I understand difficulty with making friends in adulthood. It is a lot of work. Work to find them and then trying to find time to maintain it. Ugh

I don’t care about birthdays though. I usually work on my birthday anyways. I routinely forget how old I am. I think this attitude of no expectations helped me not to get bothered with getting upset. It’s just one day out of other 364.

No most certainly you didn’t deserve to be treated poorly by that man. It was all about domination and power with this guy. No one deserves the kind of treatment. Decent people don’t do the kind of stuff.