Should I dump my cheating girlfriend?

I've been with my girlfriend for over two years and it's been good. Not perfect, but pretty good. Until she went out clubbing with a friend, took a concoction of drugs and ended up shagging some guy. I found out about it, we had a fight and she admitted it wasn't the first time she'd cheated - but promised it would be the last. I can forgive her, but I can't forget about it. Should I stay? Confused

Dearie me. So zonked out that she couldn't help herself... that old chestnut. Bottom line as I see it is that it was in her power to tell him to talk to the hand. Did she do so? She did not. She got her kit off and joyfully bumped uglies at least once (and possibly two or three times) with someone other than yourself, then blamed the disco biscuits for her abberation. But, as you seem to be dithering a little on the confrontational aspects of dumping someone, the only thing to do is to chuck her stuff off the balcony - that's if you have a balcony. If not, simply decorate her car with all her underwear and sticky-tape a sign to the windshield telling her the fat lady has sung her last disco ditty.

Or you could swallow your pride and go to counselling. But when you've been bitch-slapped by betrayal not once, but several times that you know about, I tend to think your future together is looking less than rosy. Good luck...
Love, reality chick

Yes, even superheros need holidays

Hey there folks. Just wanted to drop you a quick line to say that I will be packing away my cape for the next five or six weeks as I jet off overseas to rest, revive and drink as many cocktails as humanely possible.
But do not despair: I will be back with news of my many adventures at the end of August.
Keep safe peeps.
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Love,
reality chick

A scrub in time...

The other night I tried very hard to avoid eavesdropping on my neighbours as they fought about who should wash up the breakfast dishes. OK, I’m lying; I totally opened the window so I could hear them better. But seeing you all know about my inexcusably nosy side already let’s focus on the issue at hand: how the sexes view the dishes. Her overall tack was: ‘Why can’t you see the dishes are sitting there and wash them up as you go?’ His was: ‘What’s the big deal? I do heaps around here as it is.’
I’ve mentioned in the past that more sex is a happy knock-on effect for men who indulge in choreplay - and while you could argue that gender’s irrelevant when it comes to where we lie on the scale between total pack-rat and obsessive-compulsive neat freak, I have another theory. In fact, I’d bet my last buck on the fact that some women have a kind of feel-good neurotransmitter that only switches on when surfaces are uncluttered, dishes are washed, beds are made and vacuuming is done. It’s the same neurotransmitter that flashes, ‘Warning! Danger! Danger!’ when the house is a mess and your mum / best friend / neighbour who wouldn’t know a spec of dust if it punched her on the nose announces she’s on her way over.
Not to sound completely sexist, I’m sure some men have this trigger switch too. I just haven’t met very many of them. Which makes it all the more sweeter when the ones that don’t grab the gloves and get stuck into the breakfast dishes – because you know they’re doing it just to please you. (Or let’s be honest, to get more sex).

*** Your turn: who cranks the neurotransmitter in your relationship? And do you have any hot tips for tricking a lazy partner into doing more housework?

Meet the parents

Meeting your partner’s family is a biggie. And trying too hard to make a semi-decent impression is a surefire bet that something dodgy will go down. I’m about to meet my boyfriend’s family for the first time and while I’m hoping I won’t accidentally set fire to the house or give one of his siblings a black eye (a la Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents) there’s a good chance I’ll spill food on my clothes and not notice, or worse, get drunk and start a table-slapping discussion about something taboo.
It’s just as bad for blokes, says Timmy, 40. “It's always at least slightly nerve-wracking because of the tangible sense of "Is this bloke good enough for our daughter?" that you get,” he says.
That pressure led to Jason, 27, royally cocking up the first meet’n’greet with his then-girlfriend’s folks. “I tried to score brownie points by offering to clean the goldfish pond, but when I killed all the goldfish they’d had for years after not using fish-friendly cleaning agents, I was pretty much history,” he remembers ruefully.
Language barriers don’t help, warns 35-year-old Alana, who wishes she could forget the first time she met her then Spanish boyfriend’s father, Antonio. “We were talking about Australia’s rabbit problem and the Spanish word for rabbit is conejo. I thought that ‘cono’ was the shortened, familiar form, but unfortunately it means ‘pussy’. So I say, ‘Hay mucho concos en Australia’ meaning there were a lot of rabbits in Australia but I’d actually said there was a lot of pussy in Australia! You can imagine how that went down...’
Overly-friendly parents still give Kath, 36, the willies. “My boyfriend’s dad was good-looking but a total letch and kept ‘accidentally’ feeling me up as he brushed by. Yucko!’
But Tash, 37, has a sweeter story to tell of the day her parents met her partner Paul. “They’d had some wine and were all jovial; Paul was nervous as hell,” Tash remembers. “And his really long curly hair didn’t help... mum kept coming up and playing with it; she is pretty tactile at the best of times but ridiculously so when drunk, and poor Paulie just kind of grinned and bore it. But you know what? They fell in love with him and 8 years down the track are still madly in love with him.”
Awww. Maybe there’s hope for me yet!

*** Your turn, kids. Any scary meet’n’greet stories - or, for that matter, tips on making a good first impression? I’m all ears...