Yo Rollo,
This is a good thread. Thanks for posting this. It's always a good idea to bring the harshest, cruelest, most stark images of the dating and relationship war "front and center".
All things being equal (and without knowing ANY of these people personally or their backstories), I agree with you that there are so many different facets of male/female interaction here that there isn't enough time to address it all at once.
So, to be brief, I'll just fire off a few bullet points.
1. In my opinion, the woman came across as smug. and a little "princessy" (is that a word???). When she sat there and nonchalantly mentioned that she DIDN'T want to be proposed to in a public place but claimed not to know why.
I'll tell you "why" I think she felt that way:
It's because she wasn't "into the guy" and she KNEW it. Most women would NEVER turn down so big a chance to be the subject of THAT much attention---------"if" they were even halfway into a guy.
2. Right before she "thought" he was about to propose to her, she became flustered and asked him to wait so she could "catch her breath" or whatever, I believe this was either a form of attention-whorrring to play up the moment for ALL OF IT'S DRAMA, or it was actually a mild panic attack because she KNEW she was getting ready to field a proposal from a guy who no longer really "did it" for her. Remember, she already KNEW that he was gonna ask her to marry him, so where was all of her sudden anxiety coming from???
Either way------it was a bad sign.
3. When he dropped the bomb on her by asking her had she been seeing that other guy, and she AGAIN wanted to take time to "think" or whatever, to me, all that seemed like was that she was so thrown off balance that needed time to come up with the best lie that she could.
And of course, her response, was pathetic-----an EPIC failure. Surely if she was STILL out with the guy "after" she had made a few "mistakes" months ago, she was ALSO still hoping to make a few MORE mistakes with that same guy. It appears to me that she wasn't sorry for what she did, she was only sorry that she got CAUGHT. And there's a huge difference between the two.
4. Is dumping a woman in such a public fashion a pointless and fruitless method of teaching her a lesson? I would say that the answer is "NO". To the contrary, I believe that such a public, multimedia comeupance is the BEST way to actually succeed in "teaching" people (not just women) a lesson.
But women, especially so, because as a gender, they tend to care FAR MORE about how they are percieved by society than most men are. Dumping a woman who deserves to be dumped in this way is arguably the most devastatingly lethal shaming tactic that could ever be devised. In fact, it's probably a little more devastating than all of the "little' shaming tactics some women use on men all the time.
Think about it.
5. Is the guy dumping her on the radio an AFC form of payback or revenge? Maybe. But there's an argument that can be made that it was moreso JUSTICE in it's purest form.
Why do I say this?
My reasons are many-----but much too many to list here. Instead, I'd like to leave you with some more food for thought. It seems that much of the debate here is over whether or not the guy's actions were vengeance or justice.
My question to all of you troops here is this:
"Is justice somehow rendered as "less than justice" when it is administered by your OWN HAND?"
Soldier on.
VU