Two couples tried traveling together: Why one split, the other married USA TODAY
* This article was originally published here
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Monday, August 26, 2024
Bothered about New Gfs Ability to Lie
I (29m) have been seeing this woman (34f) for about 2 months now and everything seems to be going well. We are teetering on entering the "boyfriend/girlfriend" stage, but we spent this weekend together and something happened that freaked me out a little.
I had bought us a bottle of her favorite tequila to enjoy together over the weekend and we drank a little bit Friday night. Saturday we spent the morning + afternoon at my place and I noticed she was extra affectionate and slurring her words a bit. She smelled of alcohol but I thought maybe she was just sweating out what we had drank the night before. She fell asleep on the couch once when I was home and when I came back from a mid-afternoon haircut she was also passed out. Again, I thought nothing of it because we were just having a lazy day. Fast forward to later that night when we get back from our dinner date, I ask if she wants a shot of that tequila; she agrees. I walk over to the fridge to find almost the entire bottle drank. When I asked her about it she said she didn't touch it and didn't know what happened to it. I recounted the her behaviour and thought it was very obvious she had been drinking throughout the day looking back, but when I pressed a little bit she got standoffish and promised me that she didn't touch it once again.I live alone and other than her dog no one else was in my apartment all weekend.
I don't care about the alcohol being gone, I bought it for us to enjoy and she didn't have anywhere to be. I do care though that she was able to lie to me about it without pause and keep up the lie without much effort. I asked her again the next morning, telling her I dont care about the booze just that I was freaked out it seemed like she was lying. She swore on my life that she didn't touch it so I backed off because I wasn't getting anywhere.
Other than this everything has been great, but I don't want this to plant a seed that breaks our trust going forward.
Should I try to confront her about it again? Am I overthinking this?
TLDR: my new girlfriend drank a bunch of alcohol at my place behind my back and lied about it. I worry about breaking trust this early and wonder if I should confront her about it a third time to try and get her to come clean.
Any advice/opinions are welcome. Thanks!
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* This article was originally published here
Sunday, August 25, 2024
Me [23m] and my girlfriend [23f] keep discussing breaking up, but we struggle to do it because our relationship has many positive aspects.
TL;DR We've been in a 6-month relationship that started out wonderfully, but now it's on the verge of breaking up due to arguments and feelings of being pushed away.
We've been in the relationship for only 6 months, and we've been having a lot of arguments. In the beginning, everything was great. The first 2-3 months were romantic, and we were deeply in love. However, my partner started experiencing intense emotions during her periods, despite being on birth control. I tried to comfort her and show empathy, but I noticed that these emotional episodes were often directed at me. As time went on, these episodes became more frequent, especially during our 2-month trip to Asia. The trip started well, but we experienced a major disagreement that hurt me deeply. Though we managed to resolve it, similar 'hiccups' kept occurring over small issues throughout the trip. We both made mistakes, but we always reconciled and grew stronger. However, the arguments always seemed to start with her complaints about me, and I began feeling worn out. Despite this, I don't want to paint her in a negative light. I simply want her to be happy. We were supposed to go to Hong Kong together to meet her family, but we decided against it due to the frequent disagreements. I ended up flying back from Bangkok alone. Now that we're back home, we're on the brink of breaking up because of these ongoing issues. I'm unsure whether I should fight for the relationship, as we have many positive aspects. The whole trip was wonderful apart from the arguments. The arguments that are always aimed at me every time just really get to me because I've never tried this hard and put this much effort with a female ever. It would be heart wrenching to lose her. I'd appreciate advice from anyone who's been in a similar situation or any helpful insights. Thank you.
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* This article was originally published here
Saturday, August 24, 2024
[Update] I (M28) didn’t want to talk to my GF (F27) about our past sexual experiences. Now that it’s all out there, I feel weird and I’m not sure how to reconcile
Original post : https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/s/5steioqyxg
If there is one place to get good relationship advice, it’s from strangers on Reddit. So here we go.
I have been dating my girlfriend for about 2 and a half years. I love her very much and I know that she feels the same way about me. Our relationship is good. We do fun things together, have deep conversations, laugh together, and both clearly love and prioritize eachother. She is my first long-term relationship and I am considering proposing soon.
Something that continually came up in our relationship is that my girlfriend was curious about how many people I had slept with before being with her and wanted to know about my previous relationships and sexual experiences. I didn’t want to tell her my number and I didn’t want to know hers.
Every time it came up, I told her that I didn’t think anything good could come of the conversation and who we were with before we were together shouldn’t matter since we are together now, committed to each-other, and don’t have any stds.
She said that she wants to know everything about me, and that me not telling her my number felt like I was hiding something from her and that it felt like there was a barrier between us that was affecting how much should could trust me and be intimate with me. This was very frustrating.
My opinion on the number of people that someone has slept with is that I would really rather not focus on it. I know that (unless they are a virgin) that anyone I date will have had sex with people before me. I think it is unsavory for anyone to think about their partner being intimate with someone else (unless they are into that sort of thing), so it seems sensible to me to just not go there. No matter what the number is for my partner, I would rather just not focus on that and instead focus on our relationship.
(I understand that there are statistics out there that say that people that have slept with a lot of people in the past are less likely to be able to maintain a long-term monogamous relationship. My take on that is that you don’t really need to know if someone has slept with a lot of people before you because people can change and if they are the sort of person who won’t be satisfied by one person, that will manifest itself in all sorts of ways.)
To give some context on the situation, I think it is necessary to summarize some of my background.
I struggled with dating for the most part growing up. I never had a girlfriend in highschool or college and struggled with confidence for a big chunk of my life due to bullying and other factors. From the outside, you would never know. I presented myself as a confident and successful dude, and upon meeting me, you probably would’ve never guessed that I had a hard time with relationships.
For years, I worked on all of the external factors, like going to the gym, progressing in my career, and improving my conversational skills (particularly with the opposite sex). I would have flings with girls and occasionally get laid, but deep romantic connections and relationships always eluded me. My mom one time asked me if I was gay. It seems like so much of your worth as a man is wrapped up in how attractive you are to women and how many successful relationships you’ve had with women, and I felt so much shame at my inability to get a girlfriend.
It seemed like every time I was actually interested in someone, it would fall apart. This made me feel like I was unlovable.
It got so bad that I became depressed and started considering suicide. I knew that something had to change.
I went to therapy and made a lot of progress on feeling better about myself. I came to learn that what was holding me back was how I felt about myself and the fact that I wasn’t myself with women I was attracted to. I was putting on a facade and coming across as needy (because I was). I started to believe that if I could detach from the outcome of any given courtship and just genuinely be myself that women would be attracted to me. And it worked! I started dating multiple women and it seemed like they were swooning over me. My newfound confidence was absolutely intoxicating. It felt sooo good to be desired.
One of the women was my girlfriend and as time went on, I realized there was something special about her that I wanted to explore further. I stopped seeing the other women and we became official. This was one of the happiest times of my life.
After going to therapy, I feel totally different about myself, and I am still practicing and enjoying the new perspective that I gained. Still, part of me feels ashamed of my past and I vividly remember times where I felt invisible and undesirable.
Back to the conversation with my girlfriend:
After having a conversation several times where she would ask about how many people I’ve been with and I would tell her that I don’t want to talk about it, I eventually caved because I told myself maybe it’s not that big of a deal and I don’t want us to have trust/intimacy issues over something so stupid.
We talked more about relationships and shared some of the experiences we had. I told her what my number was. Then I made a mistake. In that moment, the curiosity I felt after sharing my number and the asymmetry of her knowing mine but me not knowing hers was too much for me and I asked her what her number was as well. She told me.
Her number really isn’t that high, in the mid-teens. My number is 5.
After the conversation, I felt sick to my stomach. It’s not because I am disgusted by her number (I actually think it is really normal) but I feel insecure about my number. Also, I think it is always bothersome to imagine your partner having sex with other people and to have it concretely laid out for you in the form of a number. I couldn’t help but compare my number to hers and wonder about how I stack up compared to the other guys she’s been with.
It definitely doesn’t bother me so much that I want to break up, but I’ve tried to explain to her that having the conversation made me feel bad. I think about my number and makes me think about times in my life where I didn’t feel desired, and when I think about that conversation it makes me feel like I missed out on a lot of sexual experiences in my past.
She got upset when I said this and said that if I feel like I missed out, then maybe I should just go sleep around now and we shouldn’t be together. She is skeptical that these feelings of missing out will ever be resolved for me. I tried to explain that I don’t want anyone else, and I am happy with her, but that I still feel weird and insecure about the whole thing. Also, I kind of feel like I got blackmailed into having the conversation and can’t understand why she absolutely needed to know.
I haven’t talked to my friends about it because it seems too revealing to get into the details of the situation and also I am not proud of the way I feel about it. I really think that it should not bother me knowing her number.
I know it is stupid to think about her past sexual experiences before she met me and to think about my own number and how I stack up, but now that all that information has been talked about, it comes up sometimes for me and bothers me.
After learning about her number, I can’t help but think about my own number in comparison to hers and my peers and I feel left out. I feel like I missed out on a big chunk of my life. I know that this is illogical because it’s not like I had no experience before her and casual sex isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be anyways.
To some extent I think it is normal to talk about exes and past relationships. Particularly if it is relevant to the current relationship. I just wish that we could’ve just not had that conversation about the number of people we’ve slept with and that the conversation about our pasts could have happened more organically.
How can I reconcile with her and move on? Also, how should I approach the conversation about prior experiences in the future?
tldr: I didn’t want to talk to my girlfriend about the number of people we’ve slept with, but she wouldn’t let it go and now I have negative feelings about it.
Edit: A lot of the comments are about boundaries. Some people are saying that I should have just not had the conversation if I didn’t want to. I thought about it some more and realized that I missed an important detail.
I had always landed on us just not talking about the number of people we’ve slept with. I didn’t think anything good would come of it.
The conversation would come up periodically, and I always told her that I didn’t want to know about it and didn’t want to share my number either. I always told her that I would rather focus on us and I don’t care about how many people we were with before. I held this boundary for a long time. After about half a dozen conversations about it over the course of about a year and a half, she decided that this was information that she could not live without.
She told me that it felt like I was hiding something and that if we could not talk about it that she couldn’t see a future for us. We didn’t talk about it right then, but then I rested on it and decided that I didn’t think it was worth breaking up over something so stupid. That’s why I ultimately caved.
From her perspective, she said not knowing was causing her to feel distance and a lack of trust for me. She said that based on me not wanting to talk about the number of people we had slept with and not wanting to get into details of past sexual encounters, she felt like she couldn’t bring up past relationships and sex at all or it would freak me out. Also, she was scared of learning about my past in real time and didn’t want to be surprised by anything she learned.
She was cheated on before. Her ex continually lied to her face about the cheating. I wonder if her feeling like she needs to know absolutely everything about me is to guard against future cheating.
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* This article was originally published here
Friday, August 23, 2024
29M Need Advice
My (29m) girlfriend (26f) confessed that she drunkenly sent a photo to her ex boyfriend several months ago while out with friends. The photo is of a pet they shared together and her ex. He responded the next morning just being friendly but not flirtatious and that was the end of the interaction. He did reach out a few weeks after she had texted him but she did not respond. She told me about him reaching out when it happened and did not respond. Before this, he reached out several times and she was always very honest about the communication which she either did not respond to, or responded in a respectful but faithful manner that let him know the door was closed. I feel very confident she is not hiding anything else.
She has apologized profusely and I can tell she feels very bad about this. She said as soon as she sent the text she felt regret and did not know why she had done it. We have since moved in together. I am really struggling with what to do or how to move forward
On the one hand I am glad she fessed up and feel confident she came clean to me about the interaction in its entirety. She came clean about two other very small things that I did not know about that were really not of any significance (she had used a nicotine vape a few times without my knowledge (I would not care) and something else similar and very minor). She confessed this all to me at once to clear her conscience and because she claims she is committed to not hiding anything from me moving forward and those were all the things she had withheld from me. She told me she is committed to being honest with me and recognizes her dishonest behavior as a problem that she needs to address. On the other hand, she withheld hurtful information from me that I did not know which stripped me of the ability to be able to make the decision to move in together knowing everything fully.
We have been together around a year and a half. We get along extremely well and are very likeminded individuals. Living together has so far been amazing and we are very compatible. I have been thinking about a future with her and until this I felt incredibly confident we would spend our lives together. Don’t want to tell my parents or friends because I don’t want them to judge her if we decide to work through this so that is why I am here on Reddit to get some advice. Appreciate your advice! What do you all think?
TLDR girlfriend texted ex. Didn’t tell me about it before we moved in together. Unsure of what to do now.
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* This article was originally published here
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Partner (28M) spends a lot of time with his friends but when I (25F) want to do something with him, he's too tired.
Hi all,
For context; my partner (28M) and I (25F) have been together for just over a year and we are long distance so really only see each other on weekends.
I really need some advice because my heart hurts.
So, for the last maybe 6 months, my partner and I have spend less and less time going out and doing things together, asides from the rare occasion where we will go for a drive or go out for food somewhere. (The last time we went out just the two of us together was to get food at the beginning of July, I did start a new job shortly after this so we didn't see each other every weekend like normal, so that's not quite as bad as it sounds.)
The part that gets me, however, is he spends a lot of time going out to spend time with his friends. When we've spoken about this, his answer has been that: he goes out with his friends for a drive in the evening/night when he has more energy, but I'm too tired to do things with him at that time. His wording was "you're too tired at night and I'm too tired during the day." There have been times where I've gotten to the point where I so badly want to do something with him that I've bit the bullet whilst I'm exhausted to go out for a drive with his friends in the evenings because I feel like that's the only time I can do something with him. It upsets me that I'm willing to do this, but he's not able to do the same for me when the roles are reversed.
I also get upset that on the occasion where he mentions something he'd like to do together, it's been something to do with his friends. The two that spring to mind that he's mentioned recently have been going on a double date to get food with his 2 friends and going to a car meet together (with his friends.) I'm happy to do it because, again, I want to spend time with him, but on the other hand, I don't want the only time we spend time together to be with his friends. I just want some quality time with my boyfriend and right now it really feels like I'm asking for too much.
Am I in the wrong for being upset at this?
Sometimes he goes out multiple days in a row with them, but each time we plan to do something it seems he's too tired.
Last weekend I suggested we go to the cinema, he agreed but the day of, he said he was too tired and spent most of the day sleeping. This weekend we planned to go for a drive, he wanted to have a nap first because he was tired, but ended up sleeping for too long and then it was too late.
I completely understand that he works nights and he's tired but it never used to be this bad, we used to do so much more but now we spend more time sat inside together. Don't get me wrong, I love sitting down to watch some shows with him and have a cuddle or playing video games together but I just want to go somewhere and do something together, go watch a film, go see some new sights, go play bowling or go to the gaming place we have. I've made so many suggestions and they just never go anywhere. I'm 25 years old and I feel like I'm just spending my life indoors and not making any memories.
I'm so fucking sad, I love this man with all my heart, he's genuinely the best thing that's ever happened to me, but I just can't stand not doing things together.
I want to clarify that I don't care if he goes out with his friends multiple times, that is not my issue at all. My issue stems from, he's doing all this but he doesn't have the energy to do things with me. If he went out with his friends and spent time doing things with me, I'd be totally okay. I just want to spend time with my partner and make memories together.
Any advice would be so helpful because I'm truly losing my marbles right now, I feel like the bad guy here because I'm getting so upset at him but at the end of the day, all I want is that quality time.
TL;DR - My partner is too tired to spend time with me, but spends a lot of time with his friends. I get upset because I see him doing this and I just wonder why we can't find a way to do this too.
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* This article was originally published here
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