Dear Faye:

The title of your thread is “Broken trust”. Your last words on your second post are: “I just have problems trusting men in general… My dad has cheated on my mom multiple times, my previous boyfriend would lie to get me in bed.. I can’t tell truth from a lie anymore”.

First I will summarize your story, then will give you my input.

You are now in your mid twenties. When you were younger and not in a relationship, you used to “be a little wild, partying and fooling around”. You are “over that phase already for quite some time”, and you currently have many male friends. You’ve been in a very intense relationship with your now ex boyfriend, “extreme highs and lows”. You still think about him, “as if he lives there (in the back of your head)”.

You’ve been in a relationship with your current boyfriend for seven months, a “rocky ride”. Three months into the relationship, you let him use a phone of yours and he looked up your communications  with all your male friends as well as one with your ex a year ago. He found no evidence of disloyalty on your part.  Following this, you logged into his account and you found out the following:

1. He has been chatting while in relationship with you, with his previous “‘friend with benefits’ VERY FLIRTY.. winky faces and phrases like: ‘..I wouldn’t ever forget about you…you’re freaky… Show me a picture… we did have fun didn’t we?'”

2. During a time in the relationship with you when he was on a trip, texting you daily saying he missed you, he communicated to his ex girlfriend or FWB, that he didn’t miss you.

3. While in relationship with you, before the two of you “were official” he complained a lot about you to the same FWB, saying you were weak, depressed and annoying, that he preferred “his nympho girl”

As a result of your findings, you broke up with him. He begged for a second chance, telling you that  “she was nothing”, that he was looking for attention because you weren’t giving him the attention he needed, that he would never cheat on you, etc.

Currently, you wrote that the two of you “still fight now and then.. I’m still hurt about the texting with that old FWB. I still don’t trust him and he doesn’t trust me either. He still brings up my ex a lot.”

My input:

1. Regarding the two of you looking at the texting history of the other: he found no evidence of you being disloyal to him. You found evidence of him being disloyal to you: flirting with his previous FWB is disloyalty. Telling her that you are weak and annoying and that he prefers her, calling her “his nympho girl”, is disloyalty, a betrayal of trust, even in the context of a relationship not being official yet. It is a betrayal in any context.

2. When you broke up with him and he talked you into resuming the relationship he used this arguments: “She (the FWB) was nothing”- that may have felt good for you to hear, but when a man says about a woman that she was or is nothing, it is evidence of the man not being a decent person. The FWB was and is something, a person of equal value to him and to you. Not a Nothing.

(When he told you: “did you *^% him too?” – that is also evidence of lack of decency on his part, a very disrespectful way to talk to you.)

His second argument is the classic argument of a cheating man: you didn’t give me attention, so I looked for it elsewhere.

Currently the two of you fight. You don’t trust him and he doesn’t trust you. Yet, you plan to move in together is a few weeks.

The reasons, I think, that you are planning to live with a man you don’t trust are the following:

* You don’t trust that his behavior is more than a … consequence of your wrongness.

* You don’t trust that you are able to evaluate him correctly. You  “can’t tell truth from a lie anymore”.

Do you agree with the above two reasons? If you do, we can communicate about these (and other things) further.

anita