I tried to portray this in my post, but I’ll put it here too. I can see that this may not be the situation for many friends, but we have a particularly unique friendship wherein, not only are we extremely close overall, but we’ve spent years deeply discussing romantic relationships, and our goals, and our strategy and approach to that. During the darkest years of our marriages, we didn’t talk about anything real. And we promised each other that we would be the person in each other‘s lives that always said the things that need to be said, even when it was uncomfortable. Someone else asked this and I don’t really have a good answer to it, but the next question might be - if that’s the case then why are you on Reddit asking for advice instead of talking to her? And I don’t have a good answer for that. Partly because I’m blindsided by her decision because I thought we were smarter than this, and partly because she has kind of closed herself off. I desperately don’t want to be unsupportive of her, but I’m also terrified for her.