Topic: More advice! On something kind of serious but not about me!

[Claimh Solais]

I come here for advice a lot. You guys have some pretty good advice and it's helped me before so I kinda trust you all with this.

So... as you guys might know from one of the previous threads I made about this, I went through a breakup about two months ago. And I've recently come to terms with it and I've moved on. I'm better now, and though I'm still in a bit of a bad place, I'm getting myself together.

And within the last year I got in touch with this friend from a decade back. And it's been nice to talk to her again, since she's such a chill person and seems to understand where I come from on a lot of things. And I kinda developed a bit of an interest in her and I might have rushed a bit forward with that. I realized that, though, and I brought myself back. My bad.

But I have an old computer that I keep backup files on. I've been letting my brother use it for a while until he got his new PC. I loaded it up to grab some old music files off of it, and and I realized it was only in hibernate and he left his Facebook open. I didn't mean to pry but I saw that he was talking to this friend of mine. And I found out he's been flirting with her and attempting to engage in a rather sexual relationship with her. Like, it goes on for pages and pages of text.

Now, this is going to sound like something about me being angry with him over that because I like her or something. But that's not it. What pisses me off is that my brother has a girlfriend. A girl that he's known for far longer than I've known THIS girl. And he's being a right asshole right now. My friend didn't want to be in a relationship like that, least of all with him, but she is a rather gutter-minded person and makes a lot of sexual jokes that my brother misconstrued as sexual interest.

I talked to her about this, trying to find out exactly what was going on before making any huge decisions, and she told me that she just thought it was a fun conversation to have, but had no idea he had a girlfriend. And now she's pretty upset with him, too.

Basically, I'm going to confront him about this. My initial plan was to give him a chance to just stop this, and we can pretend it never happened. Bonus points if he confesses it to his girlfriend and face her. And if he didn't comply, I was going to tell her myself. I don't condone cheating, and I think it's an absolutely cruel thing to do, and knowing that he's been through it before makes it just baffling.

Is this the right way to handle it? Should I make him confess right away? Should I go to his girlfriend right away? I've never been a third-party to this kind of situation before so I want to know what you all might think is the right way to handle it.

[zangetsu468]

Advise him he should stop cheating on his gf

[Mooning Freddy]

You should have a serious conversation with your brother. Family is above all.
I'm thinking how I would have handled such a situation. If for instance I and and friend wanted the same woman; that is super embarressing. But that is not it in your case, as you said your brother is in a relationship and he's just being an idiot. Advise him to back off and get himself straight. 

[Shiroi Koumori]

Talk to your brother and make him realizes what he is doing is wrong.
Don't ever talk to his girlfriend unless you are in a really last ditch attempt.

[Dracula9]

It may do well to let this friend confront him first.

Think of how each scenario will look:

You have the girl he's been talking to confronting him after having found out AFTER his advances that he has someone already.

You have the brother who found on by happenstance.

Obviously, I'm not saying don't get on his case for it, but for the moment it might be more beneficial for her to not only confront him about it, but also to basically lay down the cards of "I just make a lot of lewd jokes, sorry but it wasn't a cue of interest towards you" or whatever her side of it is.

Regardless of how it's done, I would take into consideration that her stance on things might very well have a little more weight to them from his point of view.

But confront him nonetheless--this behavior isn't okay.

[Gunlord]

Yeah, Shiroi and Zangetsu are right. Don't bring the girlfriend into this, but do have a good talk with your brother. It's always a bad idea to cheat, or abet cheating, and almost invariably brings more trouble than it's worth.

[Claimh Solais]

So I did talk to him. We had a pretty lengthy talk about it, and he informed me about his relationship with his current girlfriend. And long story short, his relationship was a bit of a toxic one. Sure, it doesn't excuse what he did, and I didn't excuse it. But we talked about it. And what he felt for this girl (my friend) wasn't anything more than lust, or rather an excuse to feel happy again.

So we talked about it, and ultimately, I convinced him instead of finding a cop-out way to make himself happy and not fix things in his relationship, to try and find a way to ultimately fix what's wrong, or maybe the relationship he's in shouldn't be something he should be in.

He apologized to my friend, and hasn't talked to her since then, but he's trying to figure things out now.