My ex and I broke up due to his RJ. he has trouble with my past. We are looking to get back together. Recently he asked me if i had remembered any places that me and any of the past guys been to. there is one park where i went on a date with one of the guys, near my new house that we go by regularly. should i tell him, bc in reality it brings more hardship then anything, and is also minuscule in my opinion.
Speaking with a guy for about 2 months. I believe he has suppressed RJ. He is aware of it, I am aware of it. He contains it very well. He does spiral but he is able to ground himself very well. Myself 25F, him 22M.
I’ve previously told him my body count is only 1. But it is actually 3. I have started to have guilty consciousness and I’m wondering if it’s a good idea to tell him?
I’ve actually never even asked about his / cared. But I don’t want to this mess up what we have. This is really for my own peace of mind. And to build a relationship based off of facts not lies.
Thoughts?
For anyone with retroactive jealousy, have you tried completely not asking? If so, has it worked?
Title says it all. M20, first relationship / sexual partner. Girlfriend is older and has had past sexual experiences. RJ is kinda ruining my life.
I've been trying to deal with it for a few months now. Already made huge progress by no longer trying to find out more about her past through any means. I shared my insecurities with her and she was comprehensive and compassionate. Nevertheless I try to spare her of the occasional panic attacks and negative thoughts that come with it, since it's my battle to win after all.
I'm confident I'll get through this eventually, but I just need some advice on how to deal with the negative thoughts creeping in. How do I prevent them from snowballing into full blown panic attacks?
I’ve posted a lot about my own experience with RJ, but lately I’m experiencing something totally different. I’m experiencing RJ because of what one of my close friends is going through. He’s had feelings for another friend of ours for a long time. She’s never really been interested in him, but I get the impression that she might be starting to change her mind now that we’re all in our early thirties.
My close friend is very much like me. He isn’t a virgin, but he’s not the most experienced when it comes to dating. He’s had one girlfriend before, but that’s it. I think he’s got a lot of great qualities to offer, but we all know how hard dating can be. Our other friend has had a very different lived experience. Guys have always been interested in her, and she’s dated quite a few people.
Right now my friend is back in our hometown to take care of a family member, meanwhile, our other friend just started dating some random guy she met on an app. I know it’s her life (and she can do whatever she wants), but I can’t help but feel like it’s wrong that my friend has so much hope of creating a relationship with her while she’s actively sleeping with other guys.
I know my close friend is a pretty reasonable person. He knows she’s dated other guys in the past and doesn’t want to dwell on that, but it will be extremely hard on him to know what’s going on while he’s away. It also puts me in a horrible situation, because I don’t want to be the one to tell him. I feel like our friend believes that it’s fine to sleep around, and doesn’t approach dating the way that we do.
How do you even begin to navigate this kind of situation? Personally, I feel like this goes beyond RJ. While I want things to work out for him, I feel like this situation is going to cause a ton of RJ (perhaps to a point of it not even being worth it).
Due to my RJ, my partner and I are going to take a long break. It was getting to a point that I would ask about everything we were doing, and whether it was unique to us or not.
I did want to pause and do a sanity check though because there are degrees of intensity to everything! What may be alright for me might be too much "past experience" for someone else. So, I wanted to ask everyone on here how those boundaries and limits came to exist for each of you personally?
For me, I found out that my partner had lived with an ex for several years in college, and moved states with him when she graduated. Also, I felt like there were some sexual acts that made me question if my partner was on the "wilder" side compared to others. I don't want to get into those as it feels too personal.
I've gone down rabbit holes of checking what is statistically normal and what is not, obviously there were the usual (horrible) anxiety riddled questions where I would ask what they had done, and how could it possibly be any different physically with me?
In my experience everytime I’ve dated someone with history it almost always led to me contemplating breaking up 24/7 because of it. My body and mind just couldn’t handle all the pressure and stress of it so I always thought that breaking up is the easiest solution to it.
How do you cope and fight it?
Hey guys, this might be a bit of an unusual thing to ask but I’ve been using nicotine for about a year now. I tried to quit a couple months ago and was successful for two months before I fell back into it after learning some involuntary information about my partner’s past—things I found out directly from his ex (she messaged me randomly). It kind of sent me into a spiral, and I ended up buying a vape again.
I'm trying to stop again, but I find that smoking helps me calm my thoughts when I’m overthinking his past. I want to hit it every time I start thinking too much. Do you think I should quit right now, or wait until I’m in a better mental place before quitting? (I suffer from RJ and ROCD)
We knew each other at school when we were younger, and I had a fairly strong crush on her for several years. I never told her. We weren’t particularly close friends, and I also liked other girls.
Then our schools/classes split, and we basically stopped seeing each other regularly. Around that time, my feelings for her started to diminish naturally. I became more focused on other girls.
She started dating her first boyfriend roughly a month before I started dating my own first love. So by the time she got together with him, I definitely wasn’t as strongly into her as I had been earlier, and I wasn’t sitting around waiting for her.
There was still very light contact between us for the first couple of months after she started dating him. She also tried to meet up with me in a group and messaged me at different points. Eventually that contact disappeared completely, and we both went on with our separate lives.
We both eventually had our first serious relationships, and interestingly, those relationships ended at roughly the same time. After that, we unexpectedly reconnected, and that’s ultimately how we ended up dating each other.
So I don’t think the accurate story is “I desperately loved her while she chose another guy.” That’s not what happened. But she also wasn’t completely irrelevant to me when she started dating him.
For some reason, my brain now cares a lot about exactly how much I liked her at each point in that timeline. It seems to treat the difference between “I liked her a lot,” “I still liked her somewhat,” and “I barely cared” as if figuring out the exact answer would somehow explain what the situation meant.