Boyfriend [29m] is confusing the hell out of me and I’m basically trying to ignore my gut instinct [22f]

Ok so we’ve been together about 2.5 years. We were long distance for the first 1.5 of those, and I moved away to be with him last year. It’s always been pretty intense. We’ve always talked about the future in an open way but not in a pressured way. Just in a way that we sort of knew we’d just be staying together, but we never planned our wedding or anything like that yet.

So anyway, there’s been a few bad moments. He’s been pretty manipulative at times and lied about little things which I’ve caught him out on, mainly to do with hiding how he knows people he was messaging and telling me they were from work when they weren’t etc. So my trust towards him has been broken a few times but I’ve got past it to an extent.

Besides that, we’ve always been pretty affectionate and happy. Just content with each other. He started a really important and stressful job about 2 months ago, which involves a lot of shift work so sometimes we wouldn’t see each other properly for days, but that’s fine. He’s done shifts before and it never bothered me as long as we made time for each other when we had matching days off.

About 2 weeks ago, he was off work and I came home a little bit earlier than usual because the traffic was good. I walked in and I could hear him talking to someone, I just assumed he was playing Xbox or something. As I got closer to the living room, I could hear a girl’s voice. I walked in and the talking stopped and he looked a bit startled and like he’d just closed down something on his phone. I just asked casually who he was talking to and he said ‘what? no one’ even though I knew in my heart I heard someone. I brought it up later on at which he got really defensive. I asked to see his FaceTime call history then just to put my mind at ease (I’ve never asked to see his phone before) and he completely blew up and said no and he can’t deal with that and me asking to see his phone.

He then goes on to say he’s not happy, that somethings missing, that he feels like I’m more of a close friend than a girlfriend etc. The sex had dried up months ago but I was the one who wanted to talk more about it and he never tried to do it more or anything. This just completely threw me. He said he’s been feeling like it for a while and he doesn’t know what’s missing. I asked if there’s someone else and he said no, nothing like that. I asked if it’s stress from work and we talked about how it does stress him out but it’s not that either like he should be able to work through that. The problem is he doesn’t communicate with me about things. And I would go to bed after this crying and he just wouldn’t seem to care. It’s been just all uncertain now for about 2 weeks. He says he still wants to be with me and he knows this is hurting me but he doesn’t know what to tell me right now. My friends are saying I should break up with him but I feel so torn. I feel like if someone is unsure of me then they don’t truly want to be with me and why should I accept someone who isn’t sure of me 100000%. He’s been acting normal with me in the mean time like still hugs me and talks to me. It just feels awkward now and I just don’t get it when he says he wants space but is acting like that. He’s also been going out with work more, supposedly with work anyway. He went out the other day really early like 9am early and then didn’t come home till 8.30pm the next day because he was ‘enjoying some space.’ I saw his bag that he took to stay at his work friends house and it was full of clothes, like he was packing for a big trip because they were like a mixture of casual and smart clothes. That’s not how you pack for one night out with friends. I called him out on this and he said half of those clothes were left in there from last time he went out, which they weren’t because I saw the bag before he packed to go out and it was empty. I just wish I had concrete proof that he was doing something because it would make this all easier lol. What should I do?? I’m just so confused and hurt.

there’s so many little things I could mention but basically tl;dr: my boyfriend says he’s unhappy basically out of nowhere and says he wants space but still wants to be with me. I feel like there could be someone else because of all this but he denies it. Not sure what to do or how to approach this.

Submitted May 05, 2019 at 01:42AM by lizardqueen123 http://bit.ly/2J13Ho8