Sincerely,
A Little Cracked

Dear A Little Cracked,

Three years ago, Dave embarked on his two-night bachelor party to Saratoga Springs with his brother and eight of his closest friends. It promised the holy trinity of male bonding: booze, red meat, and poor decisions made near a body of water. As he packed his Aloha shirt and counted out the number of contacts he would need for the weekend, I remember telling him something I would’ve never dreamt of saying to anyone else, not because I didn’t mean it, but because I actually did.