u/DragonfruitQuick682

I’m 22F and my boyfriend is 24M. We’ve been together for about 8 months and I genuinely love him and believe that he loves and cares about me. I’m not looking to break up with him and honestly the thought of it makes me really sad. I want this relationship to work.

But something has been bothering me more and more, and I don’t know if I’m being unreasonable.

I’ve noticed that my boyfriend repeatedly likes posts from women that are very sexualized/bikini/thirst-trap type posts. At first I thought maybe I was just being insecure, so I tried not to care. But I’ve now noticed a pattern.

For example, there’s one female guitarist he follows. Her profile is mostly guitar/music content, but I noticed that he has liked multiple bikini posts of hers while I don’t see him liking her guitar content. I’ve also found several other women where the posts he liked were specifically bikini/revealing pictures.

Some of these are smaller creators, not just celebrities.
What bothers me is the selectiveness. I honestly wouldn’t care nearly as much if he liked a celebrity’s posts generally, or if he liked someone’s content because he genuinely follows them as a creator. I also don’t have an issue with him liking his female friends’ posts because they’re his friends.

It’s specifically the repeated pattern of liking sexualized pictures of women he doesn’t know that makes me uncomfortable.

I’m not saying he’s cheating or that liking a picture automatically means he wants the woman. I know that a like is just a like. But I can’t help feeling like, if someone repeatedly chooses to like the bikini/revealing post while ignoring the other content, then part of the reason is probably that they find the woman attractive.

And honestly, that hurts me.
There are also some other things that have been making me question the balance of our relationship. I’m usually the one writing long month-anniversary messages, making videos, initiating games, planning dates, supporting him with his uni, buying gifts/food, and I’ve even helped him financially when he was struggling. There have been periods where his uni was so overwhelming that we barely talked for up to two weeks, although we did have check-ins.

I don’t necessarily think he’s a bad boyfriend. He has been under a lot of stress with his uni graduation, and I genuinely believe he loves me. But sometimes I feel like I’m putting significantly more active effort into the relationship.

So now the Instagram thing is hitting a nerve.
I keep thinking, “I give this relationship so much. Why does he also need to actively engage with sexualized pictures of random women?”

I don’t want to be controlling. I don’t want to tell him he can’t have female friends or that he can never find another woman attractive. I just don’t feel comfortable with my boyfriend repeatedly liking sexualized posts from women he doesn’t know.

\*\*TL;DR; : This is a sample summary of the TLDR rule, all things are bold. Is this going the right way?\*\*.

I don’t really know where else to put this, so I’m hoping maybe someone here can understand.

I’m a 20-year-old Muslim woman from a very religious family, and lately I’ve been feeling an overwhelming amount of guilt and confusion about my faith and my life.
I love Allah. I genuinely do. That’s what makes this so painful.

I’ve been wearing hijab since I was 8 years old. I’ve always dressed very modestly, and hijab has been a huge part of my identity for basically my entire life. But recently I’ve started questioning it and, when I’m away from home, I’ve taken it off. When I do, I feel a sense of freedom that I honestly didn’t expect. But afterward I can feel incredibly guilty and scared.

My family is very strict about modesty. Just recently, my mother got angry with me for wearing something that only went up to my knees, even though I was still fully covered. So I don’t feel like I can honestly talk to my family about what I’m going through. They don’t know that I’ve been questioning hijab, and they also don’t know that I’m in a relationship.
I’m in a relationship with a man I really love. My family doesn’t know about him, and when I visit him I have to hide where I’m actually going. I feel guilty about that too. I hate feeling like I’m living two different lives.

I’ve also crossed a boundary in my relationship that I personally believed I shouldn’t cross. I don’t want to go into details, but I’ve been carrying a lot of shame and guilt about it. At the same time, I don’t regret loving my boyfriend. I don’t suddenly stop loving Allah either.
That’s what makes me feel so conflicted.
Sometimes I’m even scared to pray because a part of me irrationally thinks, What if I turn back to Allah and then He takes my boyfriend away from me? I know that probably sounds strange, but I’m genuinely scared of it. I don’t want to lose him.

I feel like I’m constantly afraid of disappointing someone. I’m afraid of disappointing Allah. I’m afraid of disappointing my family. I’m afraid of losing my boyfriend. And sometimes I don’t even know what I want anymore underneath all of that fear.
I’ve thought about telling one of my sisters because she has had relationships herself and doesn’t wear hijab, so I thought maybe she’d understand. But I’ve also seen her reveal someone else’s private relationship to the family almost immediately, so now I don’t know if I can trust her with something this important.
Another sister is someone I trust more, but she has lived a very different life and has never dated. I don’t know whether she’d understand or whether I’d just disappoint her.

So I feel completely alone.
And I think one of the things that hurts most is that I feel like taking off my hijab somehow makes me “worse” than a Muslim woman who never wore one. I know logically that I can’t know what’s in anyone else’s heart, but emotionally it feels like I broke something I had committed to. I’ve worn it for most of my life, so questioning it now feels like I’m betraying a part of myself.
I don’t want people to tell me simply that I’m a terrible Muslim or that I should just leave Islam. Neither of those things reflects how I feel.

I still love Allah. I still care about my faith. I still want a relationship with Allah. I’m just struggling with what that relationship looks like when I’m no longer sure how much of my religious life comes from my own heart and how much comes from fear, family, and expectations.
I want to understand how other Muslims have dealt with this kind of conflict.

Can you love Allah deeply while struggling with parts of how you’ve practiced Islam? Can you make mistakes and still come back to Allah without drowning in shame? How do you deal with guilt when your family and religious environment make it difficult to be honest about what you’re going through?

I don’t really need judgment right now. I think I just need someone to tell me that I’m not completely alone in this.

I’m 20 years old and I’ve been wearing the hijab since I was 8. It wasn’t forced on me in the sense that nobody physically made me wear it, but I also wonder how much an 8-year-old can really understand about Islam. Looking back, I mostly wore it because my mom encouraged me to. I didn’t even get my period until I was 15, so I wasn’t even religiously accountable at the time.

Lately I’ve been struggling more than ever. I think I want to take my hijab off, at least for now.
The thing is, I still love Allah. I still want to practice Islam. I still pray and I still care deeply about my faith. I don’t want to become immodest or abandon my religion. I simply don’t want my identity to be reduced to a piece of cloth anymore.
I live in Germany, and ironically, a lot of the harassment I experience comes from Muslim men. I get stared at, catcalled, judged, and treated as if they’re entitled to comment on my appearance or behavior. I wear colorful hijabs and light makeup, but flowy abayas and somehow I still feel sexualized despite being fully covered. It has honestly become exhausting.

Sometimes it feels like people see “the Muslim girl in hijab” before they see me. I’m a human being with my own personality, dreams, flaws, and struggles. I don’t want my entire identity to be wrapped up in whether or not I’m wearing something on my head.

I also have a lot of questions, especially about hadith rather than the Quran. I struggle with understanding why women seem to carry so much of the responsibility for representing modesty. Why is there so much emphasis on women covering from head to toe while men are mainly told to cover from the navel to the knee and lower their gaze? These questions don’t come from wanting to rebel—they come from genuinely trying to understand my faith.

My sister, who does wear the hijab, told me that before making a decision I should speak to many scholars and really educate myself. I understand why she says that, and I probably will. But at the same time, she chose to wear the hijab at 25. My mom chose to wear it at 35. Their journeys were very different from mine. I’ve been wearing it since I was 8, before I was old enough to make such a significant decision for myself.

I’m not here to argue whether the hijab is right or wrong. That’s honestly not what this post is about. What I’m struggling with is whether keeping it on is the right thing for me right now, when I’ve been carrying these feelings for over 10 years. At what point do you acknowledge that these feelings aren’t just a passing phase anymore?

Part of me feels that Allah knows what’s in my heart. I believe He understands that I’m trying to be honest with myself and that He would be patient with me if I needed time to rebuild my relationship with the hijab from a place of love rather than obligation.

The part that scares me isn’t even strangers anymore. It’s my mom.
She’s very religious, and I don’t know how to tell her. My other older sister doesn’t wear the hijab, but I still worry that my mom will be heartbroken or feel like she failed as a parent. I don’t want to hurt her, but I also don’t want to keep living in a way that doesn’t feel truthful to where I am right now.

Has anyone gone through something similar? Whether you kept the hijab, took it off, or eventually put it back on, I’d really appreciate hearing your experience. Please be kind. I’m genuinely trying to navigate my faith, not run away from it.

I’m [F21]looking for outside opinions because I genuinely can’t tell if this is my anxiety or if my feelings are reasonable.
My boyfriend [M22]has a female best friend that he’s known for several years. They’re very close and regularly spend time together one-on-one.

Sometimes they hang out at her place, drink alcohol together, and smoke weed together. Recently he spent the day helping her move and then they went to get food afterward.

One thing that probably contributes to my anxiety is that she’s very open about having casual hookups and a pretty carefree dating life. I know that someone’s sex life doesn’t automatically mean they would disrespect a relationship, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t make me worry more.
He’s never hidden this friendship from me. He tells me when he’s with her and keeps me updated.

However, there have been a few things over the course of our relationship that have bothered me. For example, I had to bring up his gf before me multiple times before he finally unfollowed her, and on one occasion he paid for this friend’s meal, while in our relationship we almost always split things 50/50. Sometimes I also feel like he doesn’t really understand why certain things make me uncomfortable.
To be fair, when we’re together he’s genuinely loving, affectionate, and caring. I don’t have proof that he’s cheated or anything like that.
I guess my question is:

Would you be comfortable if your partner regularly spent one-on-one time drinking and smoking with a close friend of the opposite sex? Would this bother you, or would you see it as a completely normal friendship?

I’m genuinely trying to understand whether this is something I should work on within myself or whether it’s a reasonable boundary to have.