Me and my girlfriend are approaching our six-month anniversary, and today she decided to open up about her past relationships. She told me about the one before ours and how she was cheated on. Honestly, it really upset me to hear that, it's really unfair, and I felt terrible for her. She shared that relationship was sexual, but given it was a long-term one, it was super understandable.
As for me, I’ve never had sex or been in a serious relationship in recent years. We’re both 18 now, so when she started talking about her relationships back in high school and mentioned today that she’d been sexually active since the age of 13 in all her relationships, it left me... upset. It’s tough for me to process, especially considering how young she and the others involved were at the time. I couldn’t help but wonder if there had been any coercion or situations where she might have been forced into something she didn’t want. I asked her about this, but she assured me everything had been consensual sometimes she initiated sometimes they did. She even shared more details which I didn’t want to hear about… things like meeting someone from another school through Instagram and regularly meeting him to have sex, another time involving a public mall, and even a time some guy brought her to an abandoned apartment.
The age she was during all of this was 13 to 15 at most, it makes me deeply uncomfortable. I genuinely feel like that was way too much information for me to handle. I didn’t need to know all these specifics, and now that I do, I feel... different. I don’t want to sound judgmental or put myself on a pedestal because I haven’t had sex/lost my virginity yet, it just wasn’t something I wanted during my teenage years, but learning about this has caused a feeling of repulsion that I can’t ignore ☹️.
She told me there were at least four people before me, and this was just what we talked about in a ten minute conversation. While part of me appreciates that she feels comfortable enough to share her past so openly with me, and I know she truly values the way I treat her compared to the way others have, I’m finding myself conflicted. She has told me how others in her past treated her terribly, cheated, or only seemed interested in her for sex. And I want to be different for her because I do genuinely love her, she’s been open in telling me how great I am compared to her past relationships.
But now, knowing all of this, my feelings have become so conflicted. On the one hand, I want to see her past as just that, the past, and understand that her experiences shaped her perspective on relationships and self-worth. But it’s hard not to feel uncomfortable by everything I’ve now heard. Initially, when I only knew about her relationship at 16 with a 19 year old, a situation we both agree was grooming, it was easier for me to process. But all these other stories from before… they’ve left me feeling overwhelmed and genuinely put off for the first time since we’ve been together. It’s a lot to process, and I don’t know how to make sense of it all yet or where to progress. If anybody has gone through something similar especially regarding the age range any advice would mean the world.