[Phily]

Hi!

Thanks for reading my post. I'm a 27yo guy who has been in a relationship with a MW for the past 10 months. She is 30yo and is traditional (off the boat) Chinese and lives with her husband and mother. We've been best friends for two years before anything had happened between us. However, I'm jealous of the amount of time her and her husband spend together. How can I "fight" these feelings of insignificance that I have? She always tells me how important I am to her but she feels indebted to her very sick grandparents for raising her (that's why she won't leave her husband, because she doesn't want to disappoint them before they pass away).

I'm also the fifth man she has been intimate with and the only one she says who has ever given her "pleasure". She also told me that she has been intimate with me more times than all of the men she's been with including her husband combined... We spend about 2 hours together each day during the week and are intimate most of those days... I guess based on everything she has told me and her background, Do I have any reason to feel so damn jealous???

Thanks so much and Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukah!!!

[johan]

You are cheating yourself by allowing anything at all to happen with her. Of course you are going to feel jealous or angry or about 1000 other things. But that's the evidence that you are just selling yourself short by investing in someone who has little to offer you.

It sounds corny every time I write it, but it's the path to your solution: if your friend came to you and confessed that he was in a situation identical to yours, what would you tell him?

If it were my friend, I'd tell him that it's ridiculous to be involved with her. That it's just going to be a source of pain for him (not to mention her and her family). That he could find someone who could actually be there for him without a heavy load of guilt and obligations to others. The best thing you could do is to look at this as a sign that you REALLY need to have another look at your own priorities.

[travellingman]

how much does her husband know about you?

[Phily]

Hi Travellingman!

He knows we work together and he also knows that we are very close friends. I believe that it was a marriage of convenience for him and he just received his US citizenship about a month ago... Of course I could be wrong.