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The original was posted on /r/relationships by /u/Fearless-Pattern-352 on 2024-01-23 08:28:37+00:00.
Should I bail on this relationship?
I (47m) have been seeing this woman (34f) for about 4 months. We hit it off right away, spent the whole 4 months talking and being together pretty much every chance we had.
She has had a rough past couple of years, basically allowed the older man (like myself) who she was with previously to control every aspect of their lives as well as their successful business they had together, then apparently everything went to shit when he got on drugs from having all this expendable cash around, their relationship became really toxic and abusive and she basically had to run with nothing.
When we met she definitely trauma dumped on me quite a bit, I listened and felt sorry for her and tried being a voice of reason for her, she has mentioned many times that I am calming for her and stable, things she hasn’t had in her life for awhile I guess.
She certainly wants all the things that come with a normal relationship, we agreed not to have sex with anyone else while together, spent literally every day together for months, but she has been pretty persistent that she isn’t ready for a ‘full blown’ relationship? At the beginning of December she had a falling out with the people she was living with so I invited her to stay at my place until she could find a place to live. She spent Christmas with my family and I, everything seemed like it was going great until a few weeks ago when we met at a pub after her work (she is a bartender and showed up already drunk) and she was really rude to me, and fought with me that night, I ended up leaving my space and sleeping somewhere else just to get away. She did apologize the next day for being so difficult.
I had multiple people warn me about her after they saw us together at the beginning, apparently she had made a name for herself in the small town we live in, one girl called her a ho, multiple dudes said her nickname was red flag lol. She is very endearing tho direct to a fault, and charming and intelligent, and very cute on top of it, so I decided that maybe she was worth a try anyway and she seemed really into me so I took a chance on her. I am promiscuous myself, which she is as well and has admitted to being, so I try not to judge on that but I am not a cheater. I’ve made my mistakes in the past and paid dearly for it, so I just don’t go there or put myself in a position where I would be tempted.
I did see a few things while we spent time together that made me question if it was worth the trouble- she loves to flirt, loves attention from men, and has a very short fuse. I kind of started realizing that she had an ego that needed to be fed, and me being secure in myself it started being a turn off because I was starting to worry about me having feelings for her and she really never did anything to make me feel important to her, and things really seemed to be all about her. If I didn’t hear from her I would worry she was with someone else.
So a week after she was rude to me at the pub, I was still feeling shitty about what happened although she did apologize and was apparently too drunk to remember the things she said, I knew something was up and she wasn’t talking to me about it. She was in my bed at my house she was living at, and she fell asleep watching a video so I got her phone to turn it off and my curiosity got the better of me so I checked her messages and of course there was a text conversation with some guy the same night she was rude to me, him asking her to come to his place and her telling him ‘not tonight’, then towards the end she told him they should hang out sometime.
Yes, I know that going through someone’s phone is fucked up but I wasn’t going to waste my time on some woman who is rude to me and gives out her number to other dudes. Of course I was pissed, I woke her up and asked her ‘who’s this?’ We fought a bit, she said that it was a guy that’s been flirting with her for about a year, that she was just ‘curious’, said it was nothing though and she wasn’t ever planning on hanging out with him and that it wasn’t a big deal.
Well it was a big deal for me. I asked her to get her stuff and leave the next day. She messaged me throughout the next day, telling me she was so sorry and didn’t mean to hurt me.
She and I have been talking all this last week, me just trying to figure out why she needed to do that when we, I thought, were building a relationship together and spending all our time together. I really like this woman, in fact I was totally falling for her but this really broke my heart. She’s been trying to patch things up, but gets super defensive when I would probe her about what happened and why. She can’t admit to herself why she gave this guy her number and allowed him to pursue her like that, as well as her reciprocating in the text conversation.
She has said she is sorry, that she’ll never do it again, and that she is no longer talking to the guy and that it’s done. I don’t know if I could really trust her again, even though everything in me tells me I should give her a chance because besides this issue everything for the most part has been good except her not being very affectionate or wanting to be in a comitted relationship with me yet, but for the most part she is fun to be with, we have great sex and laugh the whole time together. I mean it’s only been 4 months but she was living with me, spending every day with me and talking about a future with me, so maybe you can see why I’m conflicted.
I really don’t know where to go from here. Should I keep trying? Am I just wanting something that isn’t there? Am I just being used?
TL;DR, met amazing woman, been together for 4 months, laughing, hanging out everyday, having loads of fun and sex, she moves in with me then I found out she had been texting another man making plans to hang out while living with me.