Mimikyu

I appreciate you all so much for responding and I hope I don’t seem argumentative, it’s just a lot going on to put in a post and I hope no one is getting the wrong idea. I’m not here to hurt anyone or try and own them. 😰 I just really was not expecting this from this person and there are many things we are very close about and are okay with that I know a lot of other relationships have stronger boundaries for . We don’t particularly have a toxic relationship. This just something that surprised me and hurt me very much from who I consider my best friend, not just a partner to control. 😞

@yogacat also he picks up my phone and goes through it when I’m sleeping all the time. It’s a boundary we have set in the past that we don’t mind each other doing, which I realize can be toxic for others - and I don’t grab his phone all the time like I own it. But since I know he is okay with me doing so is why I did, and I fear that this could have happened multiple other times and he just forgot to delete that history this time..

@yogacat it does scare me and it’s why I feel sort of a huge wake up call like I was deep in love this entire time with someone who said they were not interested in something like that and just completely have been showing a different side of himself all of the sudden. It’s just not something we’ve dealt with together in our relationship. I see what you’re saying about threatening his autonomy and please know that I definitely do understand boundaries and there are many things I don’t question and don’t expect him to tell me at all. I apologize if I made it seem like he has to tell me his every thought and action. I know he needs to keep his individuality and especially whenever he steps away to call his parents or something like that and be alone, I completely respect it wholeheartedly. It’s just this particularly feels like a breach of trust and understanding in the intimate side of our relationship that we had an emotional connection over and so it’s just messing with me

@DarkCh0c0 I completely agree that this entire thing moved very quickly, and I was very hesitant and scared to commit to it but honestly I had never felt more safe in my life at the time as at first I was living on my own in another state but really wasn’t happy. Upon meeting me he decided to get his own place just so that I could come be with him. I flew out to him in his hometown to meet him for the first time, but still held onto my lease just in case at any point I felt uncomfortable. He was constantly begging me to just never leave and he took such good care of me. He ended up driving 14 hours with me just to help me pack up all of my things so I could move in with him and he helped pay to end my lease early. I was only committing to a few months of living with him at that time but when it came time to make the decision if we wanted to continue or not, I just knew I wanted to go back to my home to be closer to my family. He insisted he wanted to come with me and I held it off for as long as I could to be entirely sure that’s what I wanted and was comfortable with. I ended up making the decision to commit to another lease to him in my home state now, and our lives just completely changed. It’s more expensive here and so he had got a more demanding job with lots of required overtime just to have extra money, (even though I also work full time and it isn’t really needed) and it’s been completely burning him out he’s turning into a different person. I’ve tried helping him look for other jobs and even have had multiple conversations with him that despite how appreciative I am of him for working so hard, it really isn’t worth the lack of time we get to spend with each other. He also has stopped taking as much good care of himself, to which I’ve tried to intervene many times and a lot of the time I feel like his mom constantly reminding him of simple things. I expressed to him that I really am not happy with the situation and he’s been trying to change it. But as of lately he’s been weird, hiding things from me, and now even this weird intimacy problem, feels like a breaking point for me. You’re right, it’s like the honey moon phase has ended and I’m actually seeing who he is when he just lets himself go. Before this, he was very head strong and would change things if they were not working out for the better for him or for me. He also was not so distant from me. Honestly, this behavior is a deal breaker for me and I told him I wanted to end things as we did have a conversation about it again and I said this is really just getting out of hand at this point. He begged me to let him fix it and said he is still the person I knew when I met him. I don’t know how much I can trust that right now.. I don’t know if he’ll hurt me like this again. Part of me feels like it’s just hard times and I have to accept it and also part of me feels like any relationship I’ve ever been in I’m always the one who is much more intimate and cares about these things like actual true monogamy where you only desire your partner and don’t do these things behind their back. I feel like I’m just going to keep getting hurt no matter who it is if I can’t accept peoples natural temptations

Hello @smackie9 , thank you so much for responding to my post and I respect your opinion! What you say truly does make me feel better in the aspect of the purpose of him watching and the exact nature of it. When it comes to having private time and being in an intimate relationship with your partner though, at least for me, I feel like it’s healthy for each other to be open with what we do in our private times. I don’t hide anything I do from him.. we are both in our 20s and maybe this is something I’m going to have to get over? It makes accepting this behavior really hard for me though because I feel like open honesty and transparency is extremely important to me in a relationship , I could be asking for too much though from a human. I know I don’t own them, but I guess maybe that’s just a fantasy of mine that I would want from a partner because I enjoy to give transparency myself . 😖

I have been dating my boyfriend for a year and a half now. We have been living together for a year. When we first got together, I asked him if he watched porn. He was honest and told me yes, why? I let him know honestly it was a turn off for me, and that I personally don’t find myself to be compatible with someone who regularly enjoys that. He completely understood and actually agreed with me that it isn’t desirable in a relationship and he is only interested in me… and so I didn’t find it to be controlling for me at all to request him to stop doing this. Anyways, throughout the entirety of our relationship, he has been the most sincere, caring man I’ve ever met who is always connecting with me on very deep emotional levels. He constantly enjoys reminding me how he is only mine and lately while he’s working overtime he tells me all day how he just wants to come home to me and pleasure me. Sorry for the long introduction, but this brings me to I suppose why I felt extremely hurt when I woke up from a nap and realized he had gotten home from work, and I heard weird noises coming from the bathroom, so I walked in there to find him watching a girl getting railed while he was masturbating. A girl who looked absolutely nothing like me with a completely different body type. I started crying and had to leave. I haven’t been trying to make him feel like a horrible person for it but it really did hurt me because I never expected this from him. He told me he wouldn’t ever do that again and that his work life has been making him feel foggy and that isn’t the type of person he wants to be. We have been fixing things since then. Please don’t condemn me, but since this has been in my mind, tonight I couldn’t help myself and decided to look through his phone history. I discovered there was one other day he was watching porn. This particularly hurt me 10x more because on this specific day, he had come home from work acting very erratic and stressed. He promised he would never take these things out on me and I give him space where need be. But on this day he was even slightly rude to me unprovoked, and I was purposely sitting in the other room without bothering him, despite it hurting me how he was ignoring me and acting so harsh, and come to find out it was that same day that instead of being intimate with me or showing me any kind of attention, he was watching porn. I recall now he spent a long time in the bathroom that day. I think what hurts most is how he treated me that day, and now I’m finding this out weeks later, and also the fact that he hid it all from me and the only reason I know about these 2 occasions is from me finding out on my own. It feels like a slap in the face and I don’t know how to feel anymore, because now everything I felt about his personality and how he will end up treating me in our relationship for the future feels like a huge change to me. I just feel like now there’s a part of him I don’t know. I’m not going to sit here in denial and assume he won’t ever hide this from me again. And honestly I’m not open to being okay with it.. I’ve read many many forums about other people explaining why I should not feel personally offended, and how men are wired differently than women, and don’t feel an emotional connection when doing this. It’s not that I’m insecure about myself, it’s just that men who are attracted to watching porn, especially when I’m in the other room, truly just turn me off. And I know not every man is into that sort of thing.. This man is particularly a huge sweetheart though, and I get that for most it is pure stress relief. But I can’t look passed him hiding things from me and I really don’t know where to take things from here I am just so so hurt and feel betrayed. I feel like I knew him so well and now I feel like I live with a stranger. I’m sorry if that sounds dramatic but that is just truly how I feel. I honestly just think I shouldn’t be in a relationship at this point, because I feel like people responding to this post, if any, would tell me I’m wishing for a Cinderella story in a real world where fairy tales just don’t exist, as I’ve been told before. I just have to either accept this and temptations or be alone, right? Thank you if you took the time to read my post and for responding kindly. I really am not trying to be shallow and I have no one else to talk to about this.