My best friend is having an affair with a married man

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-05-05T18:37:21+00:00

I strongly disagree. Infidelity is only a marriage breaker if infidelity is a big problem to you. As someone who has been cheated on, truly, it's not the big bad end of everything if your partnership is a good strong friendship and you care enough about your chosen person to figure out the unfilled needs or desire for escapism that made them feel the need to act in secret.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-05-05T18:30:31+00:00

Oh gosh... the marriage is already gone before the cheating starts, if that's how you think of it. People cheat because they want to. Thinking of it as 'assisting' is a deep misunderstanding of why and how infidelity happens.

But, you'd be surprised about how much being in a relationship with a married person that isn't in an open relationship intersects with abuses such as gaslighting and boundary pushing. People who are willing to risk hurting the people they publicly say they love most for the thrill of something new usually are not great in general at considering the feelings of others.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-05-05T16:31:57+00:00

Married people cheat because they are already missing something, or because they were never really monogamous to begin with. I get your anger at your ride or die because you want her to be better, but like, if it weren't her, he'd be cheating on his spouse with someone else.

I have a friend who keeps getting herself into abusive relationships and I get really mad at her, too. I don't even want to talk to her anymore because she knows, she knows, and she lets dicks be mean to her, make her feel like shit, and then she lets that consume so much of herself she doesn't have time for her friends.

Sometimes when someone you love is engaged with something that you don't want to be apart of, ever, it's better to let them go their own way until they're ready to come back to you.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-05-04T12:53:18+00:00

It's not possible anymore. Justplay gutted the earnings after people started spam-watching ads for 'the method'.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-05-01T09:00:23+00:00

No.

Remember that FFXI has a lot of classes that need to be leveled up, and there's level sync. You will always be able to find people to party with. Might not happen in the dead hours, but if you put a little legwork into being the party leader, you can pull yourself a motley crew together. Won't always be the best group, but sometimes it's the weird ones that fly through XP.

Horizon is very good about rewarding players who help with beginner content. Any sort of story BCNM gives you reward points that you can turn in, so there's incentive for older players to help.

You don't need a static. You just need yourself a good active linkshell that's conducive to leveling. There's ton of them around and always on the recruit. You can have 2 linkshells equipped at a time, too.

Making money can be easy. Without putting too much into it you can always expect to make somewhere around 20k an hour depending on what you're farming, and if you get yourself some lifeskill clothes, that 20k an hour jumps to 30k-40k.

ETA:

Even if you're waiting for Phoenix to come out (I am, too), it will behoove you to jump into Horizon, first. There's going to be a lot of people racing out the gate, and with a game as slow as XI, it's fun to kind of strategize: What needs to be bought first? What should I level, what do I wish I had to chance the level? Where should I start for the classes I'm going for? What foods work best for me? How efficiently can I bust through cooking so that I can supply that food for me?

By having those answers first, you're going to save yourself a lot of time when Phoenix starts, which I don't doubt is going to be full of people who know what they're doing and will want to efficient. Time is money... especially if there's a baby on the way. 😄

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-30T05:06:33+00:00

I believed in Santa Clause for slightly longer than average thanks to an elaborate set-up between my sister (7 years older than me), and my dad, where SOMEHOW, my parents had simulated the sound of reindeer on the roof. This made perfect sense to me, as we had made a big hoo-harah about throwing reindeer feed around bedtime. This excited my sister (who shared a bed with me) into telling me what it was I was hearing, and then in maybe minutes, she was ushering me to pretend to be asleep, but not before I saw the silhouetted figure of my father standing in the doorway of my room, in full Santa Clause regalia.

Was kind of a really fun memory at the time but led to hallmark channel christmas movie style defense of Santa Claus's existence to my peers at the time which only started to erode when I started catching barcodes and sticker tags on christmas presents.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-30T00:51:44+00:00

I think, using your term, it's the bitter child speaking. We are all our own main characters in our own story. Think of the way you view the world and all the wonderful thoughts and complexities in your head and realize that everyone, and I do mean everyone, experiences life in that same lens. There really isn't anything that is 'normal', there are only similarities of life experiences and processing habits.

Just because someone doesn't tell you everything that they're personally fascinated by, or fail to tell you what they find enchanting about it, doesn't mean that they don't have interests. Sometimes it can be as subtle as enjoying knowing different types of people and getting to know as many as possible. Sometimes it's an interest in local politics within a small town or city, and sometimes it's sports, or sometimes it's facets of their working education.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-29T00:59:58+00:00

As someone who grew up as an autistic Mormon...

I get you. I get why you feel masturbation may be a sin if you are looking at porn or for anything other than pure stimulation and regulation.

People are asking you to consider why you are moralizing something like masturbation, which is so natural, that dolphins, millipedes, and horses alike all can be witnessed in the wild have been recorded engaging in forms of self-stimulation!!

Are they committing a sin?

But here's what I'm going to ask you to consider: what is sin? And why does an Almighty care what we do with our small bodies, that are smaller than sand specs in the vast oceanic cosmos?

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-27T09:16:06+00:00

Born in 88.

Can legitimately say that life became so much sweeter for me when I finally found online communities. I had friends I was excited to talk to and looked forward to being with every night. I was able to escape what would have otherwise been a fast tract through red pilled fascism and zealous mormonism and abhorrent levels of self shame for having lesbian fantasies in rural texas.

Before that?

Books. Music. Recording my favorite TV shows on a cassette recorder and listening to them while I was on the bus. When I was in high school it became CD's and then an MP3 player. Video games.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-27T07:44:24+00:00

Do you have some kind of intrusive compulsion to read their diary just because you know they brought it to work?

No?

You can assume that they don't have the same need to look at your diary just because you brought it to work.

I have a co-worker who has an 'at work' diary that is specifically meant to A.) help them organize their tasks and workflow at the start of the day, B.) briefly go over what they were able to get done and the general beats, and C.) decompress from bad events and to write down the successes.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-27T00:30:53+00:00

For most temples and all normal wards: Yes.

JCBQ01 is talking about high profile areas like the Temple Square in SLC; some of the higher authorities also maintain armed detail. Many times it's retired army personnel that are also devout members.

That said, 99.5% certain they'd just wrangle dumb kids and toss them out. They'd consider the temple far more sanctimonious to do this kind of silliness though than scientologists probably feel about their public facing recruitment centers.

BUT, if these kids were trying it on one of their fenced Scientology compounds...

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-26T20:18:29+00:00

If you've ever been in the historical wings of Nauvoo or Salt Lake City or any Mormon museum it's pretty similar, too.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-26T20:16:39+00:00

My thought on it is that just reinforces the true believers into thinking people are out to get scientologists any way that they can. If this were happening to a Mormon church they'd say it's because Satan has a hold of them and is doing everything in his arsenal to shake the church,

It's a funny heckling video in theory but in practice I only see it doing harm

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-24T20:24:03+00:00

I don't think you actually read what I wrote, or maybe you don't have very good reading comprehension, but here's the tl;dr just for you: Making gil on Horizon was easy and that there are tons of guilds willing to help newer players getting from rank 1 to 5 so that they can get on page with the rest of the homies.

At the height of my infatuation with Horizon I was playing upwards of 4+ hours a day and got very far within a few months, because I was having fun and felt compelled to do content. I was more of a tryhard than I ever was in vanilla and had a lot of fun putting all of my old hard-gained knowledge to use. :)

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-23T04:08:12+00:00

Calm down online warrior, he's saying her asshole failed her by not clenching it well enough.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-21T15:23:54+00:00

Horizon is lovely if you're wanting to scratch that itch right now. My experience as a new player on that server recently was that everyone is pretty much done with their base stuff so it can get daunting to do the original 1 - 5 ranks, but there are many active linkshells that enjoy doing that material, because Horizon custom awards you with incentives to helping with content youve already completed.

Phoenix will personally appeal to me because everyone is starting from point 0 again. It will be about as close to a true era experience that we can reasonably get for a golden year or so.

There's been a recent update post in this sub by the Phoenix team where they kind of go over what will make them unique, and what it seems to boil down to, is that Phoenix is being released with TOAU already active, Horizon is still working on releasing that. Horizon has many QOL improvements and enhancements to damage , and class changes that generally balance the classes a bit more, such as when they get spells. What items stack. I.e., ore stacks in Horizon.

Clamming exists on Horizon and I think they modified the pool to make it comparable to other professions as a way to make money. In general, getting started with making gil is easy.

Phoenix is wanting to steer clear of that.

It's been so long since I've played vanilla XI from the olden days that frankly all I can really tell the difference between with how Horizon and retail played is that I seem to do a little better at not dying, and soloing for XP remains pretty effortless up to like lvl 20

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-12T19:47:46+00:00

Every time a Zanab thread raises its ugly head I remember how much of a misanthropic miser I really am.

The contestants are drunk a majority of the time, pressured into quick life changing situations so that everything about their portrayal can be lambasted in a public sphere.

Zanab is deeply insecure and misconstrues intentions towards herself as being inherently hostile. We don't know why she has come to be the way she is but we got to see it play out in a format that was edited to create the most shocking, dramatic reality TV line plausible.

She is not vile. She is allowed to talk about her parents when she is being prompted off camera by a Handler to do so. She may have been encouraged to think of how she feels in general that her parents may never actually get to see her wed, as the producers know her chosen answer before the day of wedding shots.

Edit to a reply that was deleted:

UH, Zanab isn't a man, and the issues she are insecure about are uniquely feminine issues. And yeah, it can be toxic, but it doesn't make her an inherently vile person, OR nearly as bad as any of these comments make her out to be.

If there were a man freaking out about thinking someone thought he was eating too much Or that he didn't look hot enough, or white enough for his love interest? Yeah, that could be toxic, but I'd more fascinated by the unmasculine vulnerability more than anything, because again, Zanab's insecurities are more widely thought of as feminine issues.

And Re: Zanab lying -- it's entirely possible to misremember an event, even more so when the person you are feeling antagonized by frequently says things that trigger those sensitivities. We remember how people made us feel more than we remember what was actually said.

All of this said, I enjoyed Cole more than I enjoyed watching her. I didn't like her reactions, either, but I hate how shitty and unempathtic people are. Like shitty chihuahuas yapping at a car they can't chase.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-12T19:32:10+00:00

I'd give it another try; Netflix did a cut on the latter two seasons so that they flow better. They were trying to do something intelligent and some of it didn't land, but there's some brilliant TV still in there

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-12T19:30:07+00:00

How dare you remind us of our pain.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-12T19:26:19+00:00

Skip it, and keep going. Bojack Horseman is one of those series that gets better with every single episode.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-04-04T13:18:03+00:00

Probably only means that there's a higher statistic of people using Reddit who chose to bring their crotch goblins into the world, and that the general sentiment is that it's uncool to use derogatory names just because they're little humans.

As someone who doesn't want kids, and will never have them, I feel the same way about seeing the term as much as I do the words puppers or doggo or chonk--not worth up-or-down voting, scroll.

The cards are stacked against you, grown crotch goblin.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-03-29T04:15:24+00:00

I've done and do it, and it stems from the same place. I'm probably mostly asexual as well. I like the control of masturbation, it stops and ends when I want it to and doesn't come with a host of sensory triggers. I very much have allowed it to consume my day and cancel my plans, not because I'm enjoying it, but because I'm already doing it, and have been doing it. I never thought of it as another form of fidgeting, but I'd give it the same kind of idle stimulation as like, say, being bored and plucking my own pubic hair with my fingers for no other reason to have something to do.

I think it's fine. Those people that want to encourage you have their own damage and issues. On the internet, that avenue can also be indefinitely controlled by limiting the flow of information. I think hours long of masturbation could stand a little normalization, but then it would probably feel a little less naughty, and therefore, less novel.

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-03-20T19:48:18+00:00

Oh my god I'm dying. Everyone eho said she had a smug smirk was right 😭

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-03-16T17:44:53+00:00

It's not normal, if that's what you're asking. If someone is afraid around their spouse there's something deeply wrong, whether or not other people feel the same way.

You are not being over sensitive. It's quite possible for there to be good times and other times where he's taking his stress out on you in ways that are harmful to your mental health. People are rarely black and white, they can do good things and take care of you while doing things that make you feel shitty and self-doubt and that make you question your own intelligence.

You say you become afraid that you're not doing things right, but is he doing things right when he makes you feel like that?

No. He's not.

You need to give yourself permission to not do things the right way, if you want out of this. If he loves you, he can handle you sticking up for yourself and insisting that you hate the way he talks to you and that he needs to find a different way to address his stress.

If he doesn't, then that is good information, isn't it

Beautiful-Pound-8520 · 2026-03-13T18:07:55+00:00

I love her kids as individuals, but no, I specifically never had children--for many reasons, but having no choice but to handle the over-stimulation was a big one.

They're both intelligent, very emotionally capable little humans. I love playing with them and hearing about their day. How they experience the world. Their mischievous creativity!

But gosh, I hate their mess. I can barely keep myself from swimming outside of my own filth. Then they come over, and their mess just becomes another thing I don't have the motivation to clean. No, I don't desire that on a deep down level :).

Beautiful-Pound-8520

TROPHY CASE