Blissbabe Member Profile

...See more Hello, I’ve been with my husband for nine years and in that time I’ve always been insecure and controlling. He has his own toxic traits and we’ve been able to make it work by (probably unhealthily) catering to each other. To avoid triggering me, he has largely always avoided any female friendships and we’ve had no issues with this for years. Well, about a year ago he became very involved in an online community and I found out he was behaving very flirtatiously with several women. I have no reason to think it went beyond that and he adamantly insists he’s not interested in other women, but it caused months of fights as he was unwilling to leave the community. It nearly even led to divorce as I couldn’t stand his continued involvement and was angry that he was suddenly changing the status quo, while he was angry at my lack of trust as well as me trying to make him give up his friends and community. There’s a lot more to it but I feel like that’s a decent baseline. At the core of all of this is an intense fear of someone tempting him away from me and so I don’t even want to allow the chance. Yes, it also means I don’t trust him even though there is no history there. To my knowledge he has never cheated but he does gaslight and lie and I absolutely cannot stand the idea of being cheated on and not knowing. He has stopped the flirtatious behavior and mainly only talks to male friends now, but he cannot fully disengage with women there and I know he shouldn’t have to but it continues to freak me out. Knowing he’s even capable of behaving the way he did has left me with heightened insecurity and anxiety and we end up fighting regularly if I get any sense that he’s talking to women. I know this is extremely unhealthy and controlling and I see all these other people who have no issue with their partner having online friends of the opposite sex, some even openly flirting, but I just absolutely lose it if I see anything that seems even remotely too familiar. My brain immediately starts wondering if this or that might be happening. I am looking into professional therapy but would appreciate any advice or tactics I could try for getting passed this. I’ve had the most success with completely disengaging because if I don’t see it, I have nothing to get riled up about, but something always inevitably pulls me back into the paranoia and I start checking in on him or questioning things. How do people just… trust. The idea of not knowing what might be happening makes me crazy and so everything in me wants to just take away any scenario in which it could happen.

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