hello! i am posting here after talking to a few friends about it but i have a pretty complicated situation at hand and i don't exactly know how to feel. i will preface this by saying that i have BPD, my boyfriend's ex has BPD and my boyfriend definitely shows symptoms as well. we are also in an e-relationship and he plans on living with me after i graduate from school next year.
in september of last year my boyfriend ended his relationship with his ex boyfriend. they had dated for ~5 years and the reason for the breakup was simply because the ex wouldn't do anything with his life alongside some tension between them that i won't get into. they decided to still be FWB though and throughout my boyfriend's time of being single, he would somewhat regularly drive 2 hours to see and have sexual relations with his ex boyfriend.
in ~january of this year, my boyfriend stumbled into some housing problems which required him to pack up and move in with his ex boyfriend. he lives there for zero rent, zero anything. he had to quit his job and has been unemployed since, essentially meaning that my boyfriend and his ex have been together all day everyday for months. which is fine! i am so happy my boyfriend has somewhere to live! unfortunately though, because he has no job and his ex boyfriend is very reliant on his father for money, my boyfriend relies on his ex for food and living stuff. they go out together often.
my boyfriend often tells me how much he hates his ex and how he wishes he has nothing to do with him. he says that he doesn't want to have a friendship with him in the next 5 years.
at the same time as his sexual realtionship with his ex, he was definitely building an emotional relationship with me (which he admitted to leading me on for a while shortly after we started dating) which ended up with us beginning a relationship in, i believe, feburary? he prefaced our relationship by going something like this 'i want to go out with you. do you want to date? i will still be fucking my ex boyfriend. is that okay with you?'
for context: i am the type of person who never says no. he knows this and, in the past, has actively encouraged me to stand up for myself. it's an issue i've been actively working on, but for this, because i had such intense feelings for him and i felt like that i could just ignore it, i said yes. they have sexual relations ~2 a month, that i know of.
one time, somewhat recently, however, i caught him in a lie. he said that he was going to get dinner with his ex, which is FINE, everybody needs to eat. however, he told me he would only be gone for an hour. (we had plans that night haha) it ended up being that he was gone for 5. i obviously already knew what happened, but didn't question it. he then gave a shitty explanation, that they both somehow left their phones at home and that they were struggling to decide what to eat.
the next day he sent me a selfie with a very clear, very dark hickey on it and so i lightheartedly asked if all he did yesterday was dinner. it made him freak the fuck out and apologize profusely, saying that he'd never lie and skirt around it again, which was comforting but like... come on man :(
the other day we had made plans to hang out while i was upset and wanting to be consoled and he said we could hang out later that night, after he went out to dinner with his ex, and i was ecstatic! 10pm rolls by and he's home! and then he doesn't reply to me until almost 2am! cool. cool. he fucked his ex again! not the first time, not the last, but it definitely didn't feel good to be essentially flaked on for sex with another person. he didn't even REMEMBER the day at all he got so fucking high for kink.
fast forward a few weeks, he's been very depressed lately. he's been off the phone entirely and, from what i can tell, has been spending quite a bit of time with his ex boyfriend because they are in, well, the vicinity of each other and it just feels better to not be alone. i understand that entirely. i really, really do... but just yesterday, er the day before now i think? he hadn't spoken to me all day except to vent.
he vented about feeling miserable and that he feels like that he'll never find a love that he's satisfied with because he wants somebody to put his priorities above anything else. i comforted him and whatnot but at the end of our conversation he said "Anywho, im likely going to disappear soon to shamefully sleep with my ex boyfriend who I don’t like very much because I am sad and desperate"
i'm a bit worried that he is using me as an "emotional boyfriend" and his ex boyfriend as a "sexual boyfriend" and i am not quite sure what to do.
how do i confront this? i don't know at all aaahhh help me please i love him more than anything and don't want to lose him but some of my friends are saying, intentionally or not, he is being abusive and cheaty and i just AAAAAAA