u/Entire_Iron5514

Hi everyone. This is my first time doing something like this but I'm at the point where I just don't know what else I can do and would appreciate any and every advice I can get from this community. As the title suggest I am at a cross road on how to proceed. I have been dating my boyfriend (28M) for roughly a year and six months. We are currently doing long distance and have been since we got together. To get to the issue, I had found out he kept hidden that he was previously married and as much as I know I did not have to know this information it would have been nice especially since I did come to find out that he was in the process of separating when we were starting to first talk/get to know each other. It became a big issue in our relationship especially since I felt like that should have been something to disclose early on. Maybe it's just me and I think i would appreciated it but I don't know if I was just reading too much into/ making it a bigger deal than I needed to. Yesterday I had a weird dream of something nagging me to look through his phone since he was staying with me. I couldn't shake the weird feeling so I did look through his phone. I know that I shouldn't have without his permission but I did. Nonetheless while going through it I went through his camera roll and I saw that he had two pictures of her from Feb 16. I felt a pit in my stomach and continued. I should add that the first time around I managed to find her name and so I looked it up on his messages. I did see that he had a couple mentions of her with his dad. I clicked on the message and it was him telling his dad that him and her were gonna be out of town, I looked at the dates and it was the days that he had come up for my birthday. Through out the messages with her name there was some as recent as december 2025. I sort of lost my cool and woke him up to get out of my house. I couldn't help it but I started crying telling him how he's been lying this whole time and that since the last time we talked about this I would have thought he would have cared to tell me she was still a thing in his life. He tried to turn it on me and say that I invaded his privacy and how he wasn't gonna be doing this anymore because it's always the same thing. I tried to explain that it is because If im not looking through his phone would he have ever told me any of these conversations. He sat there silent. I went in on how I don't know anymore what to believe and that now I feel like he made a fool out of me for trying to be understanding the first time. I let him know how it makes me feel because I basically have to "beat" it out of him for him to be even truthful about otherwise I would have never known. His explanation on the two thing I mentioned above:

1. the picture. He says that it was one that his grandma sent before that automatically saved onto his phone which is hard for me to believe because this isn't the first time that this had happened.

2. The conversation with his dad where he says him and her would be going out of town the days he came up to see me. He has made it very clear that him and his dad have a rocky relationship where his dad tries to dictate his life. He said because of this his dad tries to urge him to get back together/ work things out. He says that so he doesn't start issues he just apeases and lies to his dad saying they'll get food or do something and then goes back after the supposed meetings to let him know that it didn't work out. Again this is something that I dont even think I can believe.

For those who may be wondering I've not met his parents yet. With my work schedule it's been hard to find time for me to travel down there and the few times that I was supposed to go I had things come up that prevented me from going. Throughout our relationship he has not spoken the highest of them and it slowly started making me not want to meet them because of how they treated him. He has told me that they know about me and ask about me but im also at that point now where I don't know if that is the case. If he can easily be dishonest/ lie to his parents to appease them how do I know that he isn't lying to me? He did tell me that there was some friends that didn't know about them being divorced. I started to feel like a fool because I feel like I should have known better but I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. He would claim multiple times that he would show me the divorce papers if that would make me feel better but never did. We recently got into it because I brought up that I needed to see them to know for sure. There so much more that I dont want to add to make this any longer than needed.

At this time we've agreed to a break and after the break we would talk things out to see how we mainly me want to proceed moving forward. I can't go to any friends since they know him and my best bet right now is reddit. I feel like I know what I should do but because I care and love him I'm just trying to hold on to anything I can to see if it can work out but I don't know if I'll ever trust him and then what sort of relationship would that be? I know it wouldn't be fair to either of us. Thank you to anyone that reads this post and I am happy to answer any questions if needed