

For three years, my FP had a poet friend who was crushing on her. She denied it for a while, but he kept doing overly romantic gestures for her and posting sappy IG stories after seeing her. I was mad suspicious from the get-go because their only connection was that they went on a date a few years back. 

Ultimately, I convinced her to ask him and he confirmed it. 

I wasn’t comfortable with the relationship, but instead of taking space from him so he could sort out his feelings and get over her, she started hanging out with him secretly to avoid my emotional reactions. I only found out about the hangouts from watching his stories, something that I was obsessively doing because it felt like the only way to find the truth.   They went out of town to watch a drive-in movie, she was the first person to meet his new puppy, they made joint Spotify playlists, and she spent the last hour of her birthday with him but told me she was with her girlfriends, amongst many other things. 

She blames having to lie on me. She says that if I didn’t have such intense reactions, she would’ve told me the truth. The thing is, she was constantly suspicious of my own friends, and would accuse me left and right of flirting, which I wasn’t doing. I blocked/unfollowed/stopped talking to people just so we wouldn’t fight about them anymore. She made me show her my messages and DMs with multiple people, and I always obliged because I didn’t want to be assumed guilty and left. She’s admitted that if I had been hanging out with a friend who was crushing on me, she wouldn’t have tolerated it. She refuses to call it double-standards, though. 

Fast forward: In August, I was attacked for being transgender and also sexually assaulted. It left me traumatized af, so I shut down and started to isolate. I stopped seeing her because she didn’t feel like an emotionally safe person to be around. Her accusations of me flirting and cheating were never-ending, and I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with it, so I took space. She, however, was still the only person I turned to for support via texting/calls. She was the only person who knew about everything that happened to me. 

We had a huge fight at the end of September. She told me she was “done,” but I didn’t take it seriously because she had said that a thousand other times and it never stuck. Another fast forward: a week later, I realized that she wasn’t sleeping at home, so I blew up her phone and begged her to tell me where she was. She ignored me until she got home two days later. We talked and she said I’d be hurt and upset, but that she didn’t want to tell me because she wanted to focus on work. I spent the entire week begging her to tell me who it was, because I couldn’t focus on anything else. While ignoring me, she went back to spend the weekend with the mystery person. When she came back home on Sunday, I walked over to her place while spiraling and saw him pulling up to her building with her in the car. 

I freaked the hell out, called her, and she finally confessed she had been sleeping with the poet. It turns out that three days after saying she was done, she went to the movies with him. Two days after that, they went to a show and kissed. She then started spending multiple nights a week at his place. She told me she only did it because she felt abandoned by me. She said she still loved me, but I had been neglecting her, and that she turned to him to fulfill her needs. 

We’ve been fighting about it since, and she keeps telling me that it didn’t really mean anything, and that he could’ve been anyone. She said that she didn’t have sex with him, but that they did kiss and cuddle. She keeps minimizing the awfulness of her sleeping with someone that, for three years, she tried to make me feel crazy for distrusting. I keep spiraling and freaking out and being completely overwhelmed because she essentially blames me for doing it . She also won’t stop talking to him, and won’t unfollow him on socials. Some of y’all might think that sounds controlling, but she’s outright made me block people that she didn’t trust — I’m just holding her to her own standards.

Things keep getting worse because she refuses to acknowledge the severity of what she did, especially because of the timing (I had just been R-worded a month prior). Anytime I ask her questions about him, she immediately changes the topic. I keep behaving in more and more unhinged ways because I feel like she doesn’t take what she did seriously. She will sometimes even question me about where I am/who I’m talking to.

She said she ended things with him, but continues to ignore my questions and demands. She tells me that I shouldn’t feel as betrayed as I do, and thinks that we can just hang out while pretending that nothing happened. 

I feel extremely betrayed, gaslit, and like I’ll never be able to trust a single word that comes out of her mouth. I feel like she doesn’t care about me at all, because who would do this to their partner a month after they experienced something horrific? I’ve essentially given her al ultimatum: stop talking to him completely and never see him again, or I’m gone. She won’t engage with my ultimatum. She is continuing to text with him despite saying she ended things. 

Would any of you ever be able to trust your FP again? I feel like she’s completely broken me. I don’t even know what’s real and what’s just a fabrication. I’m enraged, and spiraling, and really depressed. I

I don’t I can forgive her. I don’t think there’s actually think there’s any going back from this, but because of my BPD, I also can’t imagine life without her. 

Oh, another thing: if I take the breakup seriously and hook up with someone the way she did, she’ll never talk to me again. She’s made that clear. Despite her actions, I haven’t gone on dates or slept with anyone because I’m afraid of losing her. Isn’t that something?