UPDATE:My [21F] boyfriend [47M] was hiding more than I thought, now he wants a fresh start
I recently made a post about my boyfriend refusing to let me look through his phone after I discovered that he was saving porn and photos of other women on Reddit. A lot has happened since then. I ended up looking through his phone again, and I found much, much more explicit content than I initially knew about. There were disgusting porn videos and both sexual and non-sexual pictures of women saved throughout his camera roll, and his search history showed that he was looking at this stuff content extremely frequently, every day or every other day. He then admitted to me that he considers himself addicted to pornography.
This is particularly upsetting because during our previous conversations about this, he explicitly told me that he was NOT addicted and that he did NOT look at it every day. He also initially lied about how he accessed some of the content, telling me that he came across it accidentally, before later admitting that he intentionally accessed it. He also blatantly lied to me about being subscribed to Onlyfans.
I then discovered screenshots that showed that he had been video chatting with a naked woman while I was away at work. He tried to lie to me about this at first by saying it happened on a day that was really tough for us, but I went back to our messages and we were actually doing pretty decent that day. I do not know who this woman is or how they met. At first he told me he met her through Chaturbate and was communicating with her there, and I don’t actually know too much about Chaturbate or the user interface, but the explanation doesn't make sense based on what I actually saw. It appeared to be a two-way video call through something more like a phone or video messaging app versus a camming site. He also contacted this same woman ON THE SAME DAY that I first discovered the explicit content on his phone. I found out about the explicit content around midnight, and I later found evidence that he video-called this woman that afternoon. I still don't know what exactly happened between them or who she is. When I ask about the conversations that they had, my boyfriend tells me that they were plain, they just asked each other about their day, then he stopped talking to her because she asked him for money.
Throughout all of this, he has repeatedly told me that his phone is extremely private, that a phone is like someone's journal, and that he has a moral principle against allowing me to look through it. But I also found out that he has gone through MY personal locked diary multiple times. He even took pictures of my pages. So now I obviously feel incredibly hurt and disgusted, because he has been using privacy as this moral principle that I supposedly violated, while he was secretly violating my own privacy. Now we're at the point where he says he wants a “fresh start.” The problem is that I don't feel like I can just erase everything that happened and start over. He has two other phones that he refuses to show me. He also refuses to let me watch him delete the explicit content from his main phone. Whenever I ask for transparency about what has happened or ask to see the phones, he gets extremely upset and says he doesn't want to go through what we went through the other night.
For context, our last confrontation went on until around 8 AM. We were both crying, extremely distressed, and at one point we were physically struggling over his phone. I understand why he doesn't want to repeat that experience. But when I tell him that I need transparency about what has happened before I can give him a genuine fresh start, he offers me nothing in return and continues to stand on his point of not wanting to experience anything like the other night again. I feel like he is basically telling me that he would rather break up than let me see his phones. I understand that people have a right to privacy in relationships. But what he is doing is being secretive about his wrongdoings. How am I supposed to make a decision about whether I want to continue this relationship when so many things have already turned out to be lies, and he is still refusing to tell me what else there is?
I need the truth because I have repeatedly discovered that what he told me was not the truth. He says he wants a fresh start, but to me, a fresh start requires accountability and honesty about what happened before the fresh start, right? I honestly feel like I'm losing perspective because I've been questioning myself and feeling awful so much throughout this.