My (ex)boyfriend didn’t cheat on me, but I still feel completely destroyed by what happened before our relationship
I’m in a pretty particular situation. My (kinda ex) boyfriend didn’t technically cheat on me, but right before we got together when we had already confessed our feelings to each other and everything (it was complicated because we worked together and I didn’t wan’t to have a relationship with a coworker because usually it ends badly, well it made things even worse lmao), we weren’t officially together,and during that time he was seeing another girl for about two months.
During those two months, he told me he hated me, compared me to her, gave me false hope, etc. I don’t want to go into every detail, but it honestly messed me up mentally.
Eventually he came back to me for some reasonthat idk and we’ve been together for six months now (huge mistake, I know, but thankfully it’s ending). I even quit my job because I felt humiliated. All our coworkers knew we were really close, and everyone saw him flirting with the new girl. Everyone saw how sad I was at work, and I didn’t want to keep working with her there, so I decided to resign.
To make a long story short, I’ve been deeply unhappy ever since we got together.
She’s prettier than me, and since he came back to me, I don’t even know why. I feel like the “safe choice,” because she’s more carefree / frivolous, so I feel like he came back simply because I was the safer option for something serious. Before he met her, I know he genuinely loved me, but after her… I don’t know. I feel like a placeholder, like the less attractive girl he thought he could maybe build a stable future with.
At the beginning of the relationship, when I asked him to add me back on Instagram, he refused. I ended up having a huge breakdown over it because I was jealous and because he clearly didn’t want me to see that he was still following her instead of simply blocking or removing her while he was supposedly with me.
At first, he also wanted to hide our relationship from everyone.
I could honestly write a whole novel about the things he said that hurt me. One night when I said I didn’t want to cook, he said that she would have cooked for him. When I said I wasn’t ready for marriage, he told me she was ready to get married and have children. He refused to show me their conversations. He even lied to me, swearing on his mother’s life that he didn’t have her on Snapchat, and later I found out he actually did, and that she had sent him pictures.
Since then, I’ve become extremely jealous. I cry every day and constantly compare myself to her, even though we’re completely different people. Normally I’m not a jealous person at all.
The worst part is that I feel stuck with him. I don’t even know why I decided to get into a relationship with him after all of this I was sad and felt like if I didn’t sleep with him he would continue to pursue her, I just wanted to be confortable in the job I used to like so much. It was a mistake. But he had to leave his apartment, and now he’s staying with me until he finds another place.
I want to know how I can move forward even while he’s still living here.
I think about it every single day, all day long. Sometimes even one simple word can remind me of something he said to her or something he said to me.
I really hate becoming jealous like this. I already didn’t have much self-confidence, and all of this completely destroyed it.
I started a new job, and even in conversations with my new coworkers I can feel this lack of confidence in myself. I swear it feels like mental torture. I constantly think about what she has that I don’t and how I can improve myself.
How can I move on with my life and stop obsessing over this while he’s still living with me? I can’t just kick him out because he’d literally end up homeless.
I resent him so much that during arguments I’ve insulted him, and I’ve even slapped him before, especially when I catch him lying. He has never hit me except once, after I told him how deeply hurt I was by the fact that he refused to add me on Instagram. Instead of just adding me, he kept saying he would simply delete Instagram entirely. I didn’t even know he had followed her at one point, but he kept talking about deleting the app and it drove me crazy because I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just want to add me normally but it was just because he didn’t want to delete her.
I know I’m being extremely toxic too because I constantly want to question him, I argue with him everyday about this, constantly text him to tell him how angry I am and how much I hate and resent him.
This is the first time I’ve ever been like this in a relationship and I hate it, especially the fact that I sometimes want to hit him.
I know the solution is simply for him to move out, but that’s not possible right now. And even after that, I know my self-confidence will still be destroyed mentally. What can I do?
TL;DR: My boyfriend didn’t technically cheat, but before we got together he pursued another girl, compared me to her, lied to me, and made me feel humiliated. We still ended up dating, but the relationship destroyed my self-esteem and turned me into an anxious, jealous person I don’t recognize anymore. He currently lives with me, so I feel stuck and don’t know how to move on mentally.