u/mypantshavepants

I’m planning a trip to Penang and would love some recommendations that go beyond the food scene.

I fully intend to eat my body weight while I’m there, but I’m particularly interested in experiencing more of Penang’s culture, heritage and everyday local life from traditional neighbourhoods, temples, clan houses, historic communities, festivals or rituals, old trades, architecture, museums, performances, markets, or anything that gives you a better understanding of the place and its communities.

I especially love experiences where you can actually observe traditions and communities in practice, rather than attractions that exist mainly for tourists.

I’m also very into live music, especially places where I can have dinner or drinks while listening to a good band, jazz, acoustic sets, traditional music, etc. So recommendations for atmospheric evening spots would be very welcome too.

What are your Penang recommendations? Locals and lesser-known gems especially appreciated!

This is mildly embarrassing to ask as a Singaporean, but where can I actually go to properly experience and understand Hungry Ghost Festival / 7th Month celebrations?

I’d love to catch the whole thing - getai, Chinese opera, offerings, rituals, neighbourhood practices, whatever is happening. I’ve seen bits and pieces over the years, obviously, but I’ve never actually gone somewhere specifically to observe the celebrations properly.

Any neighbourhoods, temples, performances or upcoming dates worth checking out? Happy to travel anywhere in Singapore. Yes, I already know not to sit in the suspiciously empty front row.

I’ve (33, F) been told for so long that my perception of reality is wrong that I genuinely don’t know what is normal anymore.

This has all been brought back up because my ex (34, M) recently broke months of no contact by sending me a long email telling me he misses me, that I’ll always have a place in his heart, that he’ll always be waiting for me, and reflecting on our relationship. Reading it reopened a lot of wounds I thought I’d finally started healing from.

When I replied and explained that one of the biggest reasons I could never come back was because I still saw what happened as cheating, we ended up having the exact same argument we’ve had countless times before. He insists he never cheated because, in his words, “by definition” it wasn’t cheating. Apparently, 4 therapists and people around him also told him it isn’t cheating.

He acknowledges that what he did was wrong and “incredibly messed up,” but continues to argue that any “normal person” would agree it wasn’t cheating. This is what he’s referring to. While we were in a committed relationship, he entertained another woman while I was literally lying in bed next to him. He kept Tinder matches instead of removing them. He met other woman one-on-one without my knowledge (1 from Reddit after posting about going to a gig alone, 1 with a female best friend to the movies) despite knowing that was a boundary I’d clearly communicated. Then, while he was visiting me in my country, I was away for about six hours. During that time, after getting drunk, he solicited sex from a woman he was hanging out with prior.

His response is that because nothing physical ultimately happened, it doesn’t count as cheating. But this wasn’t an isolated incident. It was the pattern that broke me. Whenever I told him I wasn’t comfortable with something, he’d argue with my boundary instead of respecting it. I’d tell him we were fundamentally incompatible and that he deserved someone whose boundaries aligned with his. I wasn’t asking him to become someone else. I simply kept trying to leave because I didn’t believe we wanted the same kind of relationship.

Every single time I tried to end the relationship, he’d threaten suicide or persuade me to stay. I’d end up feeling responsible for his wellbeing, we’d reconcile, things would improve briefly, and then the cycle would repeat. Looking back, I don’t even know if I stayed because I wanted to anymore or because I felt trapped. During all of this I was also dealing with a chronic illness. I had a symptom flare while hiking in Nepal and couldn’t complete part of the trek. Instead of supporting me, he joked about me not finishing it.

At the same time I was trying to complete my Master’s degree. I had to compartmentalise everything just to finish my dissertation. When graduation came around, he joked that the FIFA World Cup was more important than attending my graduation ceremony and wanted to stay in England instead.
By the end, I was emotionally exhausted. I felt like I had spent months trying to explain why his behaviour hurt me, only to be told my standards were unreasonable, my definition of cheating was wrong, my boundaries were irrational, and that I simply didn’t understand the difference between a reason and an excuse.

Eventually I emotionally shut down. I later started seeing someone else before the relationship had formally ended, and he says that makes me the cheater. I’m not here to avoid accountability for my own actions. What I’m struggling with is how someone can repeatedly violate boundaries, pursue another woman, attempt to have sex with her while in a committed relationship, minimise my illness, repeatedly stop me from leaving, and then months later reach out saying he misses me, he’ll always wait for me, and still refuse to acknowledge why I could never feel emotionally safe with him.

Has anyone else experienced this? Not necessarily the cheating itself, but the constant feeling of having your reality debated until you genuinely start questioning your own memory and judgement. That’s the part that’s stayed with me the most.

I miss you.

I miss our inside jokes. I miss telling you something the second I found out something funny because you were always the first person I wanted to tell. I miss talking absolute nonsense with you until one of us couldn’t breathe from laughing. I miss how we somehow grew up together, even if we were thousands of miles apart. I miss all the little versions of us that existed before everything became so complicated.

I miss running through the rain with you in the middle of the night just to get food. I miss the way those moments made the world feel so much smaller, that as long as we were together, it didn’t matter if we were soaked or exhausted. Those are the memories my mind still reaches for when it misses you.

But I don’t miss the person I became.

I don’t miss the constant hypervigilance. I don’t miss wondering what I’d discover next or whether today would be another day my trust would be tested. I don’t miss second guessing my own reality because I loved you enough to keep believing you.

I don’t miss begging to be heard, only for you to hang up the phone when I needed you most. I don’t miss crying after those calls, staring at a screen that had suddenly gone silent while I was still trying to explain how much I was hurting. I don’t miss feeling like my pain was too inconvenient for you to stay on the line.

I miss the version of you that made me laugh until my stomach hurt. I don’t miss the version of you that made my chest hurt.
That’s the cruel part of grief. It doesn’t only mourn the person who existed. It mourns the future you spent years believing you were building together. It mourns the ordinary moments you’ll never have again. The stupid jokes, the late-night food runs, the random messages that only the two of you would’ve understood.

Some days I still catch myself wanting to send you something funny. Then I remember you’re no longer my safe place.

I will probably always miss pieces of you.

But I don’t miss losing pieces of myself just to love you.

There was a time I genuinely believed one of you would be standing where he now stands. I built futures in my mind that never came to be, and for a long time I mourned lives that existed only in my imagination.

For years, I wondered why loving me seemed so difficult. I questioned my worth, replayed conversations until sunrise, and carried heartbreak like it was something I had earned. Now I understand that some people are not meant to stay. They are meant to shape us.

You taught me what love isn’t. You taught me the cost of waiting for potential instead of accepting reality. You taught me that peace is worth more than uncertainty. Because of everything we lived through, I finally recognised the love that didn’t ask me to fight for my place.

I don’t carry anger anymore. Only gratitude. Thank you for the memories, for the lessons, and even for the heartbreak. They all led me here. I truly hope life has been kind to you. As I begin this next chapter, I leave yours with a full heart.

I’ll always carry a part of you with me, not as longing, not as regret, and not as a door left open, but as a chapter that helped write the person I became. You will always exist somewhere in my story, just no longer in my future. Thank you for finding me when you did, and for letting me go when it was time.

Goodbye.

There are days I wonder whether you will ever understand what you actually lost, not because I’m irreplaceable, but because I genuinely wanted you to win. That is the part that still hurts.

People assume moving on means you stopped loving someone. It doesn’t. Sometimes moving on is what happens when loving someone becomes indistinguishable from abandoning yourself.
I kept waiting for the version of you that promised to exist. The person who would finally choose honesty over excuses, accountability over defensiveness, consistency over apologies.

Every time I thought I saw him, he disappeared just as quickly.
I didn’t need perfection. I needed safety. I needed to know that the person I loved wouldn’t lie to me, wouldn’t make me question my own reality, wouldn’t keep asking for more chances while refusing to understand why those chances kept running out.

You probably think I gave up. The truth is I exhausted myself trying not to. I defended you in conversations you never heard. I looked for explanations that made your behaviour less painful. I kept hoping that if I explained my hurt clearly enough, one day something would finally click. It never did.

Do you know how devastating it is to realise that the person you’re fighting for isn’t fighting the same battle? I was trying to build trust. You were trying to preserve comfort. Those are not the same thing. The hardest part wasn’t leaving. The hardest part was accepting that loving you wasn’t enough to make you become the person I believed you could be.

I believed there was a kinder person underneath the fear, the defensiveness, the avoidance, the ego. I believed one day you’d stop running from yourself. I wanted that future for you almost as much as I wanted it for us.

That’s why this hurts, because I think you had every opportunity to choose differently and you didn’t. Every conversation became another funeral for the future I imagined.

Every time I’ve seen a group chat of male friends/partners, it’s been filled with sexualising women, encouraging cheating, or comments like “just pump and dump her.” Is this actually normal, or have I just had exceptionally bad luck?

Another thing I’ve never understood is why some men will privately tell you they disagree with misogynistic behaviour, yet stay silent when it’s happening in their own group chat. Why is preserving male approval more important than standing up for the women they supposedly care about?

P.S. I am 32.

One of the strangest consequences of my last relationship is that I no longer feel the same sense of automatic solidarity with women that I once did. Before anyone jumps to conclusions, this isn’t because I think women are worse than men. It’s because of what happened during that relationship and how my concerns were repeatedly dismissed.

My ex cheated, blurred boundaries with other women, and frequently triangulated me with them. There always seemed to be another woman in the background somewhere. What bothered me wasn’t just his behaviour. It was the behaviour of some of the women around him.

Women giving out their number and texting a man they knew was engaged. Married women maintaining inappropriate levels of involvement. Women monitoring my social media, discussing me, or inserting themselves into situations that had nothing to do with them. Whenever I raised concerns about any of this, the discussion would somehow become about me.

I was told I wasn’t being supportive enough of women. I was told I wasn’t feminist enough. I was made to feel as though criticising a woman’s behaviour was somehow worse than the behaviour itself. That experience left me with a question that I still struggle with today. When did feminism become synonymous with refusing to hold women accountable?

I believe women face discrimination. I believe women deserve equal rights and opportunities. I believe women should support one another. But I don’t believe being a woman automatically makes someone virtuous. Women can be insecure, manipulative, violate boundaries, and participate in hurting other women.

Yet whenever these realities are acknowledged, there seems to be a rush to explain, justify, contextualise, or minimise them. What I find myself grieving isn’t female solidarity itself. It’s the idea of female solidarity. I used to think women naturally looked out for one another. Instead, I found myself encountering competition, gossip, boundary violations, and behaviour that was excused simply because it came from another woman.

I’m trying to figure out whether this is just a reaction to a particularly bad experience or whether others have struggled with this too. Has anyone else found that a toxic relationship changed the way they relate to their own gender? How did you learn to separate individual behaviour from an entire group of people?