My [29M] girlfriend [27F] found inappropriate text conversations with another woman in my phone. She’s been acting odd since confronting me with it.

TL; DR Gave my gf permission to look through my texts and she found an inappropriate conversations from a time in our relationship where I was emotionally distant. She’s forgiven me for now but is acting strange towards me since.

My gf and I have been together for a couple years. She’s my first serious everything and she’s been very patient with how new everything surrounding this stuff is for me.

I once caught her being cheeky trying to spy who I was texting on my phone and told her she could just ask to see. We talked and I told her I was fine with her reading my messages, because I found it cute that she’s wanted to know what I might say about her. She said the same was true for her and she had nothing to hide.

That was a few weeks ago, but the other night I stayed over. She needed to get some work done and was using my computer in the wee hours of the morning before we needed to get up for work. She says that she got bored working and decided to search her name in iMessage on my computer. She saw a name she didn’t recognize and read the thread where I had been talking to a woman I used to work with in the early months of our relationship.

This old coworker is Black and I am white. My gf is also black. Old coworker (OC) tells me that she wants to date a white guy and want to know what they like. I asked if she meant sexually. She kind of danced around the question. A couple days later she messaged me saying that I clearly like Black girls, so the issue when we worked together was just that I didn’t like her. I said she was great, but just a friend. She asked some more stuff about what White guys like and how to attract a guy like me, and I gave her some advice told her that she should talk to my gf about it sometime if we all get together. (Yes, I really am that dumb.)

About a week later, I texted OC to invite her out for drinks with some of my current coworkers that she also knows. She accepted and we all hung out.

My girlfriend read all of this and was absolutely incensed. She woke me up at 4:30am and put the computer in front of me, questioning me about it. She didn’t yell or say anything horrible, just passionately delineated the different ways in which it was messed up.

This was especially bad because I was very weird the first 6 months we were together. I didn’t know how to understand my feelings and acted very aloof, while my gf was trying hard not to scare me off with how strongly she felt for me. We’ve since talked about all of that, but she admitted that the first year we were together, she often felt alone or like I was pulling away from her. One day I kind of just snapped out of all of that and got comfortable with how in love I am with her.

Seeing the date stamps on those texts and knowing that she was feeling lonely and unsure of how I felt for her during that time really hurt her. I didn’t think it was a big deal at first, but when she said she’d see if I felt that way if it were her and a male coworker, I felt like I’d been gut punched and understood.

She was pissed for a few days, but still overall pleasant and sweet to me. But since then, she’s been slower to text first or text back. She acts more insecure and almost visibly bristles when I say another woman’s name. I’ve never been too into makeup, so she rarely fills up when I’m coming over, but she’s been all done up every time I come around lately. She asks me if she’s pretty, which she’s never done before. And she’s suddenly on a diet now that I can’t tempt her off of with snacks like I usually do.

She’s dated a lot of abusive assholes and has a cheater for a father, so I just feel like she’s seeing me that way now. I feel awful. I was being an idiot and not thinking. I made a big deal early on that cheating was a huge dealbreaker for me and there’s never a situation where I could look past it. And now I’ve done some dumb shit like this (that isn’t actual cheating but still would piss me off if I were her) and she’s still trying to trust and love me.

How do I fix this? I love her and marrying her is in my five year plan. OC was NEVER anyone I was interested in and was really just a friend.

Submitted December 07, 2019 at 10:49AM by ifuckedupifuckedupif https://ift.tt/368VZzC