I'm the person who went to India. Daddy's trust fund? I wish.

I've been supporting myself ever since I moved out of home at 18. Worked through uni, started at the bottom in community development, and worked and saved and wrote and saved ... By my early 30s I was in a position to travel - and yes I'd invested in a flat and had paid off my student loans by then too.

A lot of people I knew resented me for making these choices at the time though, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised to encounter that tone here. Why wasn't I freaking out about the mortgage? Or finding a husband? Let alone buying a new car or a big TV? Who did I think I was to just opt out of the race like that?

I think it's helped me live a better life to travel and settle down for periods of time in foreign places. I think it's made me a better person. I think I have a better perspective on things and I think I'm better informed. In other words it's been more than worth the trade offs I've made to do that.

The LW has to make some choices - as many above have so succinctly outlined. Particularly the choice to join Other Man in his soon-to-be-single state in a hotel room somewhere. No question this is where all this intimacy and secrecy is leading. Having any kind of intrigue with Someone You Fancy counts as foreplay in itself, and yes I would most definitely include 'I'm so unhappy in my marriage' conversations.

The only way forward is to understand that LWs primary crisis concerns the Other Man: whither their friendship once he leaves his marriage? Maybe it can continue, but maybe not. How will Other Man's New Woman handle his friendship with LW for example?

I advise LW to ditch Other Woman in the nicest way possible. Tell her you don't want to be a confidante of hers anymore. This situation will only become more fraught as the separation between them takes place. The only honourable way forward right now is to choose.

After that, LW, you are the one with the secret that you have to handle. Good luck.

rayinkorea I like your style. Good point about the men as friends thing - I'll be making remembering what you said over the next little while. Goddam those attractive men with their exciting secrets ...

I think Nim indeed WOULD have expected to grow up and 'become' human. I have read accounts of human-socialised chimps trying to shave at a certain point in order to rid themselves of their body hair. In humans it's not until a certain point in development that children with special needs and/or intellectual disabilities realise they are different and are not like 'normal' people - they have to grieve over this and come to a reconciliation with it. I imagine it woudl be this way for chimp. Indeed I imagine it's like this for any person in a group that has been in that group since infancy. A black child in a white family for example, or an only girl in a family of males. Why wouldn't you expect to become like those others of the group to whom you belong when from the beginning you had no perception of being different?

Nim's story is very sad and makes me shudder for the lack of emotional intelligence in humans. Obviously they aren't just htis way towards animals, but towards human children and adults also. Fortunately human adults are usually capable of looking out for their own interests.

Finally, anyone who has known and loved an animal knows what emotion and intelligence it is capable of. Not the same as our intelligence, but I can't tell when someone is about to have a seizure either (the way some dogs can) or tell when my husband is about to come home five minutes before he does (the way my cat can). The instances of various abilities various species have are vast, and all point to the fact that different species have different predilections and abilities, but we are all intelligent and emotional creatures. We just can't all comprehend one another and need to use our imagination to do so. Sorry this has rambled somewhat ...

Arthur Miller in his autobiography 'Timebends' said that in his opinion America is utterly invested in forgetting, and nowhere is this more evident than in their forgetting of the Great Depression. He said it was so much worse than it was portrayed to be in the years following and up until he was writing the book in the eighties. Nothing has changed since then. He wrote that Americans don't want to remember how bad it really was, they want to get past it, get over it and recreate it with a Hollywood glow. But the depression left his father a ruined man who never recovered, and he said he saw those people everywhere in his childhood and growing up.

This chimes with my mother's stories of the great depression in Australia. It was so bad she has never gotten over it. Still saving string, still feeling triumphant when she denies herself what she wants in order to save another ten cents, still afraid to stick her neck out in case her head gets bitten off. Her whole life has been limited by the trauma of humiliation, near starvation and privation she went through to get an education and get out.

Get out of debt is the answer, but how America is going to do that when it's fighting a war that's already costing THREE TRILLION DOLLARS worth of borrowed money is anyone's guess ...