I’m so confused. My boyfriend and I broke up, but now he called me and wanted phone sex with his ex-girlfriend on the phone. I hung up, but what do I do?
Question:
My relationship with my boyfriend is crumbling. We don't live in the same state. We've never met face-to-face. But I've known him for over a year and I'm in love with him, but he is cutting me off. Officially we broke up, but I don't want it to be permanent.
I do not think the emails will work because he will not read them. If he did, I think he would be happier and realize that I really am making changes. He thinks I am not hurt by all this. So he did a couple of things to hurt me the past few days. I know I probably upset him because the other night he called an ex-girlfriend on the phone then called me to pick an argument with me. Then he hung up and called me back. He told me he had his ex-girlfriend on the phone and he wanted me to talk to her. He told her that I said I didn't like her. So he wanted her to yell or something. She asked me why I didn't like her. She said I don't know her so how could I decide that I don't like her. I told her when she knows he has a girlfriend she shouldn't be having phone sex with him. She should tell him "no" and tell him to go away. She said don't worry he doesn't always get lucky.
Then my boyfriend started to talk about sex, wanting his ex-girlfriend and me to join him. I told him I wouldn't with her on the phone. Then he started to have phone sex with her. I hung up. Then he called me and asked how I felt. I told him he hurt me really bad. He said good, that now I know how he feels.
When we talked later, he asked me to go back to him and I said "no" because he would just break up with me again. He doesn't realize that when I hurt him I also hurt myself. I want to call him, but it's going to be hard for me to do it. He could block me and then I won't be able to contact him at all. This has all become so confusing to me.
Answer:
This phone sex stuff is harmful. People don't seem to believe me and you've been suckered into it as well. It is sinful because it is a verbal expression of lust (Matthew 5:28). It is also lewdness, the chasing after of sensuality for personal satisfaction. "Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy" (Romans 13:13).
The core problem, beyond being sinful, is that it focuses the relationship on physical responses to the imagination. A person's imagination has little limits and we tend to make things greater or better than it really is. When you engage in phone sex all you are doing is setting yourself up for disappointment. Reality will never match what you imagine. In many ways, real sex is better than imagined sex, but at the same time, it can never meet the unreasonable expectations of the imagination.
The other problem is that it changes the nature of the relation to one of basic lust. This is something many boys never understand because they have never related to a girl except through their lust.
Let me explain in blunt terms what you are facing. If this by, when he gets mad at you, is willing to use past lovers to hurt you, then you can expect that if you ever married him and had the inevitable fights, he is very likely to repeat his established habits. He'll go off and have sex with other women and flaunt it in your face to hurt you. I know all of this because of my experience in counseling failed marriages. I've talked to far too many women who saw this characteristic in their men before marriage and somehow convinced themselves it didn't matter.
Your boyfriend can be straightened out, but not while he continues to feed his lusts. His lust is coloring all his relationships.
Unless you can build a tie to this boy that doesn't involve sex -- including phone sex -- you will never have a lasting relationship. Sex was designed by God for the pleasure of married couples who are in a committed relationship (Proverbs 5:1-19). Sex creates bindings between individuals (I Corinthians 6:16), but without a stable foundation, sex cannot keep a relationship together. The result is a constant ripping and tearing of emotions.
One of the problems women have is that their view of sex is very different from men. Women see sex as an extension of a relationship. That is why you rejected even phone sex with another woman on the line. It means sharing an intimate relationship with another woman, it ought to make you sick.
But men are not designed the same way. Sex is something done. It is an expression of a basic need, on the same order as drinking and eating. The design of a man's body makes it difficult to ignore his need for sex, just as if you go without eating or drinking for a period of time hunger and thirst starts to haunt your thoughts. Men face the same thing with sex. That is the source of the old joke about sex being constantly on a teenage boy's mind. A part of the teenage years for boys is learning to deal with those urges so that they don't dominate a boy's life. Sadly, Satan has corrupted our culture so much that the societal pressures for boys to learn self-control don't exist as they once did.
Girls, such as yourself, contribute to the problem because you can't understand the other viewpoint. Most girls take the attitude that if they don't feel it, then "obviously" the boy doesn't either. Thus they flirt, dress to be noticed, and act provocatively thinking they are causing no harm because they like the attention and since they don't feel anything particularly, it must be the corrupt minds of the boys -- which, in part, is a part of the problem. You use phone sex because your boyfriend wants it and you see it as a way of tying him to you. But it will never be enough to hold a boy. Instead, it becomes a weapon as the relationship becomes unstable.
The result is a self-feeding cycle of degradation. What your boyfriend tried to do was get you to lower your standards, to degrade yourself. He is feeling like trash and he wants to drag you along with him. "Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves" (Romans 1:24). Going with him won't bring him out and will further ruin your own character.
There is only one way out of this mire. You have to demand a higher standard for yourself and insist that your boyfriend do the same. What women though the ages rarely understood is that men will willingly follow because of their sex drive. I would guess that your boyfriend is disgusted with himself. He thinks he is perverted and sick. You would be surprised how many boys chasing after illicit sex are, at the same time, disgusted with themselves. Because it is rarely limited to just phone sex. They are often into pornography and other degraded forms of sex.
So it is up to you. Do you encourage it, or do you demand that he rise up and clean up his act in order to get your attention? The only real question is whether you can make the same demand of yourself.
