Friiiiick I miss freelancer so much. Best space sim to date.

He’s just a regular human man.

WHAT?! My hero!

Bottom row, 2nd from the left. Simple, clean, distinct.

I’m so secure that my wife’s boyfriend told me he was taking her away to the cabin for the weekend and I decided I’d have the guys over for a poker night. They’re just good friends.

Article behind a login wall

they can’t be that bad.

Sure they can.

Thanks so much!

Article behind login wall

The nice thing about opening up to friends about it is that they can help you baseline.

For instance: when things were really peaking my anxiety a few months ago, I was in distress because I felt like I wasn’t important to my SO anymore. I communicated my fear and the situation to a friend and he was able to give me a different perspective: that the way I was thinking about relationships was zero-sum, but that my SO’s heart may have enough room for both all the love I needed AND her new friends. I just need to communicate with my SO if I’m actually feeling neglected or not.

It was good for me to hear from another person that the way I perceived the world isn’t necessarily the way everyone does.

About 10 years of marriage and your situation reads just like one of mine that started a few months back. I’ve even been through the same frantic spiral you described with the condoms.

I haven’t figured it out fully yet, but here are the things I’ve found have helped:

1. Checked out the book “Insecure in Love” by Leslie Becker-Phelps. My feelings of jealousy almost definitely stem from my insecure attachment and I needed to recognize when that fear was being activated so I could practice responding better.

2. Therapy with EMDR - turns out my family of origin was kinda effed up and that was bleeding over into my beliefs about relationships. It can be fixed with therapy (but you may need to shop around for a therapist that fits you — it takes time and that’d okay because you learn something useful from every therapist you try). This gave me the tools to fight when those anxiety attacks came around.

3. Getting my own friend group - I was like you and really didn’t NEED or WANT other friends besides my SO. That said, I took the past 6 months or so to try and branch out and I can’t tell you how great it is to have someone to call when those negative feelings hit who can talk you off the ledge (or, to my surprise, let me know that they have also had these feelings, but that it doesn’t mean anything). Being there to support someone else as they go through life is also incredibly rewarding.

4. Prayer. I’m a person of faith, and I believe prayer has helped calm me down and surrender as well as look at the situation through fresh eyes.

5. Journaling - getting into the habit of writing down your thoughts in a secure location was huge for me getting to work out those “intuitions” that were causing me some anxiety. I always thought I was an intuitive person, so when I had an intuition that led me wrong, I needed to process it.

I hope some of this helps because I know the anxiety sucks. I don’t think it will get better on its own, so if you want to stay in this relationship (and for the sake of your future relationships), decide to do the work and make moves to do it. It’s not your fault, but sometimes life shits on us and we have to go clean up the shit so it doesn’t stink so much.

So glad you said something

I thought they were toasting a freestanding bottle in honor of a fallen lad or something. Never suspected there had an SAS sniper there with them

moved from one part of the cd to another

Damn. That wisdom hits me a little too hard. Thanks for sharing!

Love LoD and I remember that exact room. I’m actually doing a replay of LoD now: when I get to that room I’ll take an extra pause to soak it in.

This thread is filled with comments on DE, but it was your comment that convinced me to finally play the game.

Thanks for the story!

DayZ was such an amazing experience at the time. Battle arena games hadn’t taken off yet and you really had to pay attention to your surroundings.

Great story! War is hell

Wow, such a cool revelation. I think the devs of CK2 would be proud that you engaged with their game like this.

Great story!

You could print out your PGP public key. Niche AF, but if I saw this person at a party I’d high five them.

No, I didn’t have the stick for a long time before death.

You would not. The stick in and of itself is not harmful. (I love where that question was going, though. Like a voodoo stick or something!)