u/candy-fairyx

I married my wife in my twenties and i loved her and thought wed build something even, but it never really worked out that way. early on her parents needed help and ended up moving in with us, and i agreed because i thought it was the decent thing to do, but it slowly turned the house into her and her parents on one side and me on the other.

every decision got overruled three to one. holidays were always done their way, my own family got treated as an afterthought and i ended up going to their things alone because she never wanted to come. i couldnt even have a quiet say in my own home without the three of them closing ranks. i raised it constantly, i suggested counselling more times than i can count, i told her plainly for years that i felt like a lodger in my own marriage.

what kept me there was that my mum had been unwell for a long time and she lived nearby and i was the one who looked after her, and i couldnt face blowing up the family while i was also caring for her. when she passed away last autumn something just lifted and settled at the same time, and within about two weeks i filed for divorce. we had next to nothing in the way of assets so it was clean.

my wife says i blindsided her and had no idea i was unhappy, and i asked her what she thought fourteen years of the same argument was about, or all those times id begged for counselling. now im in my early forties starting over, i took a better job ive turned down for years because it meant evenings away, i moved to a new place, ive got a rescue dog and ive actually made friends again.

her family and her say im the bad guy for waiting until my mum was gone and then walking out instead of "talking to her about it." i talked to her about all of it for over a decade. am i wrong for leaving the moment i finally could?

i know how the title looks so bear with me. my ex and i were together for five years and i thought we were solid, id actually been saving for a ring and was getting ready to propose, then about three weeks ago she sat me down out of nowhere and ended it. she was vague about why, said she needed a fresh start, and i was gutted but i let her go without a fight.

the next morning my phone went mad. mate after mate messaging me asking if it was true, all linking me to a long facebook post shed put up that night. in it she said the real reason we split was that id been quietly draining our joint savings for months and that she found out and had to get away from me before i bankrupted her. it got loads of comments, people i barely know piling in calling me every name going.

the thing is none of that happened, and i actually had the opposite proof. for the last few months shed been the one moving money out of our joint account into one i wasnt on, and id only found out because the bank flagged it to me, and on top of that id recently seen shed already signed a lease on a flat with the guy from her work shed been getting close to. shed planned her whole exit and dressed it up as me being the villain.

so instead of just denying it i commented on her post with screenshots of the account transfers and the dates, and said the real reason we broke up was that shed been setting up a new life with someone else on our shared money and didnt want anyone to know. people went quiet, then a lot of them turned on her, and she rang me screaming that i had no right to put our private finances on the internet.

i know two wrongs dont make a right and part of me feels grubby for airing it all in public, but she went first and she went nuclear with a straight up lie. am i wrong for setting the record straight the way i did?

Quick context. At 22 I had a really short marriage to a man almost twice my age that fell apart within eighteen months in a pretty messy way. It made the local papers for a fortnight because of who he was, and people who didnt know me just assumed Id married him for money. I didnt, but Ive had to live with that hanging over me ever since.

I met my fiancé about three years ago, were 29 and 35 now, and his family found out about my previous marriage from a cousin around six months in. Things got weird for a while, his mum and aunts kept making little comments about me "moving fast," his BIL once asked my fiancé in front of me if hed done a proper financial check, and for a couple of months I was being watched at every family event in case I made off with the silverware. My fiancé shut most of it down and we thought wed moved past it.

He proposed last year and we found out I was pregnant five months ago, told his family straight away. His sisters and younger brother were thrilled but his mum pulled me aside and asked me to "be honest" about whether the baby was actually her sons. I rolled my eyes, told her yes, and let it go, which I shouldnt have.

Last weekend we were at his parents place with most of his family plus a few of his dads mates and we got onto what the baby might look like. There were the usual harmless guesses about noses and eyes, then his dad just goes "well with OPs history we might want to keep the paternity test number handy, in case it comes out looking like the first husband." He laughed, his brothers laughed, my fiancé went red.

Before my fiancé could say anything I said "Im sorry, I dont get it." His dad got flustered and said "you know, its just a joke," and I said "no, I really dont get it, explain it to me." He tried to wave it off but I kept asking him to walk me through why it was a joke and what exactly he meant by it. By the third time, one of his own mates went "yeah this isnt funny mate" and his dad muttered something and left the room.

His BIL pulled me into the kitchen later and told me I was bang out of order to embarrass his dad in his own house, that I knew what the joke was about, and that with my history I shouldnt have been surprised. Now the whole family is on the phone with my fiancé demanding I apologise to his father. AITA?

so we have an adult son (23) who moved back home after graduating last year, my husbands original idea was that hed live with us rent free and help with my husbands dad who has mid-stage dementia and lives with us. my father in law needs a lot of help during the day, my husband and i both work full time, my son was happy to help in theory and for a while it worked.

a few months in my son started saying he wanted to get a job, he wanted his own money, he wanted to start saving for somewhere of his own. my husband was against it from the start, even offered to double his allowance, but my son was getting restless and you cant pay someone enough to feel like an adult in their parents house.

so he started applying, over the course of a year he probably applied to forty different jobs in his field, every single one either ghosted him or quietly cancelled. he was starting to think it was him.

three weeks ago i was using the family laptop to print something and the gmail was logged in as my son. i looked through the sent folder and there were dozens of withdrawal-of-application emails sent from his account that he hadnt written, i then noticed sent emails to my husbands phone confirming each cancellation.

my husband had been logging in as my son and pulling the applications himself the day after my son submitted them.

i blew up at him, he didnt deny it, he said he was just making sure his dad was looked after, that our son had been a huge help and that him getting a job would mean someone else looking after grandad and that was complicated. i pointed out that we have professional carers available and the agency we use can expand to full days, and he just said it wasnt the same as family.

i drove our son out to a one bed flat near his old uni, signed a six month lease on it that day in my own name, and told him to live there while he gets a job and then take over the rent when he can. he was hurt and angry once i told him what his father had been doing, but he went.

my husband is now calling me unhinged, says i was separating the family and that ive taught our son to put a job over family, he also says it was a huge decision to rent a flat without running it past him, and that im a terrible mother.

i havent backed down. AITA?

Im in my mid twenties, been in a corporate office role for about three years now. I came in thinking the way to get ahead was to grind the hardest, deliver the cleanest work, know my stuff inside out.

I now think that is maybe thirty percent of it on a good day.

The people getting promoted around me are not the ones with the cleanest output. Theyre the ones people actually want to be in meetings with. The ones who remember a managers kids names. The ones who can read a room and not steamroll through it. The ones who can deliver bad news without making someone defensive.

I have watched colleagues with weaker technical skills than me get pulled into bigger projects, more visibility, bigger raises, all because their manager wants to spend time around them more than around me.

The worst part is that I cant even be mad about it because I get it. If I had to pick someone to work with for forty hours a week between a slightly more skilled person who drains me and a slightly less skilled person who is genuinely pleasant to be around, I would pick the pleasant one every time.

I am the manager in that scenario too.

Im not saying skill doesnt matter. It clearly does, especially in the first few years. But somewhere past entry level the job stops being about how well you can do the work and starts being about whether people want to keep working with you, and nobody really tells you that out loud when youre coming up.

Anyone else clock this around the three to five year mark or is it just me

so i started a new job about 4 months ago. during the interview i leaned hard into having experience with a specific tool the role uses, knowing realistically id only used it for a handful of projects at my old place and was nowhere near expert level. the role was advertised as that tool being maybe 20% of the work.

its actually more like 50%.

ive been scrambling since day one. watching tutorials at night, asking my partner to quiz me on stuff that doesnt even mean anything to her, downloaded the software at home to practice on weekends. ive been mostly keeping up. ive built one full deliverable that actually worked. nobody has called me out so far and ive been quietly convincing myself im getting away with it.

today in a meeting with the team and two senior people i didnt expect to be there, the question went round the table and i got asked something specific about a feature of the tool ive honestly never used and never even heard mentioned before. i panicked and gave a really generic answer that i think anyone with actual expertise would recognise as someone bluffing. one of the senior people raised an eyebrow at me and then moved the meeting on.

i have spent the rest of the day going back through that thirty seconds in my head trying to figure out if it was actually as bad as it felt or if im overthinking it.

it didnt help that nobody messaged me after the meeting. usually theres a bit of post meeting chatter on slack and today the channel was just dead silence.

is there a way to recover from this without confessing? like is the play to figure out the answer overnight and casually drop it into tomorrows standup as something i remembered? do i just say nothing and hope nobody comes back to it? or do i need to find a way to admit i was bluffing in the moment without admitting im bluffing about other things too?

how cooked am i

I need practical advice on this because I genuinely cannot figure out if I am overreacting or if this has already gone far enough to need formal action.

I work on a small team and one of my colleagues has been getting increasingly personal with me over the past few months. She has been going through something difficult in her personal life and I tried to be supportive while keeping things professional, but the dynamic has been feeling off for a while now.

Last week she asked me for something personal and I politely but clearly said no. I thought that was the end of it.

Then my manager called me over the weekend to tell me she had gone to him after our conversation and tried to get him to give her my home address and other personal details. She told him I had already said no but that it was important to her so she wanted the information anyway. He refused and held firm for about twenty minutes while she kept pushing. He said the whole thing made him really uncomfortable and that he is willing to write a formal statement if I decide to go to HR.

She works in a different city so the day to day impact is limited but she does visit occasionally and the fact that she went around me to my manager after I had already said no is something I cannot shake.

I do not want to blow up the team over something that might just be her not reading the room. But I also cannot ignore something my manager himself described as alarming.

Is this worth taking to HR and what should I actually do to prepare if I go that route?

My wife and I have been married for fourteen years and have two kids together. Our son is sixteen and came out to us about a year ago. I took some time to process it but I love my kids more than anything and I made sure he knew that nothing had changed between us.

My wife did not take it well and I told myself she just needed time. She would say things here and there that I did not love but I kept brushing it off and hoping she would come around.

Last week she told me she had been looking into sending him to a residential program specifically designed to change who he is. She said it like it was a practical solution she had been quietly researching.

I told her immediately that I would never agree to that and explained why, including the documented harm these programs cause. She told me I was enabling him and that if I actually cared about him I would want to help him get better.

We have been going back and forth since and she is not backing down.

I do not think I love her anymore and I am not sure I ever could again after this. The only reason I have not already made a decision is our daughter who is twelve and I do not want to uproot her life. But staying feels like a betrayal to my son and I cannot figure out how to sit with that.

WIBTA if I filed for divorce?

ok i need outside perspective on this cuz the people in my life whove heard the story are split and i genuinely cant tell anymore if im being unreasonable or if im just the only one willing to actually say something

so ive lived in this flat for 3 years. it was my place first, my flatmate moved in about 18 months ago, and weve always had a pretty easy dynamic going. im older than him, ive been here longer, weve got a good routine that works

his partner started spending a lot of time here a few months back. and look, i get it. theyre in a new relationship, whatever. ive been accommodating about it. tried not to make it weird

but hes started doing something i cant really let go anymore. hes been making comments about how things should be done in the flat. and not like suggestions.

directives. what time things should be quiet, how shared spaces should be organized, who should be responsible for what. once he said something about me coming in late that i still cant fully believe actually came out of his mouth

ive been here 3 years. hes been a regular presence for maybe 4 months

i was patient about it for a while honestly because i didnt wanna create tension for my flatmate. hes a good guy and theyre clearly into each other. but last week it happened again and i just said it. clearly and directly. told him he doesnt live here, he doesnt pay anything toward this flat, and he doesnt get to set rules for how i live in a home ive been in way longer than either of them

am i wrong for saying it?

my neighbor and i got off on a bad start about four months ago over something minor, a noise complaint during a house gathering that i thought was handled. i apologized and we talked briefly, i thought it was done already but apparently it was not done

over the following months shes reported me to our building management twice for things that either didnt happen or were completely within normal living parameters. building management investigated both times and found nothing to act on

then she contacted my employer claiming i had behaved aggressively toward her. my employer called me in, i explained the situation, they said they had no concerns but needed to document the call anyway

then like two weeks ago i got woken up by a knock at my door at an unreasonable hour. two people from a community mediation service she'd contacted showed up saying she had filed a complaint and they were required to attempt contact

i was asleep. she had filed a complaint about noise

the mediation people could clearly see i had literally just been woken up. they were apologetic about the timing and said they'd note the circumstances

so i finally filed a formal harassment complaint with our building management citing the pattern of behavior with dates and documentation i'd been keeping

shes now saying im retaliating against her for trying to address legitimate concerns and that im the one creating a hostile environment

i dont know if i escalated something i shouldve let die or protected myself from something that was just gonna keep going

AITA?