I’ve been in a relationship with my partner for 6 years now, since I was 18.
He’s from a military family and we knew each other from school. It was like a fairytale at the beginning. We spent so much time together, we always talked about our future. His family were posted abroad and my parents took him in and treated him as their own.
We both went to university in the same city, again spending so much time together. After he graduated is when we began spending less time together. He lived with another of his family members while I went into the teaching profession and did my training.
About 2 years ago he decided he wanted to join the army too. To begin with I wasn’t sure how it would work out for us but we’ve worked through it and he’s just about to finish his training in August.
He started training last September and there’s been two major problems. He was went on a trip to Holland and came back and continued to talk about her and like her posts. I found out two months later and confronted him about it. Initially, he was very apologetic and I told him I needed time to think about it. He came to visit a couple of weekends later and after a drunken night out I brought it up. He stormed out of the meal and got in his car. Drunk. He came round to my house the following day and proceeded to tell me he had done nothing wrong because he wasn’t flirting. He spoke to me like dirt on his shoe so I told him to get out. I think this genuinely shocked him and he tried to retrieve the situation but I stood strong and asked him to go. We decided we would talk and see what happened...
After a couple of days I began to miss him. He found this difficult because I wanted to talk to him but had also said I wanted him gone. I get that this could have been confusing but it was very much heat of the moment. We worked it out over a number of weeks. Skip forward three months and we were in a great place. He came to stay with me and my family in lockdown and it was great.
He returned to work last week and we were coping well. It got to late Saturday and he told me he had a job to do but after he had returned I never heard from him. I could see he was on social media so I went onto his Instagram. I found that he was speaking to another girl from work and had been for the majority of the day. Till the night. There were a couple of flirty messages back and forth. I screenshotted these. I couldn’t sleep that night worrying and was up from 4am. The following morning I asked him what he was up to last night and he got angry saying I was checking up on him.
I went back on his account and saw that he had gone and deleted lots of the messages which I had missed while sleeping. When I asked him what he was doing on Instagram he said he must’ve just been scrolling through but I obviously knew this was a lie. I gave him 2 opportunities to say which he then said he didn’t want to talk to me. I left it by saying message me when you’re ready to tell the truth. I haven’t heard from him in 3 days.
This has sent my anxiety through the roof. I’ve got this horrible sickness feeling in my stomach. I want this to work so bad but I feel that there’s a lack of trust and I just want him to be truthful. I feel like I’m a secret down to him as he has no pictures of us to show anyone (which he has done previously) and never posts pictures of us together anymore.
I just want advice on what to do next. Do I keep trying to make this work or is it dead in the water. Mentally I have found this extremely challenging and just want to hear people’s points of view.