Around 2 am last night, I noticed that my 22F boyfriend 24M was texting someone pretty repeatedly. This is uncommon for him, especially at that time of night, but I brushed it off almost immediately.
About an hour later, while he’s in the bathroom, I grab my boyfriend’s phone to play a tiny joke on him— for context, we’ll often use each other’s phones/iPads to text the other when we want something, i.e. “I can’t wait to give you a back massage” or whatever. When I went to do that, I noticed that the most recent texts he had were from a girl and muted, so I held down on the message to see that the only chat history was two messages from her: “why” and “that’s me.” Pretty innocent on its own, but I couldn’t shake the thought of what came before that.
I brought it up to him later that night in a pretty accusatory way which I regret. For a while he pretended not to know what I was talking about, then he backpedaled and said that girl was just a friend that lived far away, I was crazy, and he’d never cheat on me (I don’t actually believe he’s physically cheated, yet). I explained multiple times that deleting texts mid convo was a huge red flag, and he insisted that he deleted it because he “didn’t want me to see it and get upset” but it “wasn’t mid convo” and he didn’t care to reply to this girl too often anymore even though they were old friends. Immediately that didn’t make sense to me because there should be nothing for me to get upset about- I’ve never said anything about his having female friends.
He ended up flipping it on me and saying that I had deleted chats in the past, which was true— we had both deleted chats with old flings under the mutual understanding that those didn’t matter and would only serve to hurt the other person if they came across it. I had even once cleared all chats with a close guy friend of mine and ceased communication because he felt uncomfortable with him. He insisted that this was the same thing- the difference I see is that I wasn’t hiding an ongoing conversation. He had also already expressed discomfort with that guy which made it reasonable for me to want to get it out of sight out of mind. I had never even heard about this girl before.
I ended up apologizing for being so accusatory but can’t shake the feeling that it’s suspicious. There was nothing explicit for me to read, but in my mind I can’t imagine what would be worth deleting mid conversation that would upset me unless it was something genuinely worth getting upset over.
Today, he’s acting as if nothing happened. I have some retroactive jealousy issues because he has a lot more relationship history than me, which makes me weary that I’m overreacting. I feel like this will only escalate, or at least he’ll get better at hiding it. Where is the line?
TL;DR I saw that my boyfriend deleted texts mid-convo with a girl, but he insists that there was nothing incriminating, and technically there wasn’t from what I saw. Am I overreacting?
Comments
If he has nothing to hide then he doesn’t need to delete anything