Dear Ali:

You are welcome. You wrote that you want to follow my advice on the BLOGS. I never blogged before and have no input in the Home Page. I am a member here on the Forums just like you, only I do post a whole lot.

I will attend to your original post more attentively so to answer your question, if your overthinking is exaggerated in the context of the reality of what happened:

You met C four years ago, 2014. You and him were 20 and 21 at the time. You talked from time to time, nothing serious. You then pursued another guy, stopped talking with C, then went back talking to C when the relationship with the other guy didn’t work out. A more serious relationship with C developed. C told you about his ex D.

C later found out that while in a relationship with him, you still talked to an ex boyfriend, and that while you were talking with him earlier, before it was serious (Dec 2014), you hooked up with another guy. C was “completely devastated and ended things with me because I hid those things from him”. You then pursued him and got back together April 2015. You asked him if during the separation he met up with D and he said he didn’t meet her or talk to her.

Later, one night he was drunk, D called him, he told her he was with you, she told him that she saw a missed call from him, he told her she is a liar. Later he blocked her. A month or so later, on a trip, you checked up his phone and went through “EVERYTHING, phone calls, Messenger, Facebook… couldn’t find a thing, so I moved to his phone pictures” and found out that he had a conversation with her. This time it was you who were devastated. A month later you had a fight and you talked to an ex boyfriend of yours. You told C that you didn’t, he found out that you did, was bothered, but the two of you made up.

A month or so later he left for another country as an exchange student, before he left the two of you decided that you “weren’t officially boyfriend and girlfriend”, but you continued to talk, saying I-love-you to each other and promised each other “that we would not date anyone else, or if we wanted, we would tell each other.”

When he returned from Germany, July 2016, he posted a picture of the two of you in social media saying how much he loved you and missed you. Sometime in October he didn’t answer his phone, you looked for his car in the library parking lot, it wasn’t there. When you talked to him he told you that he was at the library. You then told him that you checked and his car wasn’t there at the parking lot. He then told you that he lied, that he didn’t study at the library, but instead, he and a group of other students studied in a girl’s house but he was afraid to tell you that because “she was a GIRL”.

You wrote: “I didn’t believe but he swore and swore, and told me I needed to stop being paranoid and stalking him around”. You then asked a guy he was with if they were together, you suspected the two of them planned to lie to you, then C showed you the conversation between the two of them “and it was innocent just two dudes talking stuff, he even showed me the work they had made”.

Later on that month the two of you had a romantic dinner and decided on being officially boyfriend and girlfriend, October 2016.

You wrote: “Maybe I shouldn’t have believed him. But every time I have felt doubtful about him, he has shown me the truth”. You wrote, “he told me he wouldn’t be with me for so long if he wanted to be with someone else”. You wrote that this doubting him has been going for two years by this point, Oct 2016- (soon to be) Oct 2018. You wrote that you “constantly check her (D’s) up on her social media, EVERY SINGLE DAY” and overthink a whole lot, from time to time about whether he was with D  or with someone else.

Now my input at this point: yes, are clearly overthinking to the point of obsession, and that there is nothing in his behavior that is evidence that he was with another woman at any time while you and him have promised exclusivity to each other. He wasn’t perfectly honest with you but neither have you been perfectly honest with him. Given your ongoing suspicion of him, it is believable to me that he would not tell you that he and a friend or friends studied at a girl’s house. Not because he was sexual with the girl, but because he didn’t want to awaken your suspicion.

My concern about him is that he referred to another woman as “easy meat”, and that you may be okay with this term and attitude- is this his attitude toward women, or some women, easy meat? And are you okay with it?

anita

Dear Ali:

Anxiety is ongoing fear, fear from long ago that was not settled. Unsettled, it keeps interrupting our lives. If is similar to this: a lioness spots a deer, the deer notices, immediately the deer experiences fear. Fear is the most powerful emotion in nature. The reason it is the most powerful, that is, it causes more distress than any other emotion, is because the animal needs to motivate to act immediately and use a lot of energy in doing so (running away or fighting).

Feeling the intense distress of fear, the deer immediately runs and escapes the lioness. Having escaped, it relaxes, the fear is settled and the deer resumes eating and living like before.

But what happens if the deer is stuck in a cage with the lioness, and let’s say the lioness is tied to a post so it can’t reach the deer, but the deer doesn’t know it. The deer feels in danger on an ongoing basis and it has nowhere to run. In this scenario the fear does not settle. Over time, the deer develops anxiety and even when freed from the cage and the threatening lioness, its fear is still unsettled. It has become and continues to be unsettled and gets reactivated again and again, aka anxiety.

We humans often find ourselves in a cage. For too many of us, unfortunately, the cage is our childhood home. The threat is not that we will be eaten alive. Instead the threat is being hit or yelled at, or hearing people yelling and fighting, and/or being rejected, insulted, and so forth. And children have no way to run away. The fear is ongoing and it becomes anxiety, even when freed from the cage, that is, even when leaving the childhood home.

What do you think/feel at this point?

anita