rSlash - r/Relationships Hubby's Midlife Crisis is a Soda Shop?!

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

0:00 Intro 0:09 Midlife soda 1:17 Cheating 7:15 Poly 12:07 Feeder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode is sponsored by Shopify. You know that business idea you've had sitting in the back of your mind forever? Maybe it's a passion project you sketched out in notebooks or something you thought up back in college. But the sheer thought of launching it feels way too daunting. Most people quit before they even start because running a business usually means juggling 10 different complicated apps. That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify puts everything you need into one easy-to-use platform from day one. You don't need to be a developer either.

Shopify's templates and AI tools get a slick storefront up and running fast, zero coding required. Plus, if questions come up along the way, Shopify's built-in AI assistant, sidekick is right there to help you build, troubleshoot, and keep moving forward. Whether you're a household name or just starting out, Shopify handles the store setup and seamless checkout so you can actually focus on growing your dream. If you're ready to hear that sound on your first sale day, hit over to Shopify.com and start your free trial. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.com today. That's Shopify. Welcome to R-slash Relationships, where O.P.'s husband wants to open a questionable business as a midlife crisis. Our next Reddit post comes from Lulu West. My husband's midlife crisis may be to open a soda

fountain shop. I'm a 37-year-old woman, and my husband is 39. We've been together for 15 years. We both work corporate jobs, and his is remote. We have two young daughters, a ages 5 and 1. Out of a desire for more community involvement and to diversify revenue streams, my husband has dreamed up the idea to open a soda fountain shop. Each night, he uses his finance skills to model out opening a fountain shop and milkshake counter, dreaming of rehabbing the shop that went out of business after a hundred years in our neighborhood. What at first seemed like a fun daydream is becoming more real with every spreadsheet and conversation. While I want to support my husband, I personally don't have a desire to complicate our life further in this way. I like the

idea of spinning on a red counterstool and drinking a malt milkshake, but I can't imagine all the work to get there. How can I support him and also stay honest to my day-to-day goals, which is simply make a busy life simpler? Our next Reddit post is from Throwaway. My wife and I got married a few years ago, both born and raised in the U.S. We come from pretty strict families. For a bit of backstory, my wife had a bit of history before we got married. As do I, but mine wasn't as bad. Regardless, I didn't feel the need to compare numbers, as she and I both changed and wanted to settle down. Our marriage had been good so far. We haven't had any major arguments, traveled lots, constantly communicated our feelings. Fast forward to a few weeks ago,

I left the house, however, I forgot something, so I stepped back in, and I stepped back in, and and overheard my wife in the other room on the phone all giggly. Like, as if she were talking to me, especially when we first got engaged and married. The words out of her mouth pierced my chest. She explicitly said, You better bang me for at least three hours. I froze.

I didn't really know what to do. I snuck back out of the house and stood by the door for a few seconds to make sure I left undetected. This next part I'm not proud of. but at night I forced myself to stay up till the middle of the night. I grabbed her phone and snuck to the other room. I searched, but nothing. Then I looked in recently deleted texts and found messages with an unsaved number.

Over 1,100 of them, in fact. I read through the messages and they were sickening. Not just about daily life, but a lot of it was sexual, things that they would do to each other, did to each other, reminiscing about their recent meetups. how she hid it from me, etc. There were many pictures and video evidence as well. This was two weeks ago. I've kept quiet about it since. Every night when my wife goes to sleep, I read the text to stay updated. Today, they were planning on meeting up at our place while I was out at work. She also mentioned that sometimes I do work from home, and if that was the case, they would go to his place as a backup plan or get a hotel nearby. This morning when I told my wife I'd be working from home, she looked a little annoyed, even insisting I go in because I've been home a lot. About an hour later, she told me she was going to hang out with her friend, dolled up in makeup. I'm very sure because of

the text that I know where she currently is and what she's doing. It's one thing to know what's happened, but to be sure it's actively happening as I type this, geez. The crazy thing is, my wife tells me she loves me all the time. She's either putting up an amazing face to me or genuinely just can't control her urges. However, that doesn't change the facts. I don't even know where to begin, what to do. I screenshotted a lot of the texts and sent them to myself as well as some of the screenshots purely for evidence. But I'm not really unexposing type of person, nor do I want to use them in any way against her. I think my next step is laying the evidence in front of her and going from there. Then two weeks later, OP posted an update. During my wife's trip with her family,

I lined up everything and officially filed. The day after she came back, I sat her down at the kitchen table and informed her that I was aware of her infidelity. I told her I'd been reading her texts and saw the pictures. And I was aware for a while now that she was actively cheating on me. After breaking it to her, she didn't really know what to say. She didn't defend her actions at all. She pretty much just apologized and said she had no excuse. I told her I wasn't really looking for an apology here, just closure. I pretty much laid into her about how awful it is to break such a big commitment and cheat on someone who should be your other half.

Again, she didn't really retaliate and pretty much accepted what she had done was wrong. Looking down the whole time, holding back tears. I didn't yell, curse, or insult her. I just spoke my mind. After I was done venting, she let me know that she would make a divorce process easy and wouldn't go after any assets since she wasn't faithful. I'll be honest, I did appreciate the ownership of her. mistake and told her I did in fact appreciate that. She then mentioned that if I were willing to work things out, then she would give me her location and full access to her phone. I let her know I wasn't

interested in that kind of marriage. That even if I could look past her cheating, I couldn't. That I wouldn't want to be in a relationship where I have to spend effort making sure that you wouldn't cheat again. After shutting that down though, she said that she accepted the fact that she ruined our marriage and wouldn't ask again. The only thing she asked is that she be the one that would break it to her parents and that she would be completely honest with them. I agreed since I already had the evidence of her cheating. Both her parents called me and apologized and let me know if there was anything I needed, I could ask. They also still look at me as an extension of their family, and both are upset that things ended, but understood why I was walking

away, and how disappointed they were because they never thought they raised a cheater. As for the guy she had an affair with, I did find out more about him. He's not in a relationship. He's not in a relationship and seems to be a bit of a loser himself. His job isn't good enough for me to contact to get him fired. In fact, when I found out what he did for a living, I hope he gets stuck there, lull. There definitely isn't a future for them together, not that I care. And apparently, my soon-to-be ex-wife already cut him off after I served her the papers. The good news is that divorce shouldn't take long at all, since she isn't going after any assets, and we have nothing to split. I'm taking what's mine, and she took what's hers. We don't have a joint account, so a divorce will be finalized soon.

She already moved back in with her parents and is taking her stuff bit by bit, but she'd be done with that in the next couple of days. Lastly, as for me, I'm not sure where I go after this. I feel as if everything happens so quickly. I'm definitely going to do my best to enjoy the bachelor life, and living on my own for the first time in my life. On the one hand, I'm scared, but also a little excited. I have nobody to answer to or check in on for the first time ever, so I'm going to use it to my advantage. Our next Reddit post is from Clemsdorf. My 32-year-old wife decided she was Polly after I married her, and we got tangled in agreements. We've been together for eight years, married for three. This post is skipping years of wonderful adventures, memories, open hearts, and selfless mutual

supports. I'm just focusing on the problem. So she had slept around when we were casual, and starting out, but we had made agreements by the time we'd gotten serious. If she wanted to be with me, we would both have to be monogamous from then on. She agreed. At year four, she had accidental overexposure to drugs while on her own, suffered panic attacks, and changed in some ways. She came to the realization at that time that she found the intercourse we were having to be mentally unfulfilling, and she was finding herself merely going through the physical motions of giving and experiencing pleasure. She decided I wasn't the person to do the things that would mentally fulfill her. I asked what those things were, and she refused to tell me, beyond referring to basic

Dom Subdynamics, because she didn't believe in my capacity to do it. I attempted various things to satisfy her, but none of them seemed to hit the secret mark. She decided that the only way to accomplish this was to experiment with someone else. She said that while her heart was still open to me, it was also now open to others. I expressed my concerns about her having intercourse with others, especially men. So she found a pre-made written agreement online and gave it to me, specifically to address those concerns. Among other things, the document asked if it was okay to date and have intercourse with another woman.

I said yes to that. She also encouraged that it was totally fine for me to have intercourse with other women in exchange. The only condition to all of this is that we were both open and honest about everything at all. times. I had to consider, was the joy of our relationship worth this compromise? The answer was yes. So then she met someone else, a married Polly woman, and fell in love. The purpose of our agreement had been to address her sexual needs, or so I thought. But now she's saying that Polly was always on the table, that when she said her heart was open to someone else and I agreed to her contract, that I was giving her the implicit okay to have a romantic relationship out to the time.

side of ours, even though her document didn't say that. And that our original monogamy agreement from way back when was no longer valid because she had fundamentally changed as a person since having made that commitment, as a result of her drug experience. And now that she's in love, she refuses to back out of it, even though I've told her, it's hurting me because it would be self-abandonment, something she had done for many years in a toxic prior relationship, and refuses to ever do again. Her needs must take precedence over everything else in her life, and she considers Polly part of her identity. I do not consider Polly part of my identity. However, I was willing to allow her to explore her sexuality. I never agreed to her participation in an

extramarital romantic relationship, or so I thought. Regardless of how we got there, she loves this person now and refuses to leave her. She loves me too, but says that if I can't tolerate this, I have to walk away. But even the thought of doing that is soul-crushing. I keep having conversations with her where I try to problem-solve this, but she experiences my pain every time and it drains her. She says she's tired of talking about it. She talks to her new partner and complains to her about the burden that I place on her with my objections. And I've just learned that she's revealed whatever her secret kink button is to this person and is sharing it with her, and I'm still not allowed to even try. How can I navigate this? Am I being unreasonable?

I'm praying there's a solution that can end with us still together. I like this reply from scant calamity. Brother, she already left you. She just hasn't packed her bags. The contract thing is a mess, but the real problem is she keeps moving the goalposts and calling it self-discovery. First it was intercourse, then it was love. Now it's her identity. And somehow, you know, you're, You're the one who needs to accept everything while she gives you zero. The secret kink thing would destroy me. She won't let you try, but some other stranger gets to know? That's not Polly. That's just cruel.

You're not being unreasonable. You're being slowly erased from your own marriage. Yeah, I'm honestly not even sure why this woman is still with you, O.P., because she doesn't seem to like or respect you at all. And if this is the way she treats someone that she actually likes, I wouldn't want her to like me. Our next Reddit post is from Gotu Stein. So I, a 26-year-old guy and my girlfriend, who's 30, have been together for a little more than a year,

and it's been a wonderful time so far, but I'm starting to have doubts. I really like her, and she looks so good, but I can't wrap my head around it, so here it comes. It started off perfect. She liked to cook and bake, so at first I started to enjoy her cooking. I ate more than I did before, but I was quite heavy into sports. so I didn't gain any weight. But after the first few months, she started asking me to quit playing football so we could spend more time together.

I got injured shortly after, and I basically never played since. She always called me a skinny B word, which was an inside joke at the time. But it started to get weirder when she started serving me extra leftovers and ordered extra takeaway. She was also starting to give me bigger lunches when I left for work. She always joked, saying, I don't like to throw away food, so you have to eat. eat it, or I'll never cook again. That's when I started to gain weight. As soon as I noticed that my clothes started to get tighter, I asked her if she thought that I was getting fat, and she said,

yes, but I like you this way. So I basically didn't really pay attention to it at the time, but I felt like the bigger I got, the more passionate hugging she wanted. This was before she started to feed me during, or whenever I couldn't finish my plate. Since the beginning of our relationship, I've gained around 80 pounds and I'm now 253 pounds. I'm 5'9, so you can imagine how I've ballooned up last year. I tried talking with her about it, but she denies everything, and I'm afraid that if I say no to her food, she'll leave me. I don't feel comfortable being this big,

as I've tried to lose weight, but she kind of stops it from happening all the time. I do really appreciate and like spending time with her, so I don't want to leave her. I really don't know what to do now. Is there someone who knows how I can talk to her about this? Well, the simple solution, OP, is to just start refusing the food, start dieting and exercising and see how she responds. If she's supportive, then she's just a nice girl who likes to cook a lot.

No big deal. If she becomes unsupportive, then she's an abusive girlfriend who puts her own fetishes above your health and needs. A lot of people in the comments are telling OP to run, which would be doubly effective because you could run away from your girlfriend and burn some calories while you're at it. That was our slash relationships. And if you like this content,

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