Provoke boyfriend to think about moral obligation

Q. My boyfriend and I have been together for over a year now. He is a kind and sweet man who I respect and love. However, we have had a number of arguments about his friends' behavior toward women. For example, his friend "Jack" has taken up meeting girls at bars, and on more than one occasion, gotten a woman to take a picture of her upper half naked on his cell phone, which he later sends to his buddies, including my boyfriend.

Another friend (and also his roommate), "Fred," frequently argues with his girlfriend. Several times Fred has ended arguments with his girlfriend by calling her a "whore" and kicking her out of his apartment in front of my boyfriend. On one occasion, my boyfriend believes he may have even heard Fred hit her. While my boyfriend did check up on her (she assured him that all was "just fine"), he continues to be Fred's good friend. My boyfriend maintains that it's not for him to judge how Fred and Jack live. I disagree. What do you think?

Trying to Be Open-Minded

A. If your boyfriend roomed with Adolf Hitler, I doubt he'd be giving the it's-not-my-place-to-judge speech.

Clearly there is a point where every individual, every society, has a moral obligation to judge. You and your boyfriend apparently disagree on where that line falls. You think it falls on the near side of calling one's girlfriend a whore. He thinks it falls on the other.

Here's a way to approach it with him. At what point would your boyfriend feel his roommate was crossing the line into mistreatment foul enough not only to reveal Fred's poor character, but to tarnish his own by association? Calling you a whore? Calling him one? Or does emotional abuse not count, and he'd have to hit a girl? Hit you? Hit his sister? Would Fred have to kill someone?

Where on the scale from nurturing to genocide does your boyfriend rate misogyny?

What if the girlfriend were verbally, or physically, abusing Fred -- would your boyfriend socialize with her?

Your boyfriend's stance ultimately may not change, but it screams of not having been given a trace of actual thought. Provoke that thought, please. Find out what he really believes, so you -- and, ideally, he -- can learn who he really is.

It's not any one person's place to take a stand against every outrage on earth. But I doubt your boyfriend would want to inhabit the world where everyone, to a person, declined to take even one.

Q. What does it mean when someone says, "I'd date you if I didn't have a girlfriend/boyfriend"?

The person is looking for something better? Or the person is throwing you a bone because you aren't getting any?

Washington

A. It means either one, depending on the person. "Looking for something better" can mean different things, too, like testing you as a replacement, feeling you out for an affair, testing the market, fishing for flattery.

And since either way it means nothing -- since either way, it's coming from someone you can't really trust -- it also means you wave it off after giving it exactly as much thought as it takes to figure this out.

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