Pale with Love

Audrey Carroll

 
 
 
r/RelationshipMemes · Your first 4 emojis = your relationship rn
 
SillieMillie replied to Final_Grl_25
 

 
Uhh… maybe he’s taking me out to a seafood restaurant? lol
 


 
r/RelationshipMemes · Hope This One’s a Keeper
[Alt. text: Jerry from Tom and Jerry looks angry as he holds out his hand with an emoji heart over it. Meme text: me admitting I caught feelings]
 


 
r/AmItheAsshole · AITA for having questions for my fiancé?
 
My (31F) fiancé (42M) wanted to have some kind of a guy’s night or something? Which, fair enough. So he planned to go out with these friends Monday night. (They met in a frat. He jokes they they’re in a cult. Think Illuminati, but not exactly that.)
 
I decided to get some laundry done while he was out. I checked his pockets to make sure nothing important was in there. As I was shaking out his pants, something fell out. (I had to go digging under the washing machine to find it. It was a whole thing.)
 
TL;DR: I found a small gold ring. It wasn’t mine, and it definitely wasn’t my fiancé’s. I asked him about it the next morning, and he blew up at me. He kept asking me why I was snooping on him and going through his things. I didn’t even really know what to say. I wasn’t looking for anything. I was just trying to do the laundry. Now he’s forbidden me (his exact words) from going through any of his stuff again, including this weird old trunk in his room. I honestly just figured it belonged to his dead wife (he doesn’t really talk about her), but now idk. AITA?
 
legendairylad17
sounds like a dick wtf
who reacts to a question like that?
sounds like he has something to hide
ETA: NTA
 
HannahGoesGreen
Yeah, no. Sus af. What was that about a dead wife?
Insert girl you in danger gif here.
NTA, but get outta there ASAP!
 
BackInMyDay
YTA
tbh you kinda sound like kinda a nag
 
GreatPRJ
NTA! Anger issues. Leave him.
 
UnderwaterMagnetFish
Yikes. NTA. Why are you with him again?
 
      I decided to get some laundry done while he was out. I checked his pockets to make sure       nothing important was in there.
 
Yabadabadoo, Wilma. Do you cut the crusts off his sandwich, too? What’s this guy’s deal?
 
kreepywithacapitalk
def cheating he’s mad you caught him
classic gaslighting/DARVO/reverse uno card situation
 


 
r/WhatIsThisThing · Rusted Bit of Metal?
 
Found this under my bed. I don’t think it’s heavy enough to be gold. And it’s got some red on it. Maybe oxidized something idk. Any ideas on what it is?
 
[Alt. text: Long piece of rusted metal with two short pieces of rusted metal on end.]
 


 
r/relationship_advice · Husband Sensitive About Dead Wife
 
Okay, so I know that the title makes me sound like a bitch, but hear me out. (Or not. It’s the internet.)
 
My (33F) husband (44M) and I got married two months ago. We’d been living together at a place I’d been renting, but now we’ve moved into this house that’s been in his family for a whiel. It’s where he’d been living before we moved in together.
 
Anyway, we were on our honeymoon for a bit and then work got busy. I only just got to unpacking my things a couple of days ago. I opened up the walk-in closet next to our bedroom. (It’s, like, not attached. The door goes to the hallway, if that makes sense? Maybe it used to be a small bedroom or a nursery or something back in the day.) I noticed there was some old stuff in there, which I expected. As I started to clear the old clothes out (like, moth-eaten stuff, sunstained, not even worth donating), I uncovered this door in the back. It looked like it’d been painted shut (white, mostly, and a little red rust where the keyhole should be). Then I tripped over these boxes. I was going to move them. I swear they were already open. That’s when I saw that they were photos and stuff. He doesn’t have anything like that around the house. It’s all old oil paintings and stuff that used to belong to great-uncles.
 
He doesn’t like it when I bring up his dead wife. Gets super edgy and pouty, and I just figured it was because it really messed him up.
 
Between the two boxes, I found wedding portraits of him with at least four different women. He’s never mentioned more than one, but maybe I just assumed? There were also records—marriage licenses, death certificates, wills. It dates back at least 15 years. I packed everything back up before he got home and am just hoping he doesn’t notice.
 
How do I bring this up to him? I know I probably shouldn’t have gone through his stuff, and he’s gotten mad at me for it before, but also I’m pretty sure he lied to me? Like, a lot?
 
ETA: No, he’s never been violent with me before. Like, shouting and stuff, but no hitting or anything like that, to answer people’s questions.
 
Blink2Gone
Therapy. So much therapy.
 
AlphaAndOrtega
Has he been violent with you? Sounds like he might be controlling and you don’t see it.
 
CinnaMinna6781
I would take him to a public place. If you can, get pictures of the evidence. Like, don’t take his stuff, but get some of it on your phone just in case he tries to gaslight you. He’ll probably be less likely to flip out in public, and then you can discuss your feelings like adults.
Good luck!
 
darrr72yrt
You invaded his privacy and want to know how to break it to him???
 
jkjkjk
i would say call the cops but lol
 
2smrt4yrgd
Leave. Don’t warn him. Don’t even pack. Just go in the middle of the night. There’s bad luck and then there’s serial kilelrs, dude. You’re def next.
 


 
r/AmItheAsshole · AITA for asking my husband about wedding pictures?
 
I (33F) just got in a huge fight with my husband (45M) and I feel like I can’t talk about this with anyone in my life without making people think about him differently. I don’t want to wreck his life.
 
This is a follow-up to my post AITA for having questions for my fiancé? Kinda an update, but also more than that, too?
 
So I married this guy last year. We’d been going out for two years, engaged for two years, married less than a year now. He didn’t tell me much about his past relationships. I didn’t think much of it. (Some people just don’t like to share that stuff? In retrospect, big red flag, I guess. Well done me.)
 
I knew he had a dead wife who he didn’t like to talk about. I found a box in his old closet. Turns out there were many wives? I’m not even sure how many, tbh. I did some investigation with my best friend.
 
None of these women’s families knew about all the other wives. He’s moved states a lot, too. Seems like he’ll sometimes move in with them and then move back to this house after they die. And the causes of death that I could find were all over the place—heart attack, aneurism, “unspecified injury of the neck.” There wasn’t, like, some kind of serial killer pattern or anything. Still, weird, right?
 
So I gathered everything up and confronted my husband about it when he came home from work. He flipped tf out. Asked me how I could dare go through his things, not trust him, that kind of thing. He even broke a chair he was so angry. Husband asked me if I’d looked at the names on the marriage certificates. Only one of them had my husband’s name on it. The rest were different names. He said they were all his friends’ wives. I haven’t really spent much time with his friends’ wives aside from our wedding, so I couldn’t say for sure. But I thought it was strange that he had a picture with each of them in the box, too. And why does he have copies of their marriage licenses?? He said the picture thing is a tradition with his friend group?
 
Idk. Our wedding was really busy. He might be telling the truth. He accused me of being jealous and left for the night. Now I feel bad.
 
AITA for not trusting him on this?
 
BackInMyDay
YTA. If he did the same to you, you’d be the first one to talk about how he’s the asshole, right???
 
LookAtTheBrainsOnNate
ESH. You shouldn’t have ambushed him. He shouldn’t have flipped out.
 
XYZ1774
NTA. Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable reason for all this… but just in case, do you still feel safe with him?
 
LibertyLibertyLiberty
NTA. Run.
 
2smrt4yrgd
You caught something fishy going on. NTA, but you would be TA if you stayed with him. You questioned him, he showed who he really is.
 
AstroGigi
Vibes are off. Divorce. NTA.
 
      I don’t want to wreck his life.
 
His feelings don’t matter more than your safety.
 
FunnyBunny42
maybe yall need couples counseling
 
Soft YTA
 
MomHugs4Free
NTA. It makes sense that you’d ask. He may very well be telling the truth.
 
Could you talk to some of the other wives? Look for more evidence in the secret closet or something?
 
Sometimes our gut knows things before we do. Why did you investigate him in the first place? At the very least, you may need some time apart to sort your feelings out. Agreed with others who suggested counseling.
 
ETA: Talk to the friends wives, I mean, obv, not the dead ones. You guys like to just be stupid sometimes, huh?
 


 
r/tifu · Opened Closet Door, Didn’t Like What’s Inside
This post has been removed for violating content rules, specifically:
      b. Fuckups resulting in death (including but not limited to animals)
 
      These stories are difficult to verify and are sensitive topics. If you or someone you know
       is suffering from depression and has suicidal thoughts, or if you know someone who
      has recently taken his or her own life, visit /r/suicidewatch.)

 


 
r/OffMyChest · Left My Lying Husband, Please Clap
 
This will be my last post on this account.
 
My post on another sub got deleted, so I’m not going to include everything here, just to avoid that happening again.
 
Basically: my husband lied to be. Had been lying pretty much since we met. He’s got a lot of issues. I tried going to the cops (long story), but they said evidence was circumstantile at best. My husband had a work trip for a few days and warned me not to go through any more of his stuff while I was gone. So I dropped off anonymous letters to his friends’ wives and girlfriends with all the info I have to try and give them the heads up I defintielyy never got. My sister helped me leave the state and get started somewhere else. Still trying to figure out how to divorce my husband but keep myself safe too. Didn’t give him my new address or anything, obv. Might have to move again after the divorce.
 
But for right now, I’m just so so so glad I got out!!! Thanks to everyone for your advice over the past couple of years.
 
I’m free!!!
 
 


 
AUDREY T. CARROLL

(she/they) is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024), The Gaia Hypothesis (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), and In My Next Queer Life, I Want to Be (kith books, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer/genderqueer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She serves as a fiction editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine and editor-in-chief of Genrepunk Magazine. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram.

 
The art that appears alongside this piece is “nana’s wedding” by GRETA KOSHENINA.