I feel like Im taking crazy pills!

[sally4sara]

Longest thread ever!

My boyfriend worked the nightshift for a while at a diner most people would go to after a night of drinking. The place would get really packed when the bars let out. He is a very social person and will talk to most anyone who can carry a conversation.

One night, while he was at work, I was playing a game on his computer that I don’t have on mine and someone came through on the instant messenger. When this happens, the game minimizes. I looked at it and thought it was someone we both know and started chatting to them. However, it became apparent that I didn’t know this person. I looked closer at the screen name and realized it was just a similar name. I could tell it was a girl, but not the one I thought. What made me realize this is when I mentioned my son and they didn’t know who he was. This girl was being very flirty so I played along. She thanked him for the “delicious hug” he gave her the other night. It became obvious as well she knew nothing of me or that he even had a girlfriend. After a bit I grew bored of her ridiculous questions (what’s your fav color? If you could be doing anything with anyone right now what would it be and with who? Teehee, I’d be with you cause I’m enjoying this conversation so much!) and I busted her out.

She apologized profusely and told me she had just met him the night before and it was so busy she didn’t get to really find out anything about him. She apologized again for assuming and said she was just flirty by nature and was really only interested in making a new friend. I told her it was okay; she didn’t know, and if she could tone it down I didn’t care if she was friends with him. After I said goodnight to her, I left the conversation up on the screen and finished my game before I went to bed. He found it when he came home and laughed his butt off (complimented me on knowing him well enough to accurately answer her stupid questions). I was a little irritated that she didn’t know about me, but he also pointed out that he just met her and hadn’t had the chance to inform her of anything.

They started chatting a lot online…….at night while I was asleep. I understood that he was on the night shift and would get bored. Though it did bother me a little because of the tone of her initial conversation with him (me pretending to be him), the fact that he only talked to her when I was asleep and I still hadn’t met her.

He really didn’t like his job. One day, after about a month of him chatting with her, he tells me he is planning to meet up with his friend Elliot for lunch and run around putting in job aps. He called me at work the next day and was really up beat. To the point where it seemed off and I remember wondering “is he hanging out with that girl today?” But spring had just arrived and I wrote it off as being the weather. I went on my break later in the day and he had called again. Even my boss mentioned how happy he sounded. Hmmmm. So when I got home, I did something I really shouldn’t have done. I looked at his logs. He had made plans to have lunch with her the night before.

When he got home, he was still real peppy. I asked him about his day and he showed me some pictures he had taken on his new phone and told me about finding a restaurant that was totally red he wanted to show me. I asked if he had caught lunch with Elliot and he said no; Elliot had stood him up. I asked him if anything else had happened. No, just enjoyed the day. This was making no sense; he has female friends and I don’t care. He has attractive female friends, most of which he either dated or messed around with and I give him no grief about it unless they are rude to me. I say “Nothing else like getting lunch with your new friend?” Well yes, in fact he did. She had called him and happened to be in the neighborhood so they decided to grab a bite. I told him “I know you planned this yesterday and just used Elliot’s name to throw me off! Why?”

Big speech about how he knew I was wary of her and he didn’t want to hear any flack over it so he just didn’t tell me to avoid an argument. I told him his assuming I would hit the roof made no sense and because of this he had two weeks to invite her to dinner or get rid of her.

Don’t get me wrong, the guy loves me to death, but we both come from irrationally strict parents and had to learn to lie to survive. When I left home, I decided no one was going to make me lie anymore; he still will do it to keep the peace. He also thinks of sex as just an act and affection as real intimacy. I agree with him on this to a point, but the fact that this relationship is monogamous only because I require it is at times a bit unsettling.

So we have her over for dinner. She was nice. She had a boyfriend of 2 years but he was not able to come along. We all had a good time. I thought it was a resolved deal. He had gotten a different job on a day schedule so the midnight chat sessions were few. She and I would message each other now and then.

A few of weeks later she asked him to go out drinking with some of her friends. I didn’t go because I had no one to watch my son. When he came home he kissed me when he crawled into bed around 3am.

A couple of days later, he and I were hanging out in our room. He was chatting with her on line. He started playing some philosophy audio study; some monotonous guy droning on and on till I asked “WTF are we listening to?” It was something she had to listen to for class. He got up to go make some food and I went to his computer to say something to her about how they could’ve picked someone with more personality to make the audio less boring and I saw the last line of what she had said:

“Ohh alright, I guess I can tell you. I use to date this one guy who would wake me up in the middle of the night for sex and it would get me sooo hot!”

He had not responded yet and I was a bit stunned. Why would she feel this was info my boyfriend needed to know? I didn’t say anything to her and just got real quiet. I felt really disrespected by her. She knew I didn’t approve of her flirtiness and this just seemed really inappropriate. I asked him about it the next day and he said he though it was odd too and that maybe he should have a talk with her. I asked to see the rest of the chat thinking perhaps there was some previous context that would explain why she would say something like that and he said he didn’t keep chat logs. I knew this was false so the next day when I looked anyway, I couldn’t find any logs. He said he talked to her and she understood that their friendship was just a friendship. I got no apology from her and I didn’t think very highly of her after that. She seemed like a childish little girl who craves male approval to boost her ego and didn’t care who she disrespected in her efforts. I knew full well that she wouldn’t say something like that to him in front of me!

This was really getting under my skin. I knew he was keeping chat logs prior to me asking to see them. I really hated how suspicious I was becoming. I was checking his phone to see if they had talked and getting crabby when she would message him. I started noticing that when he would mention her and say they talked, he would always say she was the one calling him. Since the phones are in my name and I get the bill, I knew it was usually him calling her. I was further bothered by him down playing this, but knew that it was probably due to my attitude towards her. Still, it had become a problem and I wanted to put it behind me. Because he had lied to me about her I was only coming up with more suspicions which would cause me to check up on him more. And the more I checked, the worse it got. One night it was so bad I couldn’t sleep. I started searching for the missing logs. I found a file hidden in one of his directories with her name as the title. It had been created the same day I had asked to see the logs of that conversation. I opened it and there they were. I already hated how I was snooping. I had never been this person before! So I didn’t read them, I printed them out and left them on the printer. When we got up, he saw them and said “what is this?” as he reached for them. I told him what I had found and asked if I should be worried about what I might find if I read them. He claimed he had no idea how that file was created (is this even possible?), that he wasn’t keeping logs, and didn’t care if I read them. So I did and there was a context for her comment. He was flirting with her too. Not real bad, but when you know a girl is the kind who craves approval and gets overly flirty to get it, why would you encourage it when you know it pisses off your girlfriend? The comment that he too thought was odd, he did respond too. While he wasn’t horribly out of line with his flirting, his response to her comment wasn’t anything close to expressing a discomfort with what she said. I told him I wanted her gone. Completely gone. He sulked about it and insisted that he had told her it was wrong and since then, she had toned it way down. I told him that wanting her gone had nothing to do with her anymore. It was because of him and his lies. He still insisted he didn’t make the file. I told him how much I hated not trusting him, how much I hated that I had become a snoop. I wanted to stop and rebuild trust with him but didn’t feel I could with her still in the picture. It was obvious to me that even if he had not been planning to do anything with her, he obviously was enjoying her behavior and encouraging it. He could say she stopped all he wanted, but I no longer believed his words. I didn’t like her, I didn’t like the fact that even when he told her the flirting needed to stop, she never apologized to me for it even though she knew my email. I said that in life there are just some people who aren’t right and she was one of them. He said he felt like when he told her to tone it down and she did, that it was a settled matter. I said of course he did because he was never offended, he was flattered. I WAS OFFENDED and didn’t feel it was settled.

The next day, he lets me know he spoke to her about it. I’ll quote:

“Well if she wants an apology, I’ll give her one, but I’m not going to just apologize for nothing.”

So I sent her an email. I told her it no longer had anything to do with her. If I was ever going to get an actual and sincere apology out of her it wouldn’t need to be requested. I let her know that expecting anything like loyalty or propriety out of her was ridiculous considering she didn’t know me well enough to be loyal or have the maturity to have my understanding of social grace. I understood that it takes everyone a different amount of time to find enough real confidence in themselves to stop needing to seek the approval of others. That because I know these things, my big issue wasn’t with her but rather my boyfriend. Since I felt we needed to work through our problem and our problem came to light in regards to her, I wanted to work through it with her out of the picture.

She responded with an apology and said she understood how jealousy can make a person feel. She felt she had done nothing wrong since she and I first spoke when she didn’t know about me and was flirting.

I then realized that while my boyfriend may have spoken to her about the nature of their conversations, he obviously didn’t let her know what in particular spawned their talk and she had no clue I had ever known that she was telling him what guys can do to get her sooo hot. So I let her know that I had seen that, and this wasn’t about jealousy. I didn’t envy her or want anything she had. I felt she was disrespectful because she had met me, sat at my table and smiled in my face while eating my food and then turned around and made such a stupid comment that she knew full well she would never say in my presence. I didn’t hear from her after that and they stopped talking to the best of my knowledge.

This issue went back and forth between us for a while. Sometimes I would feel horrible that I asked him to get rid of a friend (another thing I’ve never done before!) and he would say he felt it would be easier to earn my trust back if he was still talking to her because he realized that his wrong was not being upfront from the start and making me wonder when I would find things that didn’t match up. If he was talking to her, he said, he could better show me he was being trust worthy by telling me when they hung out or if he called her. He understood now how it would feel now if he kept waking up to find me chatting on line all the time with some new guy friend he barely knew instead of curled up next to him. So I relented.

He would talk to her……..and I would try to be cool with it. While sometimes he didn’t pick up on it, I was never really cool with it. I didn’t want to be around her and hated the fact that anytime they hung out it would always be exclusive of me and their friendship would only get more familiar with time. It made no sense to me to become better friends with someone you couldn’t really include in your life. The female friends in our social circle knew of it because I would need to talk to someone now and then. They had a poor opinion of her as a result and she would’ve received a cold reception if he ever wanted to invite her to anything with our friends involved. Most importantly, it wasn’t helping me to stop checking on him and it was making me not even want to be affectionate or do nice things for him. He would call me on his way home from work and tell me about his day. He would mention her if he had seen or spoken to her because he was trying to be upfront and I would immediately feel like there was a stone in my gut. He would go on to say nice things to me and I couldn’t feel happy about what he would say. All I could feel was the stone. I started thinking of leaving him even though we had been together for over three years at this point.

The final straw was his birthday. I had had a really exhausting day at work and needed to go to the store to buy steaks for dinner and the ingredients for brownies in lue of a cake. Traffic was heinous and I drive stick. My phone rings and it’s him. He is all jolly. His boss had given him a bottle of whiskey and one of the food joints they frequent had sent over vegan foods for him to share with his coworkers. Girl I can’t stand had taken him to lunch and gave him a wind up robot toy. Enter Stone in my gut. He starts saying how he liked waking up to the stuffed hedgehog I got him and how much he loves me. I can’t enjoy a word of this. He tells me how much he loves the life we have. All I can think about is how I really don’t want to make him anything for dinner let alone have to try to drive to the grocery store in rush hour traffic while on the phone with him to get steak and brownies now. Love. You. Too. Sweetie. At the grocery store I am snappish; my son notices and asks me why I’m so mad. I tell him to hush up. I go home and make dinner so it’s ready when he comes through the door and the brownies are ready to be pulled out to cool for after our meal. He can tell I’m not the happiest girl. I am barely speaking. After we eat he wants to talk about what’s wrong. I crumble.

I tell him how his continuing a friendship with this girl makes me feel like he has little consideration for my emotions. I tell him what was going through my head while we were on the phone earlier. I tell him how I feel he cheated. Not physically, but cheated me out of the trust I had in him and his persistence in getting me to accept his friendship with a trifling hag made it feel like she was a bit more important to him than anyone needed to be in the short time he has known her. I tell him how much it bothers me that he lied to me and his consequences for lying is that he now is doing what he should’ve been doing in the first place and that it really didn’t help to wait until I hated the mere mention of her name to start mentioning it even when it was relevant. I didn’t feel like me anymore. I didn’t like how I was acting. I wanted me back. I wanted how we were before this back. He had moved back here to his hometown after we had been dating a year and after eight months I left everything familiar to follow him. I told him if we had gotten to this point in a place I was familiar with, I would’ve left him the moment I found that file of their logs but didn’t out of fear and I hated knowing that most of all. He was hurt and sorry. He said his consequence was not simply being more upfront; it was knowing he had made me feel like this. He told me he didn’t want me to ever be with him out of fear or lack of options, but I was the best thing that ever happened to him and he wanted to fix this. He would get rid of her.

Since I have heard this before, I had not stopped checking. I saw that he had called her a few times but didn’t get through. Ten days later, I say that he had called her and spoken with her. I figured he was likely telling her goodbye. That same night, I was headed for bed. I had been running a fever and achy. He asked me if anything was wrong. I said no (nothing was; I was hoping for the best) as far as I knew nothing was wrong. I said “Why, are you still talking to that girl and just not telling me?” He said no. I asked “Are you sure?” Well she had called him but he was too busy to talk to her. This tuned into a blow up fight! I said “No, YOU called her!”

“Did I? I don’t remember.”

“If you didn’t have time to talk to someone, why would you call them? And why are you still calling her? You said you’d get rid of her.”

He tried to tell me he thought getting rid of her meant just not hanging around her, which he hadn’t. Its such bull#^%$. Who doesn’t know “getting rid of” something means? And why are we back to lying and downplaying? Hollering last night became screaming this morning and I don’t know what to do anymore. He says he isn’t coming home tonight. He says he wants to come home to a girl who can see all he does for her and not just focus on the bad and check up on him. He seems unable to recognize that I didn’t come into this relationship as a snoop, that his seemingly purposeful inability to comprehend simple English phrase comes off like insincerity, and continuing to lie and omit things sort of validates my need to check on him.

So that’s my story of why lying is worse than cheating. Feel free to comment or give advice as this is a pretty current issue for me.

[starlite]

That was one LONG post!!!!

 

Sally, you must be one of the most understanding women on this board. I am definately still working on insecurity issues, but if my bf was out there getting random girls numbers, im screen names etc and making new 'friends' like this I would be pissed. It is one thing to be friendly when you run into someone...but constant phone/email contact...Why?

 

I guess I am just that way, i dont think my bf would appreciate me making a new male friend who called me all the time, especially if sex was being mentioned on any level.

 

I think you have gone about everything perfectly. He should dump her as a friend seeing as it effecting a very secure woman. That should tell him something. She shouldnt be that important to him as to upset you this much.

 

You are right, he is wrong. Dont forget that and lay down the law with it.

 

You may want to keep a watchful eye as well in case he does try to continue but hide it. I'm not saying he will....he needs to smarten up!

 

Good luck...you sound like a great catch and relationships deserve nothing but honesty!

 

Lying makes whatever "innocent" thing done guilty in my eyes.

[shadowplay]

Ugh, your anger is completely justified. It's totally inconsiderate for him to keep up contact with this girl knowing how much it hurts you and you've been more forgiving than most women would be. Unfortunately the fact that you're on his case about it (for good reason) probably makes him want to talk to her behind your back even more because he grew up in a strict household. It's a vicious cycle. At this point I might consider giving him an ultimatum. Either she or you. If he is caught lying again, you'll leave him. It has to end somewhere because it's tearing you apart.

[sally4sara]

See, the ultimatum thing; already been there. The result was a month hiatus that ended with him guilting me into relenting.

Last night's ultimatum resulted in him hollering about how everything he does is for me and I don't see that. Followed with a snide comment about how he will just do everything I tell him to from now on and I can pick all his friends cause thats happens in a healthy relationship. He wants me to focus more on the things he does for me and let the rest of it go. Otherwise he feels like all the good he does is for nothing.

As he put it. "I bring you home orange juice because you're sick and took your son to the diner so you wouldn't have to cook; brought you home a milkshake, and all of that prompts you to check up on me?"

He stated he won't be coming home tonight.

Yes he does nice things for me. Does the payment for that have to be putting up with lies?

[shadowplay]

Well how do you feel about him otherwise? Do you really love him? How invested in the relationship are you?

[sally4sara]

Turning a blind eye to all this?...........he is great. Smart, funny, cute. He does do nice things for me. Says nice things to me.

Am I invested? Oh yeah, to the point where I went into this without a safety net. We are unable to afford to live apart. Me more so for having a child to care for.

 

But I do these things for him too without giving him reason to doubt my commitment to him. I realize this isn't just about my trust in him; he obviously doesn't trust the people who profess they love him to continue to love him if he is truthful. I have pointed this out. I just don't know anymore how to assure him that he can count on me to love him as unconditionally as a human can and not put up with betrayal while doing so.

All of this leads me to my one big hangup: Why am I always the lesson teacher in relationships? Every stinking relationship I've had, I've been understanding and stabilizing to the guy while they repeatedly make their personal faux pas of choice and only learn they screwed up after I leave. The next girl gets the benefit of my work. Its maddening!

[starlite]

Last night's ultimatum resulted in him hollering about how everything he does is for me and I don't see that.

 

Oh, so all the lying and sneaking behind your back is for you? That's really sweet.

 

This side of him sounds very manipulitive.

 

He will have a very hard time finding someone who has been as understanding as you!

 

What a jerk!

[sally4sara]

Oh, so all the lying and sneaking behind your back is for you? That's really sweet.

 

This side of him sounds very manipulitive.

 

He will have a very hard time finding someone who has been as understanding as you!

 

What a jerk!

 

Pretty much and add to that, my expressing to him how these actions make me feel reaps:

 

"go ahead tell me more about how I'm a douchbag!"

 

If you hear someone speak of your actions and your actions make you sound like a douchbag, isn't it likely you're acting like a douchbag?