"My best friend got engaged to the father of her kids about four months ago."

Kids - plural. So Best Friend made a couple with this guy, even though:

"I didn't like him because in the beginning of their relationship he used to cheat on her and just treat her terrible."

But then:

"I've known my best friend a little over 14 years now and I hold a grudge toward him because of this. I really didn't like him until he confessed to me that he liked me and had feelings for me the first time he met me."

"Ever since that day he's been texting me telling me that he wants to make me happy and just wants me to fill a void that he's missing. He says that he loves my best friend but he feels incomplete."

So what happened to the grudge for the way he treated Best Friend?

"But now I caught feelings for him because I got to know him more than what I knew before."

How does someone "catch feelings" for someone else?

"I understood why my friend was still with him even after all the cheating and lies because underneath it all he is a good person."

How can a good person behave so badly?

"So I finally gave in and slept with him and now his feelings for me have been getting deeper."

So this guy treats Best Friend terribly, makes a couple kids with her, LW holds a grudge. Then guy mans up and gets engaged to Best Friend, yet manages to woo and sleep with LW.

But somehow it's all right because underneath it all he's a good person.

What I really, really want to know is this:

What in the heck did this guy say and do that got LW to ignore everything she knew about the guy, his history, and her Best Friend? How did he talk and text his way into not only doing the horizontal bop with LW, but into making her feel so strongly for him?

In any rational universe, LW would not look twice at somebody who behaved so badly. Yet she "caught feelings for him"? She's stuck?

WHAT DID HE SAY AND TEXT?

This sort of thing is what drives "nice guys" bonkers. They do all the "right" things and get ignored, dissed, and dumped, but guys like the LW's Best Friend's fiance gets a nonsimultaneous threesome.

At first I though the letter was fake, but I've seen too many similar things happen in real life.

Thank you for your explanation. It boils down to him knowing exactly what LW wants to hear, and his saying it in a believable way to get what he wants - regardless of who it hurts. Explains how Best Friend made more than one child with the cheater, too.

And I agree with your prediction about him and the bridesmaids.

The only thing I disagree with is that the Best Friend knows, and is stuck too. If the guy is so good at saying what a woman wants to hear, he's probably got Best Friend believing he's changed and is faithful to her alone.

The thing that still puzzles me is how LW hasn't figured all this out after knowing the guy for years. If he were someone she just met it would be different, or if he weren't *engaged to her best friend*, but this dude is no stranger. IOW, how she could "catch feelings" for him after holding a grudge for so long.

Maybe this sort of thing is why the "nice guys" strike out so much. They don't play the game of telling sweet lies.

1) There are women who play that same manipulative/exploitative game; it's an equal-opportunity form of abuse.

2) LW uses the present tense; she's "sleeping with" the guy, not she "slept with" the guy.

3) LW sounds in some ways as if she has little or no control over the situation, yet what she does is totally her decision.

All of which supports your explanation.

Shrek movies

Princess Fiona

Yes, she gets rescued in the beginning of the first one, but goes on to open some serious cans of whup-ass.

writes: "You seem to be arguing against the uniqueness of Jesus's core teachings but to me, that seems like the wrong question."

It is, because some of them are not unique.

"The real question (at least, for an historian) is why his message seems to have resonated when and where it did and the subsequent historical impact of that message."

One reason was Pax Romana - the relative stability and tolerance of the Roman Empire permitted the message to travel long distances. Christians were not persecuted because they were Christians but because they refused to acknowledge the Roman gods.

The big reason, however, was the Roman emperor (Constantine?) who made Christianity the state religion of Rome. That's when the pacifist and egalitarian messages of Christ kinda got lost. It was more than a thousand years before they were revived by radical groups in Great Britain and Germanic Europe.

Look up the story of Cyril, Hypatia and the great library of Alexandria for an example of how dangerous "poetry" can be.

1) There are some folks who should get married, and some who shouldn't.

2) There are some folks who should have kids, and some who shouldn't.

3) Nobody should be pressured into any of those situations. Each person needs to decide which is right for him/her.

It's really that simple.

There have been plenty of geniuses, male and female, who did great work and were married-with-children. And plenty who weren't.

Personal choice....what a concept!