u/Panda-monium-the-cat

My bestie (28F) delivered her first little one seven days ago. Before she even left the hospital, my husband (31M) and I (26F) spent an entire weekend batch cooking and freezing roughly six weeks worth of dinners and desserts for her and her husband.
Why? Because six months ago when we brought our newborn home, my stepdaughter did the exact same thing for us. It saved our sanity. Zero cooking, zero decision fatigue, just heat and eat during the hardest weeks of our lives. We wanted to pay that forward.

The new mom? Thrilled. She specifically gushed about my husband's cooking he's the guy who always mans the grill at every BBQ and people literally request his dishes by name. She said having his meals waiting felt like "a warm hug every single night."

But here's where it gets weird.

Our mutual friends found out and went off. They called it "invasive." They said meal prep is "a family's job, not a friend's." One even used the word "tacky." They acted like we'd barged into their kitchen and taken over their lives instead of dropping off labeled containers they could use or not entirely at their own pace.
I never intended to replace anyone. Her family lives three states away. We just wanted her to not have to think about dinner while healing and figuring out motherhood. The planning alone took us days. Now I'm second-guessing a genuinely kind gesture because of outside opinions.

So did we cross a line, or are our friends gatekeeping what support is allowed to look like?

My wife and I have talked about going to Japan since we were dating. For almost 12 years it has been our one day trip. One day when work slows down. One day when we have more money or when the kids are older. Last month my best friend asked if I wanted to go with him and two other guys next spring. At first I said no because Japan was supposed to be me and my wife. Then I brought it up to her and she immediately said we could not afford it and it was selfish to even think about. I dropped it or I thought I did.

A week later my friend sent the itinerary again and I just stared at it for a long time. I am 39. My dad died at 58 after putting everything off for later. I keep hearing his voice in my head saying he would travel after retirement but he never made it there So I booked it. I told my wife last night. I expected her to be annoyed about the money. I did not expect her to cry. She said I took our dream and made it mine. She said every time we talked about Japan, she pictured us there together and now the first version of that memory will be me sending her pictures from a trip she was not on. I told her I did not mean it that way. I said I was tired of waiting for a perfect time that never comes. She said I made the perfect time impossible by going without her first.

Now I feel like garbage but also part of me is angry because if I had waited nothing would have changed. There would always be another bill, another reason. I do not want to live my whole life inside maybe someday. Did I ruin something important by booking it or is it okay to stop waiting for someone even when that someone is your spouse?

​I need to get this off my chest because the guilt is eating me alive, and my wife is entirely oblivious.

​When I first started dating my wife, her dad was incredibly intimidating. He’s a stoic, quiet guy who doesn't do small talk. For the first year, we sat in agonizing silence during every family gathering. I was desperate for his approval.

​One day, I noticed a vintage model train set in his basement. In a moment of sheer panic to break the silence, I blurted out that I was "fascinated by historical railways" and had "always wanted to get into model railroading."

​I knew absolutely nothing about trains. I still don't care about trains. I just wanted the man to look at me without squinting.

​The Escalation

​What I thought would be a one-off conversation turned into a relentless, four-year snowball effect. He lit up. It was the first time I saw him smile. Since that fateful day, my life has been hijacked by locomotives.

​Here is a brief timeline of how deep in the hole I am:

​Year 1: He buys me a $200 starter kit for Christmas. I have to set it up in our spare room and send him update photos.

​Year 2: We start attending regional train expos together. I learn the difference between O scale and HO scale to survive conversations.

​Year 3: He gifts me a vintage conductor's pocket watch and tells me I am "the son he never had."

​Year 4 (Present): He just pitched a two-week, cross-country train trip for just the two of us to "chase the heritage routes."

​The Dilemma

​I genuinely love the guy, and our bond is legitimately strong now. But our entire relationship is built on a foundation of miniature tracks and lies. I spend hours researching train trivia before he comes over just so I can maintain my cover.

My son is 6, and he's such a sweet soul. He has his ups and downs as any child does, but he's gentle and at times too got for this world. We haven't had many instances of him being bullied up until now, and he's not taking it well.

Back when I was a child/young teen, a certain girl decided to make my life living hell. She disguised herself as my friend and made me do all kinds of things for her, only to call me all the names under the sun for them. She'd make me sit on the floor and call me unworthy to touch any furniture. It was the kind of mental torture no 10 year old should endure, and I lived through it up until I was 17.

I'm 28 now, I have a child of my own and my number one parenting goal has always been to make sure my son never bullies anyone. Well, hers wasn't. She has a son as well, a year older than my kid. It hasn't been an issue up until a few months ago when they moved back to our hometown after spending the first years of the kid's life in the nearest big city.

My son, the friendly little guy he is, became friends with the boy and they had some play dates and fun outings together, which I've been trying to accept, despite that gut feeling. Turns out I was right to worry about it, though.

My son has been coming home, saying that all of his friends have been laughing at him saying he has rabies. He wants us to get rid of our dogs, and there had been instances of him telling me his 'friends' were saying he lives in a rabies infested house. The reason? I'm a K9 handler and trainer. We have 4 family dogs, and I have my own business training dogs for the army/police/armed forces, or just protection dogs in general. I've been doing this for 10 years, way before my son was born.

The most terrifying part is that the grown ass adult woman, my former bully, is the one who came up with the amazing idea of calling a 6 year old rabies infested. A friend of mine showed me a group chat she's been added to (along with other parents of the kids in my son's friend group), where she's been relentlessly bullying my 6 year old child, and me by proxy, with the other parents agreeing or laugh-reacting. She's editing pictures, downloading them from my website (regarding to the dogs we have, I obviously don't post my son) and using the photos the boys have together. I've seen an edited photo of my son's happy face in that hospital isolation room, or my dog's pictures with my son edited so that they all are foaming at the mouth.

An adult ass woman doing this to a 6 year old little boy.

My bub is obviously upset, but he doesn't know about the extent of it. It's just that his friends don't want to play with him because they think he has a deadly, infectious disease. He cried himself to sleep tonight, and it makes my heart break, because I promised myself he'll never go through what I did – yet, he is going through it now.

Other than the obvious, which would be going to the school, I'd like to get back on her for all the years she's spent terrorising me, and worst of all, terrorising my son now. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Any payback ideas, if legal, would be appreciated too.

TLDR: My childhood bully is secretly bullying my 6 year old son claiming he has rabies. She's making disgusting edits of his pictures and sending them to a group chat I'm not a part of to laugh about it with other parents. I'm lost and my child is heartbroken.

I have been with my fiancé for three and a half years. We got engaged after one year of dating and have been living together for about two years now.

On our first dates, I could see how much he loved talking to people. I mean random people. We would be somewhere, like in a shopping mall, and he would start talking to a random person about anything. Or we would be in a restaurant having dinner and he would start talking to the people sitting at the table next to us.

Now, I’m not a fan of talking to strangers, so I didn’t really like this behavior of his. But I sometimes joined the conversation a bit or stayed on my phone waiting for it to end. The problem is that he started doing it more and more. Sometimes I could see the person he was talking to was trying to end the conversation, but he kept on talking. It started feeling a bit off…

One day, we had a really bad situation with some girls in a restaurant. He started talking to them - they were sitting at the table next to us - and they started saying some very embarrassing and awkward things to us. We just wanted to be left alone at that point, but they wouldn’t stop talking.

Later that day, I finally gathered the courage to tell him that I didn’t really like this talkative behavior, especially because sometimes it made me feel completely put aside and ignored while he was talking to a total stranger. He apologized, but his behavior didn’t really change. Then I started realizing a few things… Every time we were in public, he wasn’t fully paying attention to me. He was always looking around, trying to find someone to start a conversation with.

At first, I thought he was just extroverted, but there was always this voice in my head telling me something was very wrong with this behavior.

We traveled abroad for my birthday and we were at this party, drinking and having fun. Out of the blue, he started talking to this guy and completely forgot about me for about 10 minutes. When we went home, I talked to him about it and we had a really bad argument. That was the first time I thought about breaking up with him because of that. But in the end, we talked and he apologized and said he was going to start controlling himself more.

His behavior changed for the first few weeks, but then he started talking to random people again. The only difference was that he started apologizing to me right after talking to a stranger.

About three weeks ago, we went to a restaurant and right before finding a table to sit at, he started talking to this guy who was waiting for a takeaway. I was just so tired of it by then, so I found a table myself and sat there and waited for him to finish talking. After some minutes, he came to our table and apologized for talking to that guy, but I didn’t even say anything. I was just like, “What’s the point?”

The next day, I arrived home from work exhausted and just wanted to sleep, but he insisted we should check out this apartment - we were looking for places to buy - and told me it was going to be quick. I ended up going, and after the inspection, he was driving us home and saw his friend’s car and started honking and stopped the car. I was boiling at that moment when he left the car to talk to this guy for about 10 minutes while I was there in the car waiting. He knew I was tired after working for 10 hours, but he still couldn’t resist talking to this person. Again, he came back to the car, apologetic, and I just said I was not in the mood for his apologies and just wanted to go home to sleep. He got quiet and drove home.

We talked about it later and he apologized again. The thing is: he apologizes but doesn’t stop. And it hurts me so much because that really makes me feel like literally any person is more interesting than me in his eyes.

The last straw was when we were in the supermarket and he started talking to these guys. One more time, I was there, put aside on my phone, waiting for him to finish his conversation. At one point, he mentioned to the guys something along the lines of him being the “girls’ chosen one” - I’m not going to say exactly what he said because that would break his anonymity. I was there, next to him, hearing him say something like that to a bunch of guys he had just met.

In that moment, something snapped in me. Something made me see that I had indeed become invisible to him when he was talking to random people. Something made me see that, for him, strangers’ attention was more important than my attention.

I didn’t say anything in the moment, but I told him once we were home and he was furious, saying “he was tired of me controlling him.” I never meant to control him. I just expected more from him as my partner - more respect, more attention.

Now, we are sleeping in separate bedrooms and I’m trying to find another place to go. He is being extremely apologetic again, but I’m just tired of that. Just tired of forgiving him so he can do this all over again. I really think I deserve something better.