- Date posted
- Yesterday
need help don’t feel good anymore
I want to clarify something because I think it is important for understanding my situation correctly: this is not about my boyfriend looking at women in general. My jealousy is specifically triggered by women I perceive as attractive. I don’t have a problem simply because a woman is present or because he happens to look in a woman’s direction. The situations that hurt me are specifically situations where I perceive him as looking at a woman whom I find attractive. All of the situations I describe in this post involve women I perceived as attractive. That is the specific issue I am struggling with. I am not trying to say that he is not allowed to notice or look at women at all. Rather, when I perceive him looking at an attractive woman, I become very aware of where his eyes are going, and that can trigger a lot of jealousy, insecurity and overthinking for me. There have been several situations like this. For example, once while I was driving and he was sitting in the passenger seat, I noticed him looking toward the side of the street several times. I couldn’t clearly see what he was looking at and I wasn’t even 100% sure there was a woman there. Later, he said he had been looking at some boys. I was actually referring to a different moment, and by that point he was already annoyed and didn’t want to reconstruct exactly what he had been looking at. Another time, while I was driving, an attractive woman was walking along the sidewalk. I saw my boyfriend noticeably turn his head toward her, almost like a shoulder check. The way he turned his head made me feel like, if he had had the opportunity, he would have continued looking at her as she walked past. That was my impression in that moment, although I obviously cannot know for certain what he was thinking or what he would have done. Later, he said he hadn’t looked at a woman. When I asked what else he could have been looking at, he hesitated and said that he doesn’t consciously keep track of when or where he looks around, but that he definitely hadn’t looked at a woman. There was also a situation where another driver, an woman, let us go first because the cars were very close together. My boyfriend smiled. At first, he said he had smiled out of politeness and that he had actually been annoyed by the situation. Two days later, he said he had never said he smiled out of politeness, that he hadn’t looked at the woman, and that he had only smirked while looking at the car door. He said I was reconstructing the situation in my head. In another situation involving an attractive woman, he said he hadn’t seen any woman and had only been looking into a street. From my perspective, there wasn’t even really a street there that he could have been looking into. And more recently, we were driving out of one street onto another. There was slow-moving traffic, so we could see people and cars from the side. There was a young beautiful woman in front of us whom we both know of. He knows who she is, although they have never spoken or had any kind of relationship. I personally find her very attractive, and I noticed him looking in her direction several times. I obviously cannot know what he was actually looking at or what he was thinking, but it triggered my jealousy very strongly. What makes me so desperate is that I genuinely don’t know how to deal with this anymore. I feel like I really do see him looking at these women. I’m not imagining that I see his eyes or head turning, and I don’t think I’m stupid or completely oblivious to what is happening. But every time it happens and I bring it up, he tells me that he wasn’t looking.. So I’m left feeling completely stuck between what I feel like I clearly saw and what he tells me happened. He also tells me repeatedly that he isn’t interested in other women, that he loves me more than anything, and that he wants to have children with me. I want to believe him. But when I feel like I repeatedly see something different, I don’t know how I’m supposed to reconcile those things. I don’t want to constantly monitor his eyes, question him or turn every glance into an argument. But I also don’t know how I’m supposed to handle something that genuinely triggers me when he consistently tells me that it didn’t happen. That is what I’m desperately looking for advice on: how am I supposed to deal with this? this shit hurts me