Dear alina:

Your story reminds me how important it is, when one is in a relationship (and some time after a relatioship breaks up) to not unecessarly expose the other person to images of romance/ sexual gestures with a third party: not on social media and not by telling the other person unecessarily about a sexual encounter, which is what your boyfriend did.

“I know he regrets it and loves me… We were each other’s firsts and I thought we would be each other’s lasts… I just wanna get over it, but all I can do is come up with new questions: was it night or day? Where were they?… Did he enjoy it a lot?… These questions are eating me alive. I don’t know what to do to get rid of them” –

-I think that it is so very rare for two people in our modern world to be each other’s firsts and lasts, that it is very close to being a fantasy. For the great majority of people, 99.99% I am guessing, this is pure fantasy. I learned that the more alligned our thinking is with Reality, vs Fantasy, the less emotional pain we experience.

To ger rid of the images, you will need first to… no longer want to get rid of them. The more you want to get rid of them,  the longer they’ll stay. As difficult and as weird as it may sound, try to accept these images, to relax as they appear in your mind, to not get alarmed.. and to not hate these images.

When an image or a thought appears in regard to your boyfriend having slept with another woman, take a slow, deep breath, inhale, and say to yourself: I accept this image, then slowly exhale and say to yourself: this image is leaving my mind and body. Do this repeatedly and let me know how it works, will you?

anita

Dear alina:

You are welcome. I re-read your original post this morning because I didn’t read it thoroughly yesterday, and I will comment further:

1) I can understand how the pictures of you drinking and partying with young men (and young women) overnight would very much distress him. After all, much more often than not, drinking and partying overnight includes sex because alcohol lowers inhibition. I wonder how close you were to having sex with a young man on that overnight occasion, if you were approached in a different way, or circumstances were a bit different than they were. If (if) he is guilty for having sex with another woman while the two of you were not in a relationship at the time, then you are guilty for being close enough to having sex with another man.

2) In your original post, you wrote: “He told me he couldn’t live with himself if he kept it a secret”. In your second post, you wrote: “the thought of something like this being kept away from me is unbrearable” – so now that the situation is no longer kept away from you, it should be… bearable for you, right? Try to focus on the situation being better now than it was before: he can now live with himself and the thought that you do  know what happened is bearable.

3) After he revealed it to you, you brought it up a lot, and he told you that “he didn’t wanna talk about a mistake that hurt him deeply too, and that man was gone and it was unfair of me to keep bringing it up” – I think that he is correct, and that it is important that you do not bring it up to him anymore. If you do, it will be punishing him for what you both believe was the right thing to do. Why would one want to continue to do what’s right, if one is punished for it?

4) Next time you are with him and the distressing thoughts and images replay in your mind, don’t tell him about it, don’t try to get him to make you feel better (it will make him feel worse and in return, it will make you feel worse). Endure the distress without expressing it to him in words. Take a few deep, slow breaths and say to yourself things like: this is not happening now. It happened long ago, it’s in the past. I am not in danger. I am not being replaced. I am safe now.

I hope you do check back with me and post again!

anita

Dear alina:

You are welcome. I think that you are a decent, honest young woman and therefore, it’s a pleasure to communicate with you.

“I still let him give me attention… I know I’m wrong for that” – I don’t know if you were wrong for that. There was a breakup from one guy and you let another give you attention. On your boyfriend’s end (at the time, your ex boyfriend), he was engaged in something similar that quickly, I imagine, turned into sexual intercourse. None of you were wrong (assuming that he practived safe sex), a I see it, just human.

“what bothers me is that fact that he… made sure I knew I did something wrong… all the while he hid the fact he slept with someone else” –  first, again, I don’t see a wrongdoing.  But generally, it’s almost always easier to look at someone else’s wrongdoing and guilt than it is to look at oneself. It is easier to look outside of ourselves than it is to look inside ourselves.

I’d say, look at your boyfriend’s behavior overall: is he in the habit of blaming others and not taking any blame for himself? If he does take responsibility for his behavior on a regular basis, even if imperfectly (no one is perfect) then what happened during the break in the relationship and him not telling you about it… can be forgiven, from my point of view.

I suppose it will be important to not have another break in the relationship, unless it’s a final breakup, right?

anita

Dear alina;

The pleasure is mutual then. About giving the other guy false hope because you knew at the time that you’d go back to your boyfriend if he reached out to you… if the duration of the time he could have had false hope was short, an hour or two, or a day or two, and if during that time, he didn’t spend significant money on you. or any other material resource, then it’s not a wrongdoing on your part because such interactions between young men and women are business as usual: people talking with each other, liking each other, then getting distracted, then liking someone else, etc. Does this make sense to you, or am I missing something?

In regard to your boyfriend making progress in taking responsibility for his behavior because of his relationship with you- that’s wonderful!

anita

I reactivated my account just to respond to this thread. I was exactly where you are 6 years ago. I actually was on this thread and Anita helped me so much.

I’m just here to say if you’re committed, he’s committed, and you think he’s the one… you 100% can get through this. I struggled for YEARS to get over what my boyfriend did when we weren’t together. I’m taking 2-3 years, it’s not easy. Some years I thought about it daily. I thought I would never get over it. But finally, one day… I decided to forgive and move on. One day of not talking about it, turned into 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, and now here we are 3 years later the strongest and happiest we’ve ever been in our relationship. We actually got engaged last year in Hawaii. We’re currently planning our wedding.

I like to think that situation prepped us to become so much stronger. Because of everything we went through at the beginning of our relationship as teenagers, we’ve become such a strong unit. We know the importance of communication, honesty, commitment. I like to think I won the lottery going through this young and at the beginning, most people that deal with anything similar to this is later on in life, years after marriage. Because we dealt with this so young, we’ve been able to have such a solid foundation.

I’m here to give you hope. But you both have to make the commitment and changes necessary to make this relationship work, if so… it could end up being the best decision you ever made.

I need help and am kind of on the same page. My boyfriend and I broke up for three weeks. He had sex with someone else and now (three months later) still talks/snapchats her. He says he will not stop talking to her because they are friends but he only loves me. What should I do? Please help.