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Read other letters about this article
The letter writer was absolutely in the right to tell her boyfriend the honest truth. Otherwise he'd have been tricked and lied to and manipulated into a relationship that doesn't match up with his values.
But let's talk about his values.
One has to assume that he understands that she didn't do anything criminal or unethical. Presumably, she didn't hurt anybody, lie to anybody, endanger anybody, manipulate anybody, or steal from anybody. She simply violated his sexual mores.
It's legitimate for him not to value what she did in the same way a jewish boyfriend might disapprove of my eating a bacon double-cheeseburger or celebrating Jesus as the Messiah. He'd have a right to disapprove. He'd have a right not to marry me because of it. But he'd have no right to get sick, cry, carry on like a lunatic, and condemn me to an emotionally abusive relationship.
But let's pretend for a moment that she did kill somebody.
If I was with a boyfriend who confessed such a thing to me, I'd want to know the details. What happened, was it intentional, was he jailed for it, has he sought counseling since, and so on. Was it in the course of duty? I'd want to know that he paid his debt to society, and whether or not he'd changed, but even so, I would probably feel scared and uncomfortable dating the kind of person who could kill, under almost any circumstances. So the only honest thing to do would be to break it off.
Nobody would think that they should stay with the murderer and continuously yell at them, demand apologies and shame, and withhold sex and the like. We'd all think that was nuts--we'd all tell that person to break it off and run. The fact that her boyfriend hasn't done this, and won't do this, shows how fundamentally dishonest he is.
He knows she didn't commit any fundamental crime for which she owes him or anybody else an apology, shame, or repentance. He knows that this is 100% his issue. He just hasn't been able to figure out yet what's more important to him--love or pride, love or his sexual mores.
And that's why it's time for an act of honesty from the letter writer. She needs to understand that this is not a man who loves or honors her above other things. He wants her to feel ashamed of her sexuality, he thinks of her sexuality as property that she has stolen from him. Her body belongs to him, and he's ticked off that he bought it in 'less than pristine condition'. That's a psychosis from another age.
He wants her to be the kind of woman he was fantasizing about. She wants him to be the kind of man he was pretending to be before she trusted him with her heart and her vulnerabilities. Neither of them are going to get the person they want, and it's time to be honest about it and move on.
