Dear Sasha,I have an issue with trusting my boyfriend with regards to communicating with his ex. They broke up in March 2011, after a 7 year relationship and being engaged. This February, I discovered emails dating from September -December 2011 showing that he was in frequent communication with her. She would email him if she had a bad dream, and she would send him food from her father's store while he was at work. He also saw a romantic movie with her, and lied about having to work the day after thanksgiving when he actually went to see her. He never told me about any of this. Did I mention that we live together? The worst part was that I found unsent love letters to her in his draftbox, saying he was a better person when he was with her and he wanted to get back together with her. I was devastated. He told me he never actually cheated, and that he chose to be with me. The email drafts were his way of working things out. For some reason, I believed him. He told me if he ever had any contact with her again, he'd let me know.
Lo' and behold, he went for a run on Saturday and for the first time in many months, I decided to check his phone. Just the day before, his ex had texted him asking if she could meet him. He said he would call her back and there was a call history. He didn't tell me about it.
I called him out on it and he said: 1) I didn't have a right to go through his phone; 2) It wasn't a big deal so he didn't want to tell me about it; 3) I didn't have a right to know about their conversation, because she was upset when she called. What should I do? L
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An easy trick to figure out what to do in a situation like this is: think about your problem, then ask yourself what you would say if your best friend in the whole wide world was going through the same scenario. So L, tell me, how would you encourage someone you loved and cared about in this situation?
If it were my friend, I'd tell them to open their eyes and get to steppin’. Or f-ck, at the very least, make sure they went head to head with their man to figure out what was really going down. Listen, L, I know you’re smart enough to know that your dude is playing you. It’s not normal to have interactions like this with your ex and it sure as hell isn’t normal to lie about it. If it’s all on the up and up then it shouldn’t be some big secret.
So it’s time to face up to your fears and get to the bottom of what’s going on here. My gut feeling is that this isn't some innocent cathartic friendship, and I think the biggest red flag is that he’s pretending that it is. Sorry, but I don’t buy it and L, I don’t think you should either.
Thanks for writing in and keep me posted! xx
Photo from Distortrait
