AITAH for asking my boyfriend to cut off his girl best friends?
Hi Reddit, I've never posted anything like this before but I've been going crazy trying to determine if I'm in the wrong here or not. All opinions are welcome, but I ask that you be blunt, not cruel; there is a difference.
Ok so anyways, my (F 20) boyfriend (M 21) and I are long distance in college right now. He had been best friends with this girl, we'll call her Alice, for almost 3 years. They started off 8th grade being inseparable (our high school was 8th - 12th) and were best friends up until junior year, when I genuinely had enough and asked him to create some distance between the two of them. Some back story for why I asked him to do this: Alice had a very obvious crush on him and was very touchy, flirty, just strange around him in a way you would be if you had a crush ie: touching his arm every time she laughed, constantly asking where he was in a room, trying to be by him/stand next to him/sit next to him whenever possible, she didn't respect me and his relationship at all as she would ask him to hang out alone, sit next to him without saving me a seat or filling up a seat that was meant for me, inviting only him to her birthday party when I was literally friends with her and we worked together for like 2 years, they had a strange fling in the past and I heard so many rumors about them and things that they did but recently he told me the extent of everything and granted they didn't do much but it was enough to make me upset with the fact they were still friends, when me and him first started dating people genuinely didn't believe me or were shocked when I told them because they thought that he and Alice had been dating for like 2 years.
Some more context you'll need: there was this other girl he had started to be friends with a few months before we started dating; I'll call her Maddie. I wasn't her biggest fan due to things she had said/done and I just didn't really like Maddie as a person, but whatever. I noticed, though that she had a very flirty personality and would often talk about different guys and things she'd do with them etc, right to my boyfriend. It was just really weird vibes and I started to be wary of her, not to mention she was best friends with the girl mentioned above, even after Maddie had heard about all of the things she'd done and how she constantly disrespected my relationship. There was a time when Maddie and my boyfriend hung out alone when we were dating and I later had to explain to him how weird that was and how I felt really disrespected since I had told him how I was kind of uncomfortable with her. There was another time he lwk lied to me about hanging out with her and I only learned she was at his job through Snap Maps, and when I confronted him, he said he'd rather not tell me she was there than have to deal with my reaction. I heard that she had had a crush on him before we started dating and I confronted him about this, crying and almost begging him to create some space between them both since before this I had expressed to him I was uncomfortable with their friendship so many times and he never did anything to address it. When we were having a conversation about long distance, somehow she got brought up and he told me that she had confessed to him before he and I started dating, a fact he had literally never told me any of the times I was crying to him about how uncomfortable I was with her and how crazy I felt because I was only hearing rumors.
Let me just say, by no means am I trying to force him to not have any female friends. I do have my own share of trust issues from things that have happened to me in the past, but we openly communicate and I tell him to tell me if he thinks I'm being too irrational about some things. That goes to say he also has his fair share of trust issues, and we work around the both of ours together and communicate with one another. However, I just am not the biggest fan of my boyfriend being besties with girls he's done things with or girls who have had crushes on him, that just seems weird to me.
On to the main topic of this post. Recently, he came to me expressing the need for a conversation. When I asked what about he said that he feels guilty about the way he cut off both of the girls above and wants to start being friends/friendly with them again- mainly Alice. This caught me so off guard as I thought we were doing so well as a couple and I never expected to hear about her, much less for him to tell me he had been thinking about her for the past few weeks. I was kind of extremely upset in the moment and maybe didn't handle the argument in the best way possible but I asked him if he missed her and he admitted he did. I asked him what he wanted out of this conversation, and he didn't even know what to tell me, basically he just wants to say hi to her on the street and have conversations with her. Call me crazy but because of everything I went through and the number of times I had to beg him to create space with her, even the thought of him wanting to have conversations with her again makes me so upset. He says that he hates how he cut them off also and feels like he was forced to, but let me be clear I never asked him to do that much; I only asked him to create space. Obviously, selfishly I am happy about the outcome that happened, but I don't like that he's trying to blame me for his actions of just ignoring them suddenly basically. He was so free to have a conversation with them about things or why he needed some space, but that's not the route he chose.
So, am I the asshole for getting really upset with my boyfriend for this conversation he brought up and for still not wanting him to talk to these girls really? Am I being controlling? Or am I justified for not wanting him to have relationships with girls he's been emotionally or physically intimate with?