u/Otherwise_Bus3225

I feel like I'm losing my mind, is this normal behavior?

I (27F) broke up with my ex-fiance (39M) a little over 3 months ago, but we're still living together because of our lease. I'm actively trying to find another place because I honestly don't think I can stay until the end of the year.

The hardest part is that during every fight, no matter what it starts over (this time it was about a table top fan), it somehow ends up back at our relationship and I'm always the one to blame for it. We've been arguing for 130 days. From my perspective, he still refuses to take genuine responsibility for the repeated emotional damage and broken trust that led to our breakup. He'll tell me he's sorry but in a very condescending sarcastic tone.

During these fights, he constantly reminds me that he has a list on his phone of all the "intentional" hurtful things I've said over the last four months. I know I said hurtful things, and I can't take the back and he likes to remind me of that. But it feels like my reactions are documented while the reasons I got to that point are brushed aside and ignored.

I've recorded a few conversations, and I told him I was doing it. Since then, he's started recording too. During our most recent fight he told me, "Take out your phone and start recording." I told him I didn't want to record the conversation. If he wants to record he can but don't tell me when to.

He also just told me, "You'll only have to deal with me for another five months," because he expects me to stay here until the lease ends but then asks me when I'm going to move out? My mental, emotional, and physical health have gotten so bad that I feel like I'm barely functioning. He won't even listen to me when asking why I wasn't enough for him and respond by telling me I was but then he flips the script and says the same thing. Gets offended if I answer and then will use it against me.

He makes me feel like a terrible human being for saying the things I have when I felt like I meant nothing to him.

I have other posts on my profile for more context.

I know this is an extraordinarily long post, and I genuinely appreciate anyone who takes the time to read it. I tried to condense it as much as I could, but I felt the context was important because each situation influenced how I experienced the next one. I'm looking for honest perspectives, even if they challenge my own.

My ex-fiancé (39M) and I (27F) were together for 2½ years. We met on Hinge. He was my first boyfriend. I was 24 and he was 36 when we started dating. Although we've ended our engagement, we're still living together temporarily while we figure out our next steps. I'm trying to reflect on my own role in how things ended and whether my expectations around transparency, boundaries, and trust were healthy or whether I crossed into being controlling. Before I explain what happened, I think it's important to explain how I view a committed, monogamous relationship.

I want my partner to know my world without having to ask. I want him to know the people in it, the conversations I'm having, the friendships I'm building, the dynamics of friendships that already exist, and that's something I expect in return. This was something I was upfront about from the start. I want us to know each other's worlds because, to me, that's how trust is built and emotional safety is maintained.

1.) Before we officially became a couple, he had a longtime female friend who lived in another country. I asked if there had ever been anything romantic between them. He admitted that they had both been in love with each other at one point and that they both knew the feelings were mutual, but they never pursued a romantic relationship. After telling me this, he was adamant they were just friends. I chose to believe him, accepted what he told me, and moved forward.

By that point, we'd known each other for about five months. We'd spent the previous several months building a connection. I developed strong feelings for him and believed we were building something serious. A few months into being exclusive, I left the country for a work trip and she came up in our conversations so frequently that I asked how often they communicated. He told me they talked every day or every other day. With this new knowledge, I started to feel great discomfort, and I made it known to him.

His immediate response was, "I really hope you're not going to ask me to end my relationship with x." He said it with such conviction that it caught me off guard. It felt like my discomfort about how often they talked was being minimized rather than addressed. The conversation shifted immediately away from how I felt and toward protecting that relationship. I didn't expect them to be talking that frequently because he had described her as a childhood friend, and the way he talked about their relationship made it sound like a casual friendship. Given what he'd already told me about their history, I assumed that friendship would naturally take a step back as ours moved forward. When I realized it hadn't, it completely changed how I viewed their friendship.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the last time this friendship became a source of conflict. It remained a recurring point of tension throughout our relationship. Even though I tried to move past my discomfort, it never fully went away and I was to blame for their falling out. (They're now back in contact after our breakup.)

2.) One of the earliest moments that should have, but didn't make me question whether I would truly be a priority happened shortly after we became exclusive. The first night we were intimate, he asked if I would be okay with him staying friends with a woman he had been seeing. I said no. After seeking advice, I convinced myself I shouldn't dictate his friendships and told him I was okay with it, but almost immediately realized I had talked myself out of my own boundary and went back a third time to tell him I actually wasn't okay with it.

Later, I learned he had only asked because she and another woman encouraged him to see if I would be okay with it after she wanted to pursue a relationship with him and didn't realize we had become exclusive. That realization hurt more than the original conversation because it made me feel like my emotional safety wasn't his first instinct.

For the next 2.5 years, he brought that situation up in nearly every argument, saying he was only using her as an example of how he had already prioritized me. But hearing it repeatedly made it feel like any concern I raised was overshadowed by that one decision, leaving me feeling like I had to justify my need for emotional safety over and over again.

3.) There is also a female coworker he would bring up in what felt like almost every conversation during the first several months we were building a connection. It bothered me enough that I confided in a family member. She told me that if they worked closely together, it probably wasn't something I needed to worry about. So I pushed my feelings aside instead of being transparent about the fact that how often he brought her up was bothersome. About six months into being exclusive, I finally brought it up because she was still being brought up regularly in conversation. It had taken me months to finally feel comfortable enough to open up to him. Instead of feeling understood, I left that conversation feeling invalidated. It left me wondering why she occupied so much space in our conversations. I felt ashamed for even bringing it up, like there wasn't room for my feelings, and that expressing my discomfort had become the problem.

4.) The reason for this post is the disagreement that ultimately ended our relationship.

One day he asked how I would feel about him making gaming friends online. I said absolutely because gaming is one of his biggest hobbies. He told me he'd made a Reddit post looking for people to game with. At the time, that struck me as unusual. In my mind, I assumed that gaming friendships would naturally develop by actually playing games together; you'd hop onto a game, meet people, and gaming friendships would develop from there. He didn't communicate that, to him, making gaming friends also meant building personal connections outside of gaming itself. Had I understood that from the beginning, I would have wanted a much deeper conversation about what that looked like and what we were both comfortable with.

So you can imagine my surprise when gaming usually wasn't the starting point of those conversations. Before gaming was ever really discussed, he was privately messaging people and having one-on-one conversations about hobbies, music, work, family, day-to-day life, etc. Most of those conversations were with women, and in most cases, he was the one initiating them. There were a couple of conversations with men, but those seem to stay entirely centered around gaming. When the men shared their Discord usernames or servers, the conversations generally ended there. When the women did, the conversations often continued on another platform. To me, those interactions were less about finding people to game with and more about building one-on-one personal online emotional connections that didn't feel respectful or appropriate for someone in a serious, committed relationship.

One thing that continued to bother me was that he wasn't consistently upfront about our relationship. From the conversations I saw, he mentioned me in only a couple of them. In most, I never came up at all. One conversation has always stayed with me. A woman introduced herself by saying she was married and had children. To me, that felt like a natural opportunity for him to respond that he was engaged or otherwise acknowledge our relationship. He didn't. The conversation continued, and he eventually casually mentioned that he had a fiancée.

I don't want to be someone who "comes up eventually." I don't want to be an afterthought in my own relationship. I don't want to feel like I have to investigate my own relationship to learn about connections my partner already has or is building. I want those things to be shared with me openly and honestly.

Am I being unreasonable for feeling displaced? I don't want to feel like I'm competing for my partner's emotional energy, attention, or investment, or like I have to work around connections that leave me feeling insecure just to preserve them. If something genuinely affects my sense of security in the relationship, I don't want my discomfort to become something I'm expected to simply get over. Eventually, I became emotionally exhausted and didn't know how to keep trying.

I repeatedly abandoned my own boundaries to be understanding, only to find myself defending the same needs over and over instead of having them respected.

If my expectations around transparency, boundaries, and emotional safety are healthy, I want to keep them. If they aren't, I want to learn from that too. Toward the end of the relationship, my hurt came out in harsh and hurtful ways towards my ex. That isn't the kind of partner I want to be, and it isn't the kind of partner I want to become again. I don't think being hurt excuses hurting someone else.

At what point would this have become a trust/boundary issue for you?

How would you rebuild trust after something like this, or would you consider it too much?

Do you think my expectations around transparency, boundaries, and protecting the relationship were healthy, or do you think I crossed into being controlling?

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My relationship with my ex-fiancé (39M) left me (27F) questioning whether my boundaries around trust and transparency were healthy.