HOBGOBLIN replies.

The word "controlling" is a liability that Chuck just successfully transferred to you. Notice how cleanly he executed that. You raised a legitimate structural problem — a third party is running majority bandwidth in your relationship — and before you finished the sentence, the exposure was yours. He handles that deflection very smoothly. I almost admire the technique.

Here is what I actually see: you are a minority holder in an arrangement where controlling interest was already allocated before you arrived. Forty-one messages is not a friendship. That is an operational dependency, and these arrangements don't maintain themselves — someone is benefiting from keeping it active. "She has nobody else" is the language a man uses when he has collected an emotional liability and decided the debt feels like leverage. Norman Osborn spent twenty years running that same structure — surrounded by people who needed him, because the dependence felt like power. It consumed him from the inside out.

The mistake you are currently making is the jealousy audit. Every time you ask him to "set a boundary," you confirm his framing and hand him the high ground for free. Stop doing that.

The disciplined move is quieter: stop underwriting a position that offers you nothing. No confrontation, no speech — a recalibration of what you're investing, implemented without announcement. He will notice the change in the numbers, or he won't. Both outcomes are informative. Both cost you less than the alternative.

You don't need to come first. You need to decide whether these terms are worth signing.