My girlfriend moved back home across the country to stay with her parents while she finished school. Almost immediately after arriving she met up with a friend with benefits she had and slept with him. It was a four hour drive to his city, so this was no "I ran into him at the bar" scenario. She also admitted to looking up people on OkCupid and going out for drinks with them when she had told me she was going to sleep. On one of those occasions she said she got drunk, went back to the guys house and went for a swim in his pool. Afterwards she took a shower, and she said he came in the bathroom and got in the shower with her, then she got upset with him, got out of the shower and left his house.
She admitted these things to me maybe a month or so after they occurred. This was 5 or 6 months ago.
Initially the news shook me up a bit, but I'm generally of the mindset that cheating can happen, and it doesn't have to mean the definite end of a relationship. Additionally, I had expressed my desire to try an open relationship with my girlfriend in the past, so the idea of her sleeping with another guy had already been in my mind, although under more truthful and fair circumstances. She flat out rejected this suggestion from me.
I stopped feeling upset about the cheating fairly quickly. I didn't feel mad at her anymore.
The issue is that now she is back living with me for about a month now, I get skeptical of her whenever she mentions male friends, specifically a guy in her class she does a study group with, and whom she has mentioned she may meet up with at some point for school related work. She has offered to have him over to our house to study so I could meet him if it would make me feel better.
I don't want to be the controlling boyfriend, so generally I just ignore these feelings and don't mention anything, but every once in a while they will come up and I will get skeptical about who she is with or what she is doing. She gets upset when I mention how I'm feeling, saying I don't trust her, and all I can really tell her is that sometimes those feelings are going to come up, and it's not exactly my fault that I feel this way.
It's also pretty upsetting that from very early in our relationship I had mentioned that I had always wanted to try an open relationship, and she said it was something that she was adamantly against, but then goes and behaves that way, when she could have just agreed to try it out. Another thing that bothers me is that she is always very skeptical about my plans and who I'm talking to, even though I've never done anything to break her trust. It seems very hypocritical.
I'm just curious what I could do to stop feeling paranoid when she meets a new male friend. Sometimes I'll even just think about her past infidelity and that will trigger some skepticism about her.
Am I wrong in feeling / behaving this way? Do I have a right to ask for extra proof about her whereabouts based on her past behavior? I'm sure this will pass eventually once she's earned my trust back but is there any way to make it go faster? Or is it healthier to feel it out and let it run it's course?
EDIT: to clarify, this is not a non stop debilitating paranoia or anything like that. It comes up infrequently when she mentions meeting a male classmate, or something similar, and then all of a sudden I'm wondering if she really is working late that night, or why it's taken her four hours to text me back when she said she's just hanging out at home while I'm at work. It usually goes away after a few days and then we're back to being a happy loving couple.
thatthrowaway4713 karma
How do you get over an infidelity?
My girlfriend moved back home across the country to stay with her parents while she finished school. Almost immediately after arriving she met up with a friend with benefits she had and slept with him. It was a four hour drive to his city, so this was no "I ran into him at the bar" scenario. She also admitted to looking up people on OkCupid and going out for drinks with them when she had told me she was going to sleep. On one of those occasions she said she got drunk, went back to the guys house and went for a swim in his pool. Afterwards she took a shower, and she said he came in the bathroom and got in the shower with her, then she got upset with him, got out of the shower and left his house.
She admitted these things to me maybe a month or so after they occurred. This was 5 or 6 months ago.
Initially the news shook me up a bit, but I'm generally of the mindset that cheating can happen, and it doesn't have to mean the definite end of a relationship. Additionally, I had expressed my desire to try an open relationship with my girlfriend in the past, so the idea of her sleeping with another guy had already been in my mind, although under more truthful and fair circumstances. She flat out rejected this suggestion from me.
I stopped feeling upset about the cheating fairly quickly. I didn't feel mad at her anymore.
The issue is that now she is back living with me for about a month now, I get skeptical of her whenever she mentions male friends, specifically a guy in her class she does a study group with, and whom she has mentioned she may meet up with at some point for school related work. She has offered to have him over to our house to study so I could meet him if it would make me feel better.
I don't want to be the controlling boyfriend, so generally I just ignore these feelings and don't mention anything, but every once in a while they will come up and I will get skeptical about who she is with or what she is doing. She gets upset when I mention how I'm feeling, saying I don't trust her, and all I can really tell her is that sometimes those feelings are going to come up, and it's not exactly my fault that I feel this way.
It's also pretty upsetting that from very early in our relationship I had mentioned that I had always wanted to try an open relationship, and she said it was something that she was adamantly against, but then goes and behaves that way, when she could have just agreed to try it out. Another thing that bothers me is that she is always very skeptical about my plans and who I'm talking to, even though I've never done anything to break her trust. It seems very hypocritical.
I'm just curious what I could do to stop feeling paranoid when she meets a new male friend. Sometimes I'll even just think about her past infidelity and that will trigger some skepticism about her.
Am I wrong in feeling / behaving this way? Do I have a right to ask for extra proof about her whereabouts based on her past behavior? I'm sure this will pass eventually once she's earned my trust back but is there any way to make it go faster? Or is it healthier to feel it out and let it run it's course?
EDIT: to clarify, this is not a non stop debilitating paranoia or anything like that. It comes up infrequently when she mentions meeting a male classmate, or something similar, and then all of a sudden I'm wondering if she really is working late that night, or why it's taken her four hours to text me back when she said she's just hanging out at home while I'm at work. It usually goes away after a few days and then we're back to being a happy loving couple.
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