u/Careless_Bat_9226

We've been dating a few months and I think I'm realizing we may have different conceptions of what monogamy means.

My gf has a poly "friend" who they've hooked up a number of times with the most recent time a ~3 months before we got together. She wants to keep hanging out with him and going out to one-on-one dinner/drinks (the last time she got quite drunk). She sees nothing wrong with this and I should just trust her that she will maintain proper boundaries.

I believe her that this is someone that she cares about more than just a hook up buddy. Maybe I'm more traditional but in my view of monogamy if someone has recent sexual history or isn't clearly platonic then there should be a little more distance. It would never occur to go on something date-like with someone I recently slept with.

Is this my stuff I need to deal with or is this a genuinely weird situation?

I will likely need to have ankle surgery (ligament and cartilage repair). I'm trying to find a really top doc. Portland area preferred but I would travel as far as Seattle.

Any recommendations?

I'm 46, single, no kids with roughly this portfolio:

• $150k cash (in hya savings)
• $450k 401k (Vanguard 65/35 bonds to stocks)
• $1.4M taxable brokerage (Betterment 85/15 stocks to bonds)
• $300k rental property (paid off but generating a negligible amount of profit)

I'd like to leave work sometime in the next year and have the belief that we're due for a substantial correction/period of low growth in the next years - yes I'm aware that a crash is always coming, timing the market is impossible, and "this time it's different" :)

Any ideas for how to set myself up for the future? I've thought about:

• moving some money into buying a house with a some potential for rental
• moving the taxable brokerage more into bonds (but would mean cap gains).

I'm a staff-level engineer with ~13 yoe (full stack web dev, mostly Bay Area companies). I'm ready to semi-retire or at least drastically cut down my work hours.

In a perfect world I'd go to part-time or do short term projects, eg work for a few months and then take off while keeping my current, relatively high hourly

I just keep working full-time because I'm never sure how to break into this world. I've always been seen as a high performer but I haven't been great about maintaining my network, especially since my job became remote with Covid and I moved away from SF.

Any thoughts/ideas?

We’ve been dating exclusively for about 3 months. Overall it’s actually a really good relationship. We spend several nights a week together, talk about future travel, and I genuinely like her.

The issue is that we seem to have different philosophies about friendships with former lovers.

She was single for about five years before we met and seems to have a lot more close male friends than female friends. She seems a little more sexually open, sex-positive than me. So when she talks about “a friend,” it’s often another guy, and over time I’ve learned that some of those friendships include people she’s dated or slept with in the past.

Early in the relationship, a guy from another country she’d previously visited and slept with a couple of times came and stayed with her for a few days. The trip had been planned before she met me, and she was actually pretty transparent about it—she introduced me to him, included me, and maintained boundaries while he was here. Even so, it got into my head because it was early in the relationship and I didn’t really know how she viewed friendships with former lovers.

I eventually got too in my head, started asking awkward questions whenever she’d mention a guy, and we had a pretty big blow-up over it. She basically said, “This has to stop,” and I understood why she felt that way.

Since then I’ve mostly been trying to relax and trust her.

One thing I’m not proud of: one night I couldn’t sleep, and after she’d sent me an Instagram profile saying, “This is my friend who has an apartment we could rent in X city,” I snooped her instagram for just that one conversation. I didn't click on anything else for fear of what I might find. I know I shouldn’t have done that but I guess I wanted to know if it's totally in my head when she says "friend" it means potentially more.

What I found wasn’t evidence she’d done anything wrong while we’ve been together. But it did confirm that in the couple years before we started dating they’d had a sexual/flirty relationship. There were old flirtatious messages and it was clear they’d exchanged intimate photos at some point. The only recent thing I saw was him saying he’d be home for Christmas and would love to reconnect. She didn’t really respond in that Instagram thread, and I have no idea whether they talked elsewhere or nothing came of it.

So now I’m stuck.

I don’t think she’s cheating on me. I don’t think she’s being dishonest. In some ways she's too honest. I think she genuinely cares about these people and doesn’t want to cut them out of her life just because they used to sleep together.

But it also means that when she says, “I’m grabbing dinner with my friend,” or “my friend has an apartment,” there’s often a part of me wondering, “Is this just a friend, or is this someone you’ve had a sexual history with?”

I don’t want to interrogate her every time she mentions a guy. I also don’t love feeling like I’m going to spend the rest of the relationship wondering about the history of every close male friend.

So I’m trying to figure out:

• Is this mostly my anxiety that I should work on?
• Is it reasonable to want to know the general history of people your partner regularly spends one-on-one time with?
• Or is this simply a compatibility issue where we have fundamentally different views about friendships with former lovers/FWBs?

I have a lost horizon mattress right now and it's basically fine. The main things that bother me are:

• where the mattress angles up due to the backseat: I'm 6'2" (188cm) it hits in a weird spot in my back and also causes my feet to slide into the back hatch door
• my head hanging off the edge of the seat: sounds like Snuuzu will help with this

Anyone have experience and can offer their thoughts?

It seems like most FIRE math assumes trends continue generally as they have. What happens if they don't?

I have a history of ankle sprains, torn ligaments, and some cartilage damage. I went to a doc a couple weeks ago and he suggested Brostrom, microfracture, and bone spur cleanup.

I have no idea if he's good but I'd love to find a really top guy in the country (US) who does lots of these things -- even if I have to fly somewhere to get a second opinion. Like the kind of guy who operates on professional athletes.

How do you find someone really good / do you have any recommendations?