The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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The urge to suggest that this is solely a female type behavior is strong, but misguided. Probably this kind of swooning (over a caddish rake in this case) is more common in females but again I'm not even sure of that. Plenty of dudes leave committed wives after years because they met a hottie who pushes the right buttons. Trade the wife in for a younger model, as my wise aunt used to say. Women are perhaps pulled in the same foolish direction for different reasons--i.e. not mostly sexual. Women often have more lovey emotional reasons. This doesn't make it stupid. True, it's wrong and probably to some degree self-destructive. But I've seen a woman in a terrible bizarre relationship that at the time seemed so volatile that her life was arguably on the edge of ruin--only to, years later, now married to a different (stable) guy, state without irony that the bizarre relationship in question (now long over) was one of her fondest, most cherished memories of that particular time period. And yes this is a strikingly beautiful woman.
I personally think that the "gay best friend" role (as you put it) is an important role for every man to experience at least once, and it speaks well of you that any woman is willing to trust you with her inner emotional life. Although if you have designs on her yes, it will be a singularly awful experience for you. Once is probably quite enough though.
My view is that you should keep your eyes open, learn as much as possible about yourself and her during this period, and file the information away as one of life's oddities. Women and men can both turn emotionally on a dime, especially (though not only) when young. Not everyone, of course. Some of us are made of more solid stuff.
Luckily do not have designs on this particular woman, so in this case it is merely frustration that my friend is causing herself so much inner turmoil. Yet, as you state, she may not see it that way in a few years.
It has been an epiphany that I’ve played this role far too often in other relationships and in other contexts (not romantic).
Well that just makes you a friend. Possibly from your perspective you're more of a sounding board, but I've learned that's how many women communicate. Wait till you've been married 20 years.
Seriously though, a good listener is gold, worth many treasure troves. So good for you, though it must seem tedious.
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