Can our love survive broken trust?
Question
I am 20 years old, a recovered anorexic and I have been living with my boyfriend for two years. While our relationship started beautifully, I have struggled deeply with trust and my own insecurities ever since.
When we first got together, he made me feel loved and accepted, something I had not felt in a long time. He helped me heal from years of anorexia and made me feel pretty for the first time. A couple of months into the relationship, I found disturbing porn on his computer, which he had always said he hated and it felt like a betrayal. Even thought I have never neglected him, I began wondering I was enough for him. I am tall and thin, not perfectly curvy, but not unattractive either. I could not understand why he wanted to look at those things.
Later, I found explicit messages between him and another woman. He called her pet names that I had told him I liked, and their conversations were sweet and romantic. When I confronted him, he denied it at first but eventually admitted the truth and promised it would not happen again. For a while, I tried to trust him, but the doubt lingered.
Then I found more messages with a different woman, someone he had been friends with for years. He was flirting, using the same cute nicknames he used with me and telling her he missed her. She has a boyfriend and did not seem interested, but it crushed me. I realized I could not trust him, and every affectionate word from him felt like a lie.
I have struggled with jealousy, insecurity, and depression since then. I even considered suicide. Despite his love and kindness—he is the caring, patient partner anyone would want—I cannot shake the feeling that I am not enough for him. I have tried makeovers and self-help books, but nothing works. I have stopped eating again because it distracts me and gives me a sense of control, even though I know it is unhealthy.
I am afraid to take antidepressants because I feel they would only mask the problem, not solve it. I want to stop seeing him as someone who is hurting me and start accepting myself without feeling so broken and small.
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Answer
A complex and yet commonplace song you sing. On the one hand, my heart goes out to you, for you are clearly trying very hard to do the right thing, and you are in pain. I wish very much there was a magic wand to wave, but there isn’t. Relationships are just difficult things, primarily because people have different ideas and attitudes and needs and often find themselves at odds no matter how much they love each other. The measure of a relationship that works is that the two partners are able to find ways to compromise on what they mutually need so as not to feel that either is getting taken advantage of.
Which brings me to the other hand. You’re asking a lot from this man; in some ways you’re asking him to be something he maybe is not, which is exclusively attracted to you and only to you. That is asking a lot from any man. It would be asking a lot from most women too. It is quite reasonable to expect that a romantic relationship partner should be faithful and committed; it is a whole other thing to expect that he’ll never feel attracted to another woman, never flirt, never fantasize about anyone other than your one self. Most men, and a few women too, seem to be attracted by sexual and romantic variety. They may never consumate such extra-relationship interests, but such interests will cross their minds from time to time. This is not a statement about your lack of adequacy as a sexual partner, but rather just a general statement about men. Even men who are very satisfied with their relationships will ocassionally be drawn to others and/or want to flirt with others. Men know that many women don’t like this about them, and so they cover up these interests, with varying degrees of success.
We could understand your boyfriend to be a casanova type who is into seducing as many women as he can, but that doesn’t seem to be accurate. You caught him flirting with another woman two months into your relationship, when your relationship was still only forming. He misrepresented himself as more like you than he may really be politically, but at that time, it was early in the relationship, and he was probably trying to impress you. It doesn’t necessarily mean much. Later you found him flirting (and only flirting) with an old friend, and when that bothered you, he stopped, and things have been good since then so far as you know (and you appear to be checking up on him so you might know more than many women would). This is not a bad track record, so far as I can tell.
At some level, your discomfort is maybe more about your own feelings of inadequacy and unrealistic expectations about what you are supposed to be as a woman than they are about what your boyfriend has done. I don’t think it is realistic for you to think that he’ll never want to flirt with another woman ever again. The best you can reasonably hope for is that he will refrain from such activity because he loves you and doesn’t want to hurt you and because your own relationship with him is fun and engaging enough that he is happily distracted back towards you and lets those momentary fantasies drop away. Your worth cannot be measured by how any man reacts towards you, anyway. You are an independent person and are not here on this earth to merely please another person. You are worthy independently of any boyfriend. To the extent that you don’t understand this truth in your gut, you will not feel particularly safe, I don’t think, in any relationship. You need to work on accepting yourself better, positives and negatives all, and not judging yourself too harshly.
Lastly, please consider that you may actually be depressed enough to benefit from clinical treatment, and that you should not prejudge the usefulness of such treatment until you give it a good try. “happy pills” (aka anti-depressants) are not a simple coverup for a problem; they help make it possible to solve that problem, and from allowing that problem to get too out of hand. If you don’t want medication, you ought to consider cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for depression. CBT might be a very good match for you inasmuch as your expectations are leading you to feel depressed. CBT is all about teaching you how to identify expectations and then reality-test them to see whether they should be modified or not.