Am I overreacting?
my boyfriend and i have been together for nearly 4 years.However we were together before that for about 9 months. I broke up with him then because I found out he had intense feelings for another woman the whole time he was with me ( his school crush who he still had regular contact with , at the time we were 21 and 23 ).Shortly after we broke up he got into a relationship with the other woman but they broke up after a couple of months ending things on bad terms. About 2 months after they broke up we reconnected at our place of work and decided to take things slowly and have been together happily for the most part ever since.
However periodically I’ve had a horrible feeling that he was not quite over her despite him telling me he absolutely was, he has sometimes hidden his messages from her and looked her up on social media on a regular basis ( we shared a computer) even whilst we’ve been together talking in bed but sort of leaning away from me which just fuelled the horrible feeling.
Let me just make it clear that I’m on not jealous of him having contact with women or watching porn or anything like that , this horrible feeling stems from him leading me on when we were first together with only this one particular woman and my regret for not ending it sooner.
However for the last year nothing has happened to make me question what he has told me and I’ve been getting into a really good head space with it until yesterday I had a dream that ( typical I know) that he left me for her.So I did something I instantly regretted and looked in his notebook where he jots random thoughts down and found a piece of paper folded up tightly in the back of the book written 4 weeks ago detailing that if he was drunk he would fuck her and that he is still mesmerised by her appearance and basically went on about how he needs to move past his feelings for her but why can’t and that if he lost me because of this he would remember me till he died ( not that it would be his biggest regret ) and other sentiments to that effect.
Obviously I confronted him admitting that I went through his notebook and that even if he had the best explanation in the world I simply cannot deal with these feelings of mistrust anymore in the relationship but welcomed his explanation anyway.
He tried to explain that yes when we have spoken about his feelings for her in the past he was truthful in that he has no romantic feelings for her but omitted that he maybe has never moved on 100% but their breakup was never resolved. He said that he felt that if he had told me this during those talks that he felt I would have ended the relationship and that he knew it would have seriously hurt me . He explained that the reason he wrote that stuff down was because he was trying to mentally process what feelings he still has for her ( nostalgic, sexual or otherwise ) to try and move past them but stressed that he didn’t want her as girlfriend / SO because they were simply not compatible in that way. Also that everytime he did happen to think of her that he feels very guilty and that it has become a viscous cycle of negative reinforcement.
I countered that surely if I was everything he wanted in his future ( as he put it ) after 4 years he should not have fears about possibly ‘ losing control of yourself ‘ and possibly fucking your ex if you met them whilst drunk
We didn’t shout or get aggressive towards each other but obviously got very emotional
Personally I don’t know how to move forward from this