u/petalss_dreamerr

my wife and i are both 42 and weve been in marriage counselling for about three months now trying to save what we have. for context, when i finished my phd at 26 i was on track to do research in my field at quite a serious level and i gave it up to take a steady admin job so my wife could go all in on her career which has done very well. ive worked a job ive hated for fifteen years so her hours could be what they needed to be.

in last weeks session our counsellor asked me if i could go back to 26 and do my life over again would i make the same choice, i sat with it for a minute and said honestly no. i love my wife and id never undo our marriage but if i could go back to that specific decision i would have kept my career and we wouldve figured the rest out a different way. i said ive gone from someone who loved his work to someone who survives the week.

my wife was visibly devastated and stayed quiet through the rest of the session and barely spoke to me on the drive home. i didnt sleep that night because id said something that needed saying but also felt like id put a sledgehammer through her. the next morning we had a long talk and she said she felt blindsided and would need a few days.

two nights ago my younger brother rang me out of nowhere asking if it was true id told my wife i regretted my entire adult life, it took an hour on the phone to work out my wife had rung him that afternoon and told him id said in counselling that i wished id never met her and that the last fifteen years had been a mistake. my brother is the one who tried to talk me out of giving up the research job in the first place and he and my wife have been strained ever since.

i love my wife but you do not weaponise counselling and you do not pick the one person in my life who would feel most vindicated to hear that and ring him with a twisted version of what i said. yes i told the counsellor id make a different career choice if i could go back, no i did not say i regretted meeting her or building a life with her, those are very different things.

the marriage is properly over now and her mum is over for moral support and i can hear them crying through the wall. AITA for saying what i said in the one room youre meant to be able to say honest things in?

so i helped a friend pay for a 3 month coding bootcamp last year. were going to call her my best friend of 12 years. the program was about 8 grand and i also picked up half her rent for the three months which was another 2400. i was earning well, she had just been laid off and was spiralling about money, and we both got excited about her pivoting into tech.

i sent her the money in two transfers in march. she signed up. we talked about her classes for the first couple weeks. she sent me screenshots of assignments. i was proud of her.

i found out three weeks ago that she dropped out of the program in week three.

she didnt drop out and tell me. she dropped out and kept telling me how it was going for the next two and a half months. she sent me a screenshot of a project that turned out to be a tutorial she had copied. when i asked about her final project in june she said it was incredible but she couldnt share it because of an nda.

what she was actually doing was the rest of march, april, may and most of june in a slow loop of cheap trips around southeast asia. she posted nothing on the public socials i can see, but i found out through a mutual that she was tagged in someones story in vietnam. i pulled the thread from there.

i confronted her on the phone two weeks ago. she cried and admitted everything. said she got overwhelmed in week two, decided she was never going to be a coder, couldnt face telling me id wasted my money, and quote it kind of spiralled. she said the trips were cheap and she had the time so she just kept going.

i asked if she still had any of the money. she said no.

ive talked it through with my partner and weve agreed im going to send her a written demand for the 10,400 with 30 days to respond before i file in small claims. shes never going to pay it back in one go but i want a judgment on the record. my mom thinks im being cruel, that were 12 years in and she clearly fell apart mentally, and that i should let her come back to me on her own time.

WIBTA if i file?

This has been going on for about three years now and I need to figure out if drawing a line would make me the problem.

My brother and I have always been close and when he hit a rough patch financially a few years back I helped him out without thinking twice. The first time was a few hundred, then a bit more, then a bit more on top of that. Every time he said he would pay me back when he got back on his feet.

He is back on his feet now. Has been for well over a year. Good job, stable place to live, takes holidays, goes out regularly. The money has not come back and every time I have gently brought it up he says things are still a little tight or that he is waiting for the right moment.

Last week he called asking to borrow more for something that was not remotely urgent. I said yes in the moment because I just did not know how to say no to him but I felt awful about it afterward.

I am thinking about calling him back and being straight with him. Telling him I cannot keep lending money when what I have already given him has not come back, and that I need him to make some kind of plan for paying me back before I can help again.

I love my brother and I do not want this to mess things up between us but I also cannot keep pretending everything is fine when it is not.

WIBTA if I had that conversation