Many people here are focusing on the lease and what your legal options are, which is certainly one way to look at this situation. What is glaringly clear to me is the betrayal and the way you allowed this to happen. How did this situation sneak up on you? How close were you to these "friends"? Did you never talk about the future? How did you see this unfolding? What were you secretly hoping? What is the reward you expected or hoped for by the sacrifices you were making?

I ask these questions because I am a "pleaser", too, and a big chunk of my own personal growth has been to stand up for myself. I realize that you have this same tendency and it's very unhealthy. As you can see, you can lose much of yourself.

This is not so much about losing the apartment as it is about losing yourself, losing your self esteem and learning to value your self-worth. This is an opportunity. If you don't stand up for yourself now, then some other situation will arise. You will find yourself again giving too much and there are even worse things you could lose than an apartment.

So I ask you to consider this as a strength building opportunity. You know that what these two are doing is wrong and that they have horribly taken advantage of you. If the law is on your side and you can kick them out, it may feel like crap at first, but you will end up with your dignity. This is about more than retaining your apartment. It's about keeping hold of your soul.

What a sweet story! I have friends of different ages, some 20 years younger some 20 years older and there are times when the friendships can feel both amazing and unlikely, as in who woulda thunk? Particularly with a person of opposite gender it feels almost taboo even while being quite innocent.

Thus I found this article most delightful. In a culture like ours which is quite ageist, this is really refreshing and joyful.

Thank you!

I went through something similar so I know a little bit about how you feel. I was on the other side of the country when my mom died a little over a year ago. Although I had visited her a couple months previously, she hadn't shown signs of being that close to the end of her life. When the doctors told me she was real close to the end I hesitated rather than immediately unhook myself from my life in order to be there. I made plane reservations, but she died before I got there, so I was at the funeral rather than her deathbed. I have beaten myself up many times for hesitating and not grabbing an earlier plane. But you know what? We don't know exactly when it's going to happen. We can torture ourselves in retrospect but that doesn't change anything. We do what we can do. We are not perfect. Life is not made of perfect moments. It's painful whether you are there or whether you are not there and you can be with her in spirit whether you are with her physically or even whether she is alive or not.

After the funeral, after returning home I spoke to a friend about the experience who happens to be a therapist and who happened to also have lost her mother recently. She said, "There are always regrets with death." I thought yes, there probably are. We probably always wish we had done something different.

It is very easy to get caught up in the drama of imagining how we could have done the right thing at just right, perfect moment. But life is what it is. And life always has its complications. As does death.

My advice: do what you can do. Don't torture yourself about how it should have, could have been. In many ways, death is a private, solo experience. You can always connect with her in your heart and in your memories, which are eternal.

I've currently got a phone with a lot of features. If you look at the bullet list of things it can do, it's truly impressive.

And yet, accessing those features is such a pain that many of them might as well not be there at all.

What Apple understands well, and which is often spun as just an element of marketing, is that if a product is intuitive to use, it'll be enjoyable to use - rather than frustrating to use. Which means it can - and will - be used.

What IS marketing hype is to feature a bunch of difficult to master and poorly integrated capabilities and tout such a device as if it were useful. And that's what "smart phone" and PDA companies have done for years.

Making a product that breaks ground, not necessarily in terms of feature set, but in terms of ease of use is not marketing - that's good engineering. This isn't to say that Steve Jobs doesn't give a great presentation... but it helps when he has something truly elegant to demo.

I've developed software for 23 years now. I started out thinking that the first Mac was an attractive toy. After many years on the front lines of consumer software development, seeing the substantive difference between products filled with features that couldn't be accessed by most people, and those rare products that were designed to do whatever they do easily and intuitively, my admiration for what Apple did with the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone has deepened significantly.

They truly have, repeatedly, redefined product categories.