u/Idont_thinkimcrazy

My (F26) boyfriend (M27) of over 5 years cheated on me with sex workers. I found out 2 months ago, where he put me on a “friendship trial” to try to gain attraction to me again over the course of 3 months. We have one month left. Somehow he’d convinced me that it was my fault that it happened so I agreed to the trial to right whatever wrongs and make myself more likable for him again. I was convinced for about a week and then the truth started to hit and it started to really sink in: I have to get out of here.

I got a full STD panel and came back clean, so no worries there, but I will never trust him enough to touch him again and I’m starting to become scared of him.

I have no family support. my mom tries but our relationship is strained (and she’s on disability benefits so living with her is not an option) because up until 2 months ago his family was my family. I’ve lived with his entire family as one of them for 4 years now.

His mom even agreed to lie to me about one of his “massages” recently and I saw in their texts that she was concerned he’d get “diseases”. This means that a woman I’ve loved and respected for over 5 years was willing to lie to me about something as serious as my health to protect her lying son. It also means he told his MOM about his happy ending massages?????

All of this because he says he wasn’t attracted to me anymore. From September to now, I’ve forgiven so much more than I should.

I caught him on cam girl sites on my birthday in October. I caught him watching adult videos after I’d tried to initiate and was turned down and looking up Craigslist ads for hookups in November and I caught him going to bikini baristas even though he DOESNT EVEN LIKE COFFEE in January.

I used to consider him the safest man I’ve ever known. I guess I should have considered the men I’d known up until I knew him. I don’t know a single man from my childhood that wasn’t a convicted criminal. To me the mark of a good man was simple: has a job, doesn’t hit you, sober. He checked all of those boxes.

Recently, since the weird trial began, he’s started hitting things, telling me he hated me and saying things that are extremely unkind to me.

Last August he punched a hole in my bedroom door when I told him I didn’t know a login to some streaming service. I wrote it off as a one time thing but in the past week now it’s happened again twice.

The first time I was on the couch next to him and he answered a question I’d asked him by yelling at me and slamming both of his fists into the coffee table in front of us.

The second time he was working on a creative project for me and he thought he’d messed part of it up. As I was reassuring him and brainstorming solutions standing to his left, he wound up his fist and punched the closet door directly to his left. He was sitting in a rolling gaming chair and the momentum rocked the chair and his shoulder back into me. In the moment it felt like I was about to be hit because I had “caused” the problem since the project he was working on was something he was doing for me. I didn’t ask him to, but I still found myself apologizing profusely before the tears came.

It’s like some filter has come undone and the way he’s speaking to me is becoming worse and worse. If it’s a good day, I get absolutely nothing from him. Part of me regrets ever catching him with the sex workers because he wasn’t this cold to me before. He wasn’t warm, but more neutral. Now there’s constantly this horrible chill between us. I don’t initiate conversations so we do not talk. I don’t text him first so we don’t text. I no longer reach for his hand so we don’t hold hands. We are barely roommates.

This is where I think I may suck.

When the trial began, he spent about 3 hours telling me all of the reasons he found me unattractive now. He spent hours convincing me that it was my fault he had to get a sex worker because he just hated me so much. It made me feel so bad for myself that for the first time in 5 years, I decided to fluff my own ego the same way he had been doing for years. He had broken up with me and then unbroken up with me and put me into a “friendship trial” until around June and the audacity and disrespect is absolutely insane…. But in the moment I had no choice but to agree because without him I don’t have a place to live.

I had Tinder for 48 hours and then deleted it in shame… just not before I met Grayson. I gave him my number a few hours after we first matched and he texted me a few days later. I was immediately transparent about everything with him. He listened and confided in me about his own personal life- he’s divorced with full custody of his almost 2 year old daughter.

A few days ago when my soon to be ex punched our closet door right next to me I left to cry in my car and called a few friends but nobody answered but Grayson. He had me laughing in minutes. The further I drove from home and the longer I spoke to him the more my body relaxed. I spent the night at my moms.

When I had tinder I mostly just liked whoever had a little tab that said that they liked me. I hardly considered the person behind the account, I just wanted someone to tell me I was pretty after being hurt so badly. Hence why I deleted the account after 48 hours. I know it’s not fair or healthy to behave like that and it doesn’t align with my values so I stopped.

When I met up with Grayson I expected to meet my new friend who I wasn’t attracted to at all.

I was completely wrong. When I saw him step out of his truck, I had to take a minute to compose myself and adjust to this new reality. Somehow I had emotionally connected with and agreed to spend the afternoon with one of the most handsome men I’ve ever met. Everything about him is attractive.

He later told me that seeing me made him instantly nervous and giddy, but I couldn’t tell. The shift was palpable between us. We simply couldn’t stop just staring at each other. He has the bluest, most expressive eyes I’ve ever seen.

He sat across from me at the table and we laughed together… when he slid his drink he’d been sipping on across the able and I drank from it he said

“Uh Oh, gorgeous, I think I like you”

I don’t know how I kept my cool, but I took another drink and giggled

“you think?”

And he immediately shook his head and said

“you’ve got me wrapped around your finger already”

Like AGHHHH WHY IN THE YA NOVEL KINDOF SHIT IS THAT???

And then, to make matters worse My fortune cookie read “a passionate new romance will soon come into your life” and it shocked the hell out of me. He obviously got curious about my reaction…when he read it, he grinned and said

“We can’t go questioning the fates now, can we?”

After we’d walked through the entirety of the mall he walked me to my car where we stood and spoke for longer than we should have. It was raining and cold but neither of us wanted to leave. Aside from the obvious physical tension I’m writing about, the conversation flowed just as smoothly.

I wasn’t looking forward to going home. The trial started to sneak back into my head, making me feel small. I became reminded of the horrible things he’s been saying to me. How he said he wasn’t attracted to me at all anymore, how he hated me…

When Grayson said

“I feel like I want to kiss you”

I hardly let him finish the sentence before I kissed him. For the last 5 years, I haven’t had more than a peck. My soon to be ex wasn’t a big fan of kissing. This was not a peck. Not mincing words, this was the best kiss of my life. His lips were just like the eye contact… we just simply couldn’t pull away. We kept parting ways and then just turning back around and sinking back into each other

I left immediately after. My heart sunk the closer I got home. I acted perfectly pleasant and kept my head down and avoided my soon to be ex entirely. I slept in my daybed in my own room and haven’t returned since.

The next day I met Grayson again. This time, I knew it was a date and I went headfirst into it if only just to spend one last hour with his eyes on me like that again. We both partake in the devils lettuce, myself quite heavily as it’s a CPTSD medication for me. He had a babysitter for the night because he had an early morning, so I went to his house to try some of his favorite herbs and watch a movie together. Both stating we are NOT going any further intimately but wanted to spend some quality one on one time together.

His home was clean. No signs of a secret wife that wasn’t actually out of the picture or any red flags. He made me a hadcrafted blended tea that was incredible. He had paid attention to our conversations and guessed the kind of tea I would like to a T. He collects beautiful antique furniture and let me nerd out about the history behind them.

We didn’t have sex but part of me wishes we did because we both wanted to. I knew that before we were drinking and smoking herb that we’d promised we wouldn’t, so when the opportunity presented itself, I said as much and declined. He wasn’t mad at all and didn’t push me to change my mind, he just nodded and gave me a kiss on the cheek and continued our night for another 5 hours.

How sexy is that?

I know that this is just me coping. That this passion and excitement will die out and that someone I meet in these circumstances is unlikely to be “my person” or whatever it is I should be looking for but it just feels so good to be liked by someone who I think is WAY out of my league.

I have 3 meetings with potential roommates this week and I’ve already removed about 1/3rd of my belongings into a secret storage unit over the last two months, nothing that anyone would notice being gone.

I’m holding a lot of shame and guilt about all of this.

So am I the worst person for stepping into this thing with Grayson? Is there something I’m missing?

This is a long story so I am so sorry, but I’m just having a really hard time and need someone to talk to.

Also, a strange note from my personal DMs where I got AI accusations: I’m a writer in my free time. I’m working on a novel and frequently write music and poetry. While a Reddit post is NOT my best work and telling my own life story is sloppy and poorly done, sometimes I can come across a bit lyrical. This isn’t because I used AI because I DIDN’T. I looked heavily into the AI conversation and have decided personally that I am not a fan of AI and don’t believe in using it. Just because I use too many commas and sometimes use similes doesn’t mean I’m using AI. I’m not a great writer, I’m just average and apparently in this sweet spot that sounds AI generated for some reason.

My (F26) boyfriend (M27) of over 5 years cheated on me with spicy sleep workers behind my back. I found out 2 months ago, where he put me on a “friendship trial” to try to gain attraction to me again over the course of 3 months. We have one month left. Somehow he’d convinced me that it was my fault that it happened so I agreed to the trial to right whatever wrongs and make myself more likable for him again. I was convinced for about a week and then the truth started to hit and it started to really sink in: I have to get out of here.

Needless to say this has been the most devastating blow of my life.

I have no family support. my mom tries but our relationship is strained (and she’s on disability benefits so living with her is not an option) because up until 2 months ago his family was my family. We’ve been generationally cohabitating for over 4 years now, meaning I’ve lived with his entire family as one of them for 4 years now.

I am losing all of them. They’re all his people, not mine, and they’ll choose him even though he cheated on me. His mom even agreed to lie to me about one of his “massages” recently and I saw in their texts that she was concerned he’d get “diseases”. This means that a woman I’ve loved and respected for over 5 years was willing to lie to me about something as serious as my health to protect her lying son.

It also means he told his MOM about his happy ending massages?????

Aside from them, I don’t have any family left. My dad is a substance user who’s unhoused somewhere in Seattle and all of his family wanted me to be ended in the womb so they have never accepted me as family. My mom’s family was never in our lives because they’re mostly conservative and my sister and I are both biracial with different fathers who are both not white.

I was neglected and mistreated my entire childhood. I was hurt so badly that every time I try to tell the story here on Reddit my posts get banned. I live with a lot of CPTSD (complex or chronic post traumatic stress, it means that there was repeated instances of reoccurring traumas rather than one incident.) which makes it really hard to feel safe and trust people. I escaped from the mistreatment and I built a life for myself with a man that I thought loved me.

This has all been a nightmare. I’m terrified of next steps. So far I’ve brought around 1/3rd of my things to my secret storage unit. It’s almost the last week of April and so far the timeline is that I should be getting a raise in May/June which means I’ll be able to leave around July.

All of this because he says he wasn’t attracted to me anymore.

This lack of attraction isn’t something I’m surprised by. He hasn’t initiated intimacy in over a year, and when we did get intimate he never fully enjoyed himself. I’d tried everything I could to satisfy him, but nothing I did helped. I’d been convinced for over 2 years that it was me. That I just needed to get better at it.

I caught him on cam girl sites on my birthday. I caught him watching adult videos after I’d tried to initiate and was turned down. I caught him looking up Craigslist ads for hookups. I caught him going to bikini baristas even though he DOESNT EVEN LIKE COFFEE.

And now he’s actually buying spicy sleep workers.

It’s not just that, though, that’s brought me to the conclusion that we are over. I know that should be enough, but for a second, it almost wasn’t.

I used to consider him the safest man I’ve ever known. I guess I should have considered the men I’d known up until I knew him. I don’t know a single man from my childhood that wasn’t a convicted criminal. My mom was a lifelong prison wife. So all of the family friends, “uncles” “godparents” “stepdads” had crimes ranging from petty thieves to murderers and even people who had hurt those who are most vulnerable.

To me the mark of a good man was simple: has a job, doesn’t hit you, sober. He checked all of those boxes. He still does… kind of.

Recently, since the weird trial began, he’s started hitting things, telling me he hated me and saying things that are extremely unkind to me. Last August he punched a hole in my bedroom door when I told him I didn’t know a login to some streaming service. I wrote it off as a one time thing but in the past week now it’s happened again twice.

The first time I was on the couch next to him and he answered a question I’d asked him by yelling at me and slamming both of his fists into the coffee table in front of us.

The second time he was working on a creative project for me (something he had elected to do that I didn’t ask for) and he thought he’d messed part of it up. As I was reassuring him and brainstorming solutions standing to his left, he wound up his fist and punched the closet door directly to his right. He was sitting in a rolling gaming chair and the momentum rocked the chair and his shoulder back into me.

This has made me feel very scared. He’s much bigger than me and stronger than me and I know his father was extremely violent toward his mother so I worry things like this have been normalized to him. It may be super dramatic of me but I worry that I’ll somehow escalate things but something in my gut is telling me to do my best to avoid him.

It’s like some filter has come undone and the way he’s speaking to me is becoming worse and worse. If it’s a good day, I get absolutely nothing from him. Part of me regrets ever catching him with the spicy sleep workers because he wasn’t this cold to me before. He wasn’t warm, but more neutral.. and now there’s constantly this icy weight between us.

The last couple of days since the closet incident, I’ve just turned all of my energy toward him off. I was worried that he would get upset about this but it seems to have stopped things from getting worse for now. I stoped initiating conversations so we do not talk. I stopped texting first so we don’t text. I stopped reaching for his hands so we don’t hold hands. I stopped coming up with things for us to do so we doing hang out.

This relationship isn’t technically over, but to me it ended on February 6th when he got the first spicy sleep worker that I have verifiable proof he cheated with. If not then, then when he told me I could try for three months to get him to be attracted to me again in early March.

This is where I think I may lose some people.

When the trial began, he spent about 3 hours telling me all of the reasons he found me unattractive now. He spent hours convincing me that it was my fault he had to get a sex worker because he just hated me so much.

There was a weird limbo period between the trial and when I found out, and in that limbo period I installed Tinder. For the first time in 5 years, I decided to fluff my own ego the same way he had been doing for years. Can he really blame me for being more effective at it?

I had it for 48 hours and then deleted it in shame, but not before I met Grayson. I gave him my number a few hours after we first matched and he texted me a few days later. I was immediately transparent about everything with him. He listened and confided in me about his own personal life- he’s divorced with full custody of his almost 2 year old daughter and a restraining order against her mother.. You can imagine how bad things have to be for a judge to award a man full custody of a little girl.

We have similar circumstances of our childhoods, similar adversities we’ve both learned to overcome. Talking with him the past few weeks has been so refreshing… in ways I didn’t really register as anything significant at first. It all felt really friendly and it felt really good to talk to him.

A few days ago my soon to be ex punched our closet door right next to me. I left to cry in my car, called a few friends but nobody answered until I called Grayson. He had me laughing in minutes. The further I drove from home and the longer I spoke to him the more my body relaxed.

The next day we met for lunch. If I’m being honest with everyone and myself when I had tinder I liked whoever had a little tab that said that they liked me. I hardly considered the person behind the account, I just wanted someone to tell me I was pretty after being hurt so badly. Clearly, this is why I deleted the account after 48 hours. I know it’s not fair or healthy to behave like that and it doesn’t align with my values so I stopped.

When I met up with Grayson I expected my new friend who I wasn’t attracted to at all. I could only vaguely remember his tinder pictures but I didn’t remember him being crazy hot or anything. Most people post their best pictures so I was expecting to not be attracted to him.

I was completely wrong. When I saw him step out of his truck, I had to take a minute to compose myself and adjust to this new reality. I’d mentally prepared to meet a new friend and have lunch with someone kind, and nice, and a *friend* and now I had agreed to spend the afternoon with one of the most handsome men I’d ever been around.

He showed up in his work uniform. He works a very manly hands on job similar to construction, so I was expecting a messy or dirty work outfit, but instead it looked incredibly clean. His hair is long and curly and pulled into a ponytail, a toothpick stuck behind his ear. His eyes locked on mine, and I almost fell over because my knees became weak at their shade of blue.

The shift was palpable, almost tangible between us. We simply couldn’t stop just staring at each other. Eye contact is something I’ve always shied away from but with him it was a struggle to look anywhere else. I could see his pupils dilate when he looked at me and I couldn’t get enough of it after so long of blank stares or being completely looked past.

He sat across from me at the table and we laughed together… when he slid his drink he’d been sipping on across the able, his eyes dropped to watch my lips touch the glass and he licked his own lips, took a deep breath, laughed, and said.

“Uh Oh, gorgeous, I think I like you.” with this little half smirk that turned the whiskey into champagne on my tongue. I’m embarrassed to say that it took me more restraint than necessary to keep my cool.

My fortune cookie read “a passionate new romance will soon come into your life” and I started to laugh, hard, because the chances of that are absolutely insane and also NO WAY should any new romance of any kind be entering my life at all. He obviously got curious about my reaction and I reluctantly handed it over after he pestered me about it…when he read it, he beamed and said “We can’t go questioning the fates now, can we?”

We walked through the mall together afterward. The toothpick found its way from behind his ear to between his teeth and in the same motion he reached for my hand and took it. His hand was softer than I had expected for someone who works as hard as he does. He just kept defying my every expectation.

As we wandered around, his hand went from my hand to the back of my neck while navigating the tighter quarters of the mall, between isles and amidst crowds. Whenever this happened, he gave me light squeezes and rubbed along the back of my neck and shoulders.

After we’d walked through the entirety of the mall he walked me to my car where we stood and spoke for longer than we should have. It was raining and cold but neither of us wanted to leave. Aside from the obvious physical tension I’m writing about, the conversation flowed just as smoothly. I can’t share too much of it for privacy, but we shared so much and felt so comfortable.

I wasn’t looking forward to going home. The trial started to sneak back into my head, making me feel small. I became reminded of the horrible things he’s been saying to me. How he said he wasn’t attracted to me at all anymore, how he hated me…

And here was the antithesis of those words standing in front of me. Enjoying my time, laughing with me, clearly physically attracted to me… and he has all of these other amazing qualities. Stable, attentive, good father, clean, California sober (like me), morally responsible. Things I only thought came individually in people, never all at once.. except with Grayson. Even if it’s not forever, I had everything I’d wanted for years right in front of me.

When he said “I feel like I want to kiss you” I hardly let him finish the sentence before I kissed him. For the last 5 years, I haven’t had more than a peck. My soon to be ex wasn’t a big fan of kissing. This was not a peck. This kiss made it clear he wanted me just as much as I wanted him. Not mincing words, this was the best kiss of my life. His lips were just like the eye contact… we simply couldn’t pull away. We made out hiding between my car and his work truck.

I left quickly, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on my lips, reliving the kiss the whole drive home. My heart sunk the closer I got home. I acted perfectly pleasant and kept my head down and avoided my soon to be ex entirely. I slept in my daybed in my own room.

The next day I met Grayson again. This time, I knew it was a date and I went headfirst into it if only just to spend one last evening with his eyes on me like that again.

We both partake in the devils lettuce, myself quite heavily as it’s a CPTSD medication for me to keep the hallucinations at bay. He had a babysitter for the night because he was going to have an early morning so I went to his house to try some of his favorite herbs and watch a movie together. Both stating we are NOT going any further intimately but wanted to spend some quality one on one time together.

His home was clean. No signs of a secret wife that wasn’t actually out of the picture or any red flags. He made me a hadcrafted blended tea that was absolutely incredible, we turned on a movie and smoked together.

We talked about all of it. Our whole lives. I’ve made it clear where I’m at: surprised at how much like him and steadfast in my opinion that until I’m not living with an ex I can’t start a new relationship, especially when I’m still learning to find my footing in life after this devastating blow.

He seems to understand that I need time to adjust and happy to give it to me.. he has also said in no uncertain terms that he thinks that we would be great together. His Marriage formally ended the same week as my relationship did. He respected every boundary I made and paid for me to have an uber home after 11pm.

We didn’t have spicy sleep but part of me wishes we did because when he offered to put it on the table I really wanted to. I knew that before we were drinking and smoking herb we’d promised we wouldn’t, So much to my own dismay, I didn’t. He wasn’t mad at all and didn’t push me to change my mind, he just nodded and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

I know that this is just me coping. That this passion and excitement will die out and that someone I meet in these circumstances is unlikely to be “my person” or whatever it is I should be looking for but it just feels so good to be liked by someone who I think is WAY out of my league.

I’m looking for a new place to live, but it’s difficult because I have 2 cats that I adopted with my soon to be ex and deciding how to do custody of them has been really difficult. I am touring a few places that say they’ll allow one cat and I’m hoping my charm and their cuteness will win someone over but even then, I’m not sure that taking them is the right thing to do no matter how much I love them.

They are 5 and 3 and both of them have lived in a large home filled with people who love them their whole lives. We live with a lot of people in a home that’s over 3000sqft and dogs and visitors and always some human to give them love… and I’d be ripping them out of that and taking them to some small rented bedroom with much less free roaming space. I’ll also be working a lot and they’ll be alone for over 8-16 hours a day.

I love them both so much and I would do anything for them but something about that just breaks my heart for them. The idea of my soon to be ex taking all of this from me and also keeping the cats has been keeping me up at night and I can’t talk about it with Grayson because he has custody of a human child to worry about and honestly I don’t really feel like I want him to be involved in solving any of my problems.

I’m ready to move on and start over. I know this relationship is over and I have made a horrible mistake that there’s no coming back from now. I just really don’t know what to with my babies. It just feels like my heart keeps getting shattered and I don’t know how much more I can take.

Am I horrible for the relationship I’ve developed with Grayson? We both know we’re filling voids for each other but does that make it right? Probably not, right?

I don’t know. I’m just feeling so lost and conflicted. I want to enjoy this new thing without guilt but I’m really scared if I call off the trial early he’ll start to get vindictive and with all of the punching things lately.. I’m just scared.