When I say B is my best friend, I truly mean best friend. We're in each other's wills. So the situation I've become stuck in with him is painful beyond belief, and I really need advice on how to deal with it cause I just don't know what to do anymore.
I've know B for almost 10 years now and we're more open and honestly with each other than anyone else. While I love having someone I can tell literally anything to, it does also lead to some pretty intensely emotional exchanges. I'm an extremely empathetic person, so I feel hard, and over the years (fairly soon after he moved away, actually) the emotional truths he shares are way more negative than positive and there never seems to be anything I can do to help him. I'm even beginning to worry I'm the cause. This mounting tension kinda has three basic roots; health, intimacy, and finances. This is gonna be a long ass post but I need real advice and that's gonna require the whole story...
HEALTH B was in and out of children's hospitals a lot as a kid due to complication from asthma. But he also played a lot of hockey and was really into pro wrestling. Playing the former and imitating the later, he suffered two bad concussions and never got any treatment for either. He also went back to playing sports much early than he should have. This all culminated in a compressed spine, two heart attacks, and a stroke by the time he was 24. When we first met, he was addicted to pain killers. I helped him ease off them a few months later, and he stopped taking medication of any sort for fear of relapsing. He was fine for a long time, but over the last for years things have started declining fast. He has near constant migraines, his left arm has started to atrophy, he frequently looses feeling in his limbs, he's started walking with a cane, he only get about two hours of sleep a night, and on top of all that has started suffering from memory loss. The only solutions seem to be surgery (which he doesn't want), and physical therapy (which doesn't seem to be working). I'm the only one he really talks to about these things, cause he doesn't want to scare anyone else. But he scares me, and it's even becoming frustrating because all my suggestions or encouragements to pursue helped are dismissed. He always just seems to know that whatever it is, it won't work.
INTIMACY As if all the health complications weren't enough, his family life was a wildly mentally abusive one. His father didn't want him, and his mother took off when he was 6. He was raised by a variety of aunts and uncles until his mother showed back up when he was 17 and claimed to have been there the whole time. She sticks by this belief to this day and will often bring it up to try and guilt trip him. At his wedding, she asked him why he didn't have a middle name, and then made him drive her to the airport at 5am the next morning. I have seen her, more than once, threaten suicide to get what she wants from him (usually money or validation for all the "sacrifices she made to raise him"). Not a great foundation, but he managed to persevere through all that and came out the other side a wonderfully kind and caring guy. He has no problems being emotionally or physical intimate, but again, over the last couple years, that's changed. His wife of five years, who is lovely, had to have an emergency operation when a cyst the size of a football was found in her pelvis area. She lost an ovary, and has suffered from hormonal imbalance ever since. Having a child (something they both really want), became a slim possibility and to make matters worse, her menstrual cycle flipped so now she's on her period every day of the month except for one week. This has ground their sex life to a halt. They don't even really cuddle or hold hands or even spend time with each other much anymore from the sounds of things. I've suggested couples counseling, and he's at least open to the idea, but the problem is he's really started relying on me for the kind of intimacy he's not getting from her. I want to be EXTREMELY clear here. We have never had sex. I'm a lesbian with a practically non-existent sex drive, so that's never going to happen. But like I've said, we're best friends and a love the guy. So I've hugged him, kissed him on the cheek, cuddled with him on the couch when he's had a bad day, hung out in Ned with him watching shitty movies. We're both adults who know where we stand sexually and communicate openly, so this affection has never caused any 'mixed signals'. I've seen him be just as intimate with his straight male friends. He's just a really intimate guy. But now that he isn't getting any kind of affection at all from his wife, he's relying solely on me. This has cranked his needs from me up to borderline uncomfortable levels, and since I only see him about twice a year, the demand has become overwhelming. As with all his health problems, I'm the only one he comes to for this, or even talks to.
FINANCIAL Of course, all those other issues really come back to money. Proper medical and psychiatric help for all his physical and mental problems? He can't afford them. His mother? Legally stole $450,000 from him (and blew it all on two BMWs and a bad investment on powdered baby formula). The family he and his wife wanted to start? Every alternative option requires roughly $50,000 that they don't have. But he's struggling through other financial problems even on top of all of those. He's been running his own businesses since his early 20s. He's owned and operated three different comics and games shops, and is in the process of opening a third one where he lives now. This new store is shaping up to be at least triple the size of anything he's done before, and as such, a lot of money is moving around. One of his uncles, we'll call him C, has been his business partner for several years. C is working with him on this store too, and has gotten investors from overseas involved as well. They were pushing hard to open by October of last year, but with everything happening in America, the overseas investors started to get nervous. They were still interested in the store, but the money wasn't coming. October came and went and it got to the point where they were going to lose the building they wanted to lease. The landlady wanted a deposit of 100,000 or she would relist it. Neither B nor C had the money, and the investors weren't coming through, but they asked B and C to find another source and they would pay them back with interest. A friend of B's put him in touch with some private lenders, and after getting full approval from both C and the investors (as well as a repeated guarantee that they would pay him back in time), B took out a 100k loan. I bet you can see where this is all going. The money was supposed to be paid back by February, and in June, he messaged me to tell me all of this "just in case something happened". The private lenders turned out to be a Vietnamese gang, and he'd been getting beaten up by them once a week for the last three months. C had completely ghosted him, and since he was the middle man between B and the investors, he hadn't heard anything from them either. Ashamed and embarrassed that he even got into this position, B kept it from everyone else. He didn't even tell his wife. But he told me. He also told me he was 15k short of a 25k "good will payment" to get the lenders off his back long enough to remortgage his house to pay the remainder. I've lent B money before, and he's paid me back on time every single time. In January last year, I lent him 30k to just have in his account to help with an adoption application. That all fell through, but he kept the money in the account and wouldn't touch it to deal with these lenders. I couldn't convince him to, and worried one day someone was going to hit him too hard and he'd wind up in a coma, I wired him the remaining 15k. This completely emptied my account and dipped into a line of credit I hadn't touched since college. He was mad, then grateful, and made the payment, buying himself the time he needed to get the rest of the money from the bank. He promised me I would have the full 45k back by September 10th. This was good news, because I had been really struggling with stress at work and had planned to take the last two weeks of September off (literally my first vacation in 8 years). So B gets everything sorted at the bank, but when he reaches back out to the gang to make the final payment and get this all over with, he doesn't hear back. There's nothing for weeks. He was supposed to come down and see me over my two weeks off with the money, but he's scared to leave town until this last payment is made. Then he finds out they're chasing down some con out of town, and won't be back for a few weeks. I'm pretty anxious at managing everything with negative money and two weeks of no pay, but I'd considered that worse case scenario before even sending him the money, and I knew I'd have enough to make rent and scrape by until my first paycheck. B waits, and in that time, does some playtesting for a prominent board game company located in France. They pay him in store credit (roughly $300 worth), so he goes to their online store to spend it. He ends up hitting a total just over $300, so he adds his card to pay for the remainder. The checkout screws up, and the full amount is charged to his card. He contacts customer service, but this is a company with famously bad customer service. There's a lot of back and forth, and lot of charges and refunds as they fail to process the credit properly, and suddenly B is locked out of his bank account because from the outside, it looks like he's laundering money in France. He goes to his bank to try and clear things up, but the board game company has to contact the bank themselves to confirm all the transactions are legit. They are incredibly slow to respond, the bank gets suspicious, and now his account is fully locked down and being audited at the federal level. He has no access to his money, no way of getting me my money, and wouldn't you know it, that's when the lenders start calling. He can't get them the money, so the last two weeks he's back to being beat up. Injuries are getting more serious, and there is nothing I can do to help him because every cent I own is already in his account.
All of this is just...killing me. Even just typing this all out, I don't believe it's real. But it is. I love B, and I do everything I can to help him, but more often than not I just feel like I'm drowning with him. He recently relapsed into pain meds to the point where he didn't even know what day it was, and only stopped because he ran out and can't afford more. I want to me mad at him, and I feel terrible even thinking that. But still...he's said he's going to come down and visit when this is all over...he wants to take me out of town for a long weekend...but I'm starting to feel like I don't want him to come. I feel like I don't want to see him. But I get so many text from him out of the blue saying he wants to "just get in a car and leave", or "throw myself off a bridge"...I'm terrified if I take a single step back he will actually kill himself. Per his request, I haven't told any of our mutual acquaintances (which is pretty much everyone I know) how bad everything has gotten...but I can't cope anymore. I can't think straight, I can't even begin to deal with any of this. I'm at my breaking point, and I need an outsider to give me any advice at all.
Tl;dr - My best friend relies on my for absolutely everything, helping him has put me in a very bad financial situation, and I'm worried if I put even a shred of distance between us he's going to commit suicide.
When I say B is my best friend, I truly mean best friend. We're in each other's wills. So the situation I've become stuck in with him is painful beyond belief, and I really need advice on how to deal with it cause I just don't know what to do anymore.I've know B for almost 10 years now and we're more open and honestly with each other than anyone else. While I love having someone I can tell literally anything to, it does also lead to some pretty intensely emotional exchanges. I'm an extremely empathetic person, so I feel hard, and over the years (fairly soon after he moved away, actually) the emotional truths he shares are way more negative than positive and there never seems to be anything I can do to help him. I'm even beginning to worry I'm the cause. This mounting tension kinda has three basic roots; health, intimacy, and finances. This is gonna be a long ass post but I need real advice and that's gonna require the whole story...HEALTH B was in and out of children's hospitals a lot as a kid due to complication from asthma. But he also played a lot of hockey and was really into pro wrestling. Playing the former and imitating the later, he suffered two bad concussions and never got any treatment for either. He also went back to playing sports much early than he should have. This all culminated in a compressed spine, two heart attacks, and a stroke by the time he was 24. When we first met, he was addicted to pain killers. I helped him ease off them a few months later, and he stopped taking medication of any sort for fear of relapsing. He was fine for a long time, but over the last for years things have started declining fast. He has near constant migraines, his left arm has started to atrophy, he frequently looses feeling in his limbs, he's started walking with a cane, he only get about two hours of sleep a night, and on top of all that has started suffering from memory loss. The only solutions seem to be surgery (which he doesn't want), and physical therapy (which doesn't seem to be working). I'm the only one he really talks to about these things, cause he doesn't want to scare anyone else. But he scares me, and it's even becoming frustrating because all my suggestions or encouragements to pursue helped are dismissed. He always just seems to know that whatever it is, it won't work.INTIMACY As if all the health complications weren't enough, his family life was a wildly mentally abusive one. His father didn't want him, and his mother took off when he was 6. He was raised by a variety of aunts and uncles until his mother showed back up when he was 17 and claimed to have been there the whole time. She sticks by this belief to this day and will often bring it up to try and guilt trip him. At his wedding, she asked him why he didn't have a middle name, and then made him drive her to the airport at 5am the next morning. I have seen her, more than once, threaten suicide to get what she wants from him (usually money or validation for all the "sacrifices she made to raise him"). Not a great foundation, but he managed to persevere through all that and came out the other side a wonderfully kind and caring guy. He has no problems being emotionally or physical intimate, but again, over the last couple years, that's changed. His wife of five years, who is lovely, had to have an emergency operation when a cyst the size of a football was found in her pelvis area. She lost an ovary, and has suffered from hormonal imbalance ever since. Having a child (something they both really want), became a slim possibility and to make matters worse, her menstrual cycle flipped so now she's on her period every day of the month except for one week. This has ground their sex life to a halt. They don't even really cuddle or hold hands or even spend time with each other much anymore from the sounds of things. I've suggested couples counseling, and he's at least open to the idea, but the problem is he's really started relying on me for the kind of intimacy he's not getting from her. I want to be EXTREMELY clear here. We have never had sex. I'm a lesbian with a practically non-existent sex drive, so that's never going to happen. But like I've said, we're best friends and a love the guy. So I've hugged him, kissed him on the cheek, cuddled with him on the couch when he's had a bad day, hung out in Ned with him watching shitty movies. We're both adults who know where we stand sexually and communicate openly, so this affection has never caused any 'mixed signals'. I've seen him be just as intimate with his straight male friends. He's just a really intimate guy. But now that he isn't getting any kind of affection at all from his wife, he's relying solely on me. This has cranked his needs from me up to borderline uncomfortable levels, and since I only see him about twice a year, the demand has become overwhelming. As with all his health problems, I'm the only one he comes to for this, or even talks to.FINANCIAL Of course, all those other issues really come back to money. Proper medical and psychiatric help for all his physical and mental problems? He can't afford them. His mother? Legally stole $450,000 from him (and blew it all on two BMWs and a bad investment on powdered baby formula). The family he and his wife wanted to start? Every alternative option requires roughly $50,000 that they don't have. But he's struggling through other financial problems even on top of all of those. He's been running his own businesses since his early 20s. He's owned and operated three different comics and games shops, and is in the process of opening a third one where he lives now. This new store is shaping up to be at least triple the size of anything he's done before, and as such, a lot of money is moving around. One of his uncles, we'll call him C, has been his business partner for several years. C is working with him on this store too, and has gotten investors from overseas involved as well. They were pushing hard to open by October of last year, but with everything happening in America, the overseas investors started to get nervous. They were still interested in the store, but the money wasn't coming. October came and went and it got to the point where they were going to lose the building they wanted to lease. The landlady wanted a deposit of 100,000 or she would relist it. Neither B nor C had the money, and the investors weren't coming through, but they asked B and C to find another source and they would pay them back with interest. A friend of B's put him in touch with some private lenders, and after getting full approval from both C and the investors (as well as a repeated guarantee that they would pay him back in time), B took out a 100k loan. I bet you can see where this is all going. The money was supposed to be paid back by February, and in June, he messaged me to tell me all of this "just in case something happened". The private lenders turned out to be a Vietnamese gang, and he'd been getting beaten up by them once a week for the last three months. C had completely ghosted him, and since he was the middle man between B and the investors, he hadn't heard anything from them either. Ashamed and embarrassed that he even got into this position, B kept it from everyone else. He didn't even tell his wife. But he told me. He also told me he was 15k short of a 25k "good will payment" to get the lenders off his back long enough to remortgage his house to pay the remainder. I've lent B money before, and he's paid me back on time every single time. In January last year, I lent him 30k to just have in his account to help with an adoption application. That all fell through, but he kept the money in the account and wouldn't touch it to deal with these lenders. I couldn't convince him to, and worried one day someone was going to hit him too hard and he'd wind up in a coma, I wired him the remaining 15k. This completely emptied my account and dipped into a line of credit I hadn't touched since college. He was mad, then grateful, and made the payment, buying himself the time he needed to get the rest of the money from the bank. He promised me I would have the full 45k back by September 10th. This was good news, because I had been really struggling with stress at work and had planned to take the last two weeks of September off (literally my first vacation in 8 years). So B gets everything sorted at the bank, but when he reaches back out to the gang to make the final payment and get this all over with, he doesn't hear back. There's nothing for weeks. He was supposed to come down and see me over my two weeks off with the money, but he's scared to leave town until this last payment is made. Then he finds out they're chasing down some con out of town, and won't be back for a few weeks. I'm pretty anxious at managing everything with negative money and two weeks of no pay, but I'd considered that worse case scenario before even sending him the money, and I knew I'd have enough to make rent and scrape by until my first paycheck. B waits, and in that time, does some playtesting for a prominent board game company located in France. They pay him in store credit (roughly $300 worth), so he goes to their online store to spend it. He ends up hitting a total just over $300, so he adds his card to pay for the remainder. The checkout screws up, and the full amount is charged to his card. He contacts customer service, but this is a company with famously bad customer service. There's a lot of back and forth, and lot of charges and refunds as they fail to process the credit properly, and suddenly B is locked out of his bank account because from the outside, it looks like he's laundering money in France. He goes to his bank to try and clear things up, but the board game company has to contact the bank themselves to confirm all the transactions are legit. They are incredibly slow to respond, the bank gets suspicious, and now his account is fully locked down and being audited at the federal level. He has no access to his money, no way of getting me my money, and wouldn't you know it, that's when the lenders start calling. He can't get them the money, so the last two weeks he's back to being beat up. Injuries are getting more serious, and there is nothing I can do to help him because every cent I own is already in his account.All of this is just...killing me. Even just typing this all out, I don't believe it's real. But it is. I love B, and I do everything I can to help him, but more often than not I just feel like I'm drowning with him. He recently relapsed into pain meds to the point where he didn't even know what day it was, and only stopped because he ran out and can't afford more. I want to me mad at him, and I feel terrible even thinking that. But still...he's said he's going to come down and visit when this is all over...he wants to take me out of town for a long weekend...but I'm starting to feel like I don't want him to come. I feel like I don't want to see him. But I get so many text from him out of the blue saying he wants to "just get in a car and leave", or "throw myself off a bridge"...I'm terrified if I take a single step back he will actually kill himself. Per his request, I haven't told any of our mutual acquaintances (which is pretty much everyone I know) how bad everything has gotten...but I can't cope anymore. I can't think straight, I can't even begin to deal with any of this. I'm at my breaking point, and I need an outsider to give me any advice at all.Tl;dr - My best friend relies on my for absolutely everything, helping him has put me in a very bad financial situation, and I'm worried if I put even a shred of distance between us he's going to commit suicide. https://ift.tt/eA8V8J https://ift.tt/2qd3xhV
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