THE FALLBACK GUY

The breaking point came when a girlfriend in the red kept spending like she wasn't.

According to the poster, her account had already gone negative, and he had been covering smaller gaps for her before, gas, food, the kind of bills that can turn into a crisis fast. He helped, he said, because he cared about her. Then he bought her a ticket to a concert she wanted to attend.

After that, the spending widened. She bought a second-day concert ticket, plane tickets to another island, and tickets for her kids too. Some of it went on payment plans. But even as those charges piled up, she kept telling him she was broke and struggling.

He finally told her it didn't make sense to spend money on trips and concerts while her account was already in the negative, and that he wasn't comfortable continuing to help financially if that kept happening.

She pushed back hard. She said she couldn't cancel because her kids were excited and it was "already a thing now."

That's when the fight got personal. She got upset, said she felt like a burden, and told him it sounded like he didn't like her. Then came the comparisons: she said she should come before his mom and sister, and she couldn't understand why he would help family sometimes but not her in this situation.

In an edit, he added that the conflict had started earlier, when she needed new tires and they were in rough shape. She told him, "if you cared about me you would pay for them." He said the price tag, more than 700 dollars, put him off, and she ended up doing a loan-like payment arrangement where the money comes out of her check.

He also said this had started to feel like a pattern. He felt like the fallback guy, especially because she hasn't put the father of her kids on child support or anything. The father, he said, only texts and calls every once in a while to cause problems and threaten to try to take the kids.

There was more money pressure too. The trip had originally been planned for three days months ago, and he had even suggested making it a week just for herself because family could watch the kids. Then she lost her job for a month, and he thought that should have changed the plan. It didn't. She kept telling him, "you have a a lot of money so you can afford it."

He said he does make good money, but it isn't unlimited: he's paying half a mortgage in another state, rent where he lives now, and car payments, while trying to save for early retirement.

In another edit, he said her parents have helped her with rent and other things, but also say that because he is "the man" he should be covering all of that. In the update, he said she admitted that "what she's doing hasn't been fair to me or her family."

He ended by asking whether she could actually change, because he cares about her, and doesn't want to end it if it can be fixed.