Any hope for my relationship?
I’m a 27-year-old woman in England and I’ve been involved on and off with a 30-year-old man in the US for about 5½ years after meeting through a prison penpal site. He was incarcerated for theft of iPhones. He was released from prison in February this year.
I visited him in the US for 10 days after his release and things were amazing. I went back again in April for 2 weeks, but leading up to that trip things had already become extremely unhealthy. He became intensely paranoid that I was cheating or hiding things despite never once catching me cheating, lying, or doing anything suspicious.
For the first 2 weeks after coming home after the first trip, things were great. Then the paranoia started. It started with small things being interpreted as “off” behaviour — for example after I came home from the first trip, I didn’t want phone sex for a few days because my period was due, and he later said that’s when his trust issues started because I “started acting different.” Other normal behaviour then became suspicious to him like taking more than a few rings to answer a FaceTime call because my phone was in the other room or not replying immediately because I was cleaning. Any time that these things happens, I was accused of being with somebody else.
Over the next couple of weeks until the next trip, I started constantly reassuring him and changing my behaviour to avoid accusations:
always being available,
updating him constantly,
sitting on FaceTime for hours every night,
screen sharing while on FaceTime
sharing my location
constantly explaining myself
Having to show him around my flat on FaceTime, open cupboard doors to show him that nobody was hiding in them
A few days before my April trip we fell asleep on FaceTime together and the next morning he told me that throughout the night he was hearing moaning and lots of banging and lots of noises and he was convinced that I was fake sleeping on a green screen. He then started asking for things like my iCloud login and Instagram password to “prove” I wasn’t doing anything. I refused because by that point I already felt like nothing was ever enough and more access would just create more paranoia. I was genuinely becoming ill with the constant accusations and treading on eggshells and there would be 2/3 hour long conversations every evening when I got home from work with me trying to reassure him and him accusing me of the next thing I was supposedly lying about.
The only thing that had kept me in a relationship with him until this point was the fact that he was very self-aware, when he wasn’t spiralling he would say to me I know that this isn’t healthy and I know that I’ve got severe trust issues and I know that what I’m asking of you isn’t right or healthy and you are justified in saying no to passwords etc but he said that if I really wasn’t doing anything behind his back and I really wanted to try and help him then I would have no problem sharing these things so I’m essentially making everything worse by not helping him, completely disregarding how I have changed my entire lifestyle to help ease his fears.
I was debating on whether to go on the April trip or not but decided to go hoping that me physically being there with him would be able to help ease his anxieties and help him feel more secure for when I next go home.
During my April trip I discovered he had secretly bought spy cameras off Amazon and hidden them in the bedroom and bathroom to record me and monitor my phone screen while he was in another room. I saw loads of recordings of me just lying on the bed on TikTok while he watched remotely. I barely reacted at the time because I had become so used to trying to soothe his trust issues.
Aside from finding out about the spy cameras, the April trip went extremely well and I felt really positive coming home (that sounds crazy I know given the history of everything) but within a couple of days things went back to how they were before. He then requested that I gave him access to the security camera in my flat which I stupidly agreed to hoping that would solve all of our problems because I knew that I had genuinely nothing to hide. When the cameras obviously proved nobody was coming in or out, instead of feeling reassured he just moved the accusations onto my “behaviour” instead — things like turning lights on/off, the way I moved around, etc. He would call me a “weirdo” constantly for completely normal things like questioning why I kept my hairbrush in the living room rather than my bedroom and he was telling me that I was manipulating lights in a certain way to block certain doorways to sneak people in.
He has also screen recorded FaceTimes and later interrogates me about tiny movements like:
“At 4:27 why did you look left, who was there?”
I genuinely started feeling psychologically unwell:
hypervigilant,
constantly on eggshells,
scared to miss calls,
scared to move wrong on FaceTime,
constantly trying to prevent accusations.
A couple of weeks ago I basically had a mental breakdown and told him I can’t do it anymore and this is where I revoked camera access, turned my location off and told him I wasn’t going to continue in this relationship anymore if he doesn’t change and work on himself. Since then, over the past couple of weeks things have been better (less accusations) but there are massive double standards which I believe he has only done to punish me for revoking the access:
he has changed his phone password and told me that I can’t go on his phone anymore when we’re physically together
he stopped sharing his location,
he admits he withholds affection (says luv u when I say I love you things like that) and refuses to explain things to “make me feel how he feels,” (for example on a FaceTime I saw him zooming in on a picture of a girl on his camera roll in the reflection of his glasses and when I asked him about that he told me that he would not explain anything because I refuse to give him my passwords)
he’s gone out to bars until 5am leaving his phone at home
but if I question anything, I’m accused of “spinning things.”
Meanwhile, emotionally the relationship has become completely one-sided. Everything revolves around regulating him and his anxiety. Even though I’m not being met with extreme accusations anymore, constant little comments are being made. My needs only seem to matter when they don’t conflict with his insecurities.
Examples:
I recently found a lump in my breast and had an appointment at a breast clinic. Despite all our issues, he didn’t even check in or ask how it went. I genuinely think he forgot because he’s so consumed with himself and monitoring me.
Sex is extremely selfish. He doesn’t care about my pleasure and refuses oral sex, while everything revolves around him.
Financially I’ve invested massively:
flights,
hotels,
clothes,
trips,
general support,
probably around £10k over the years.
He recently promised to start paying me back weekly after getting a job, but so far has only sent £250 and complains about sending money despite having very low living expenses.
The biggest issue now is that I genuinely feel like there is no “solving” this because the goalposts constantly move. Whenever I provide proof or reassurance, a new accusation appears:
cameras proved nobody entered my flat → accusations shifted to my behaviour,
he demanded to see my emails to prove I logged him out of Spotify because he suddenly couldn’t access my Spotify on his phone → when no password reset email existed, he claimed I must have deleted it,
every reassurance just turns into another theory.
He says I’m manipulative and “spin things,” but I have been doing nothing but bending over backwards trying to help him while becoming mentally drained in the process.
The confusing part is that I do believe he genuinely loves me and is just really struggling with adjusting to life in the real world and I don’t think he can help the way he feels insecure and paranoid because he was never like this in prison. He is very self-aware like I have said and he is very aware of the fact that his behaviour isn’t normal and it’s unfair to me. I don’t think he wakes up every day thinking “I want to abuse her.” But at the same time, his behaviour has become controlling, emotionally exhausting, invasive, and honestly psychologically damaging for me.
He is now saying he wants me to do a polygraph/lie detector test in June when i’m next due to fly out to see him, he says that’s the only way that this behaviour is going to stop, he needs proof from a lie detector test that I am not a cheat or a liar. At first I agreed because I genuinely have nothing to hide and I thought maybe it would finally put everything to bed, but the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realised that even if I passed, I honestly don’t think it would change anything. Every time one accusation gets disproved, another one appears instead. It feels like he’s so determined to prove I’m lying that no amount of reassurance, evidence or “proof” will ever actually be enough.
Right now I’m at the point where:
I love him,
but I don’t think I can do this anymore,
I feel like I’ve lost myself,
and I’m struggling to tell whether there’s genuinely any hope of recovery after enabling/reinforcing this dynamic for so long.
Has anyone actually come back from a relationship dynamic this extreme and ended up healthy? Or is this realistically too far gone?