Gavin de Becker once remarked, “The best cons make the victim want to participate,” and that explains this situation. This man tried to use your own niceness and sense of responsibility against you. de Becker calls the strategy “forced teaming.” In forced teaming, one party tries to create a predicament which requires both parties to solve. The goal is to make the innocent party feel “we are in this together.” But that is never the case. Moral responsibility is not assignable.

Someone who says “Stop me or I’ll do something bad,” produces no moral obligation in you. It is simply the strategy of a person running a con. If there is a moral lesson here which applies to you, it is this: It is not right to allow a person to trick you and get away with it.

Instead of getting you drunk so he could take advantage of you, he got himself drunk — or so he said — so he could take advantage of you. That may be a reversal of an old ploy, but the intent is identical. In relationships, people with bad intentions often pull good people off their path.

An old adage says, a teaspoon of sewage will spoil a barrel of wine, but a teaspoon of wine will never improve a barrel of sewage. If this man had achieved intimacy with you, you might be tempted to think of this as a relationship and him as a possible husband. That would have you living in his world.

But even if we assume he didn’t scheme this out and simply has a problem with alcohol, it doesn’t put him in a better light. Dating a budding alcoholic is of no advantage to you. It still makes him a man you don’t want. We don’t have the right to change others and seldom do we have the power.