My [24f] boyfriend [29] repeatedly sexts other women online, now I’m thinking about bailing out on the house we’re supposed to close on next week.

This is... a mess, and I know it. I’ll try to lay it all out there as simply as possible. Using his secret account as a throwaway.

We’ve been dating for a little over a year. Things have been rocky, but soooooo good when they’re good. Neither of us have ever connected with another person like this before.

When we started off, it was supposed to be a hookup situation, and I was aware he was sleeping with someone else. We’d shared our curiosities about nonmonogamy and I was also doing my own thing, until he and I were spending several nights a week together for a few months, and I knew it was a little more than that. Then I was finally like “hey, were dating. I’m not dancing around it anymore, you treat me like your girlfriend. Call me that.”

About two weeks later he comes to my house and then casually brings up, “so I was working under the assumption that it was still cool if my friend and I hooked up.”

I had already figured out who it was by accident. Just plain observation, intuition, and logic. But I was extremely hurt by this. I was almost expecting the topic to come up before this but asking permission, not forgiveness. This is a whole different beast, but she was very rude to me (at her place of employment) when I was (to her knowledge) still in the dark about who she was. If I ever got to the point where I was comfortable opening our relationship, I would never be okay with him hooking up with her. Due to the pure disrespect and disregard to me and my feelings.

I ended up forgiving him. I told myself the lines were kinda blurred, and I could’ve communicated better myself. Fine, we’ll try again. I’ll believe you wouldn’t do this to me on purpose, you know better now. (I know, I know. Hindsight is 20/20)

Months go by and I’m an anxious mess. He gets distant around his birthday, i write it up to that. He finally snaps out of it weeks later and I feel like I’ve truly fallen in love. Like I met the real him for the first time. He’s great. Takes care of me, is attentive.

Mentally I’ve crumbled. I can’t get over the fact that he lied to me straight to my face in the beginning of our relationship. I realize exactly how wrong he knew he was, and that he did it anyway. I finally work myself up, we have a long, huge loud discussion. He assures me nothing has happened behind my back. We start to move past it.

But he’s weird about his snapchat. Tries not to let me see his inbox. It took me a long time to notice, even longer to be sure that it wasn’t just my head. So one time when he goes to the bathroom, I check his phone.

I know. I don’t like that I’ve become this person. I’ve done it one other time before him, and I was right that time too. I didn’t find anything particularly incriminating but a lot of girls on snap, and some nudes I couldn’t determine the origin of. Whatever, porn is not a problem to me at all. Although the woman I mentioned earlier had the somewhat recently changed nickname of “cheesecake” Take that however you want, I find it sketchy.

So I waited a few days, and happened to be at his house while he was showering. I checked again and found he had sent nudes to a girl in chat and was trying to sext with her. I confronted him once he got back. It’s worth mentioning I tried a little to get him to admit to it himself, but I had to literally tell him what i found and then he apologized. He had to leave for work but he erased it from his phone, and told me it was just like porn to him, and he didn’t want to hurt me and he wanted to be better for me.

I give in again, after a few days. Fine, but I will not put up with ANYTHING else. He says he understands, and there is nothing else. I say no more secrets, because that’s lying too. And he promises me.

I try everyday to trust him more. To believe he is honest. To believe that my feelings matter to him even when I’m not around. I told him I would, if he would be someone who deserved my forgiveness and trust. He said he would. I did my best to allow him his privacy, but every so often I’d take a peek just to settle my anxieties down a bit, because I wasn’t finding anything. I feel good about it.. I’m finding myself coming back to the relationship. We decided to move in together. My living situation sucks and he wants to buy a house by the time he’s 30, and a really cute house goes up for sale down the street from my sister, so we go for it.

The second time we are supposed to see this house, I’m waiting for him to shower and I notice his old cellphone, that he had told me towards the beginning of his relationship he used specifically for watching porn. I was blatantly weirded out by it, but decided not to make a huge stink out of it at the time. But now I can’t help it. Same lock code as his current phone. I find porn, and a nudes collection, and a Kik with recent sexual messages sent from him. I confront him and he says he set it up on purpose to see if I was still going through his things. He points out that the messages were to bots, but I didn’t get a chance to look at even half of the stuff that was on this phone. He throws the phone away anyway, and had me throw it into the outside trash myself so I’d know it was done. I told him I’d let him have his privacy. That I’d do better and give him the benefit of the doubt.

So continues the optimistic trying to not be crazy. I realize through an article that I have betrayal ptsd. But I’m still trying to work through the obsession with trying to catch lies around me so that I feel just just a little less of an idiot. But things have been a little off lately, and I want to blame it on stress for the most part. This is huge for both of us. But i have t checked so long that a part of me is bouncing around inside me needing to look. So I finally get the chance, and I stumble upon this reddit account. Same email as his regular one, I know because I changed the password. And a few suggestive chats to reddit users active in nsfw subreddits.

I don’t think I can move in with someone that gets off on keeping secrets from me. I’ve never been one to put up with bullshit and I feel like I’ve given him more than enough chances.

I was getting really excited. I told my friends, family, coworkers. We’re supposed to close next week. But I don’t know if I can go through with this. He did everything for the house in his name, but I am supposed to contribute to half the mortgage payment and bills. I think I might just move back home with my mom to save up more money and work on getting back the pieces of me that I left in the beginning of our relationship. I’m struggling a bit with the idea of explaining to everyone that I’m suddenly moving back home, and not to the new house. But the more I think about it the more confident I am that the truth speaks more to me being dedicated to doing what’s right for me than me being stupid. Stupid would be moving in with a guy who can’t be honest with me, or... I don’t know, lying to “the best thing to ever happen to you” a week before you buy a house down the street from her sister.

I supposed advice is welcome, though I think most of this was just to get it off my chest. I know that my going through his phone is a big debate. I agree, I think it’s a generally not good thing to do, however I’d be a lot more apologetic if it didn’t keep proving me right about things I’d like to be wrong about. Invading privacy is wrong, gaining access to information that you deserve to have and will allow you to change your situation for the better; can’t be sorry about it.

TLDR; My boyfriend is incapable of respecting my wishes or being honest with me, so I’m going to bail on the house he’s closing on next week.

Submitted January 19, 2020 at 06:26PM by discreetboi https://ift.tt/375zpJf