tl;dr
i just broke the news to my close friend that it wasn’t right to be friends with our past and we aren’t speaking anymore. my boyfriend (of 10 months, who i’ll be moving in with plus my sister because i’m being kicked out in january) has had insecurities since we started dating. i want my friend back in my life but i don’t know how to make things work. this is my first healthy relationship with boundaries. what can i do to help my boyfriend with his insecurities for this situation, and if something similar comes up in the future?
full story:
to give some context, i’ve been on and off friends with a guy met online for about 4 years now. we’ve seen each other at our best and worst, messed around and sexted and whatnot, we even hoped to meet up one day since he’s in another country, i wanted to bring my boyfriend with me too since at the time the two were friends. it wasn’t romantic, just fooling around.
about a week or so before i met my bf (we’ve been dating for almost 10 months currently), me and online friend messed around and sexted again once. when me and my boyfriend started becoming interested in each other, i made a boundary with my friend that whatever we had going on needed to stop, my friend was perfectly okay with that and understood. i let my boyfriend know me and my friend had a past and he seemed okay with it.
when he asked further questions and found out it was sexting and that it had happened prior to me and him meeting, he started becoming more and more uncomfortable.
my online friend is a very close friend of mine, like i said we’ve been through a lot together. but we’re clear with boundaries. he understands, i understand. for the entirety of my boyfriend and i’s relationship we’ve remained JUST friends. i’ve let my bf read my messages with him, i no longer sing in front of online friend because bf didn’t like it, let him know when me and online friend are calling, distanced myself from friend, even introduced the two, they got along nicely for a while.
unfortunately, his insecurities began growing. he had nightmares about me and online friend having sex. he told me today he felt uncomfortable because he couldn’t stop thinking about how i’ve seemed online friend’s dick sexually.
online friend has a girlfriend and she seems very sweet even though we’ve never directly spoke.
to clarify, my boyfriend never made me do any of this. i want to keep my friend around but it isn’t fair to my boyfriend. he’s had poor relationships in the past, cheating and bad girlfriends. he told me his concerns and i tried to make things work. but nothing i did helped.
on one hand, i wanted to maintain the friendship because he was very dear to me, but this created problems in my relationship. on the other hand, i just cut the friend off and i feel really upset. he was a great guy. but my boyfriend appreciates it a lot.
i don’t want to break up with my boyfriend. we’re planning on moving in together with my sister since im getting kicked out at the start of january. he’s an amazing man, fits my needs, sensitive, caring. but this situation has been difficult up until now. my mom told me my boyfriend needs to learn to work on his insecurities and that i can’t keep cutting off friends for his sake.
i want to reassure my boyfriend. i don’t want to cut my friend off, i never did. cutting him off made me really upset but i did it for my boyfriend. i understand how my boyfriend is feeling but my friend and i were best friends. it broke my heart during me and his last conversation. he’s not an outwardly emotion guy but i could tell he was upset too.
what can i do in this situation? breaking up with my boyfriend isn’t an option.
Comments
Ultimately, your boyfriend’s insecurities are your boyfriend’s problem, and he has to be responsible to fixing them, not you. His responsibility is to come up with a solution other than putting fences around you.
One thing you’re likely to discover is that when you give into a partner’s insecurities like this, they rarely get better. In fact, they usually just move to the next-closest target. After all, you just validated the part of him that gets insecure, you just said, “Hey, this tool works!”
So the right solution is usually some minor boundaries (remembering that boundaries are how you let someone into your life, not how you keep them out) a willingness to talk your partner through their insecurities, and a firm, loving, “no.”
And it’s not that your boyfriend was cheated on in the past. Lots of people get cheated on as a teenager (or whatever counts as cheating when you’re 16) and don’t go down this road.
And also, no, he didn’t “make you” do this, but we’ve all heard, “I’m uncomfortable with this,” and we know what it means. If your boyfriend is traumatized by nightmares about you cheating, that’s therapist territory.