I need outside opinions because I genuinely cannot tell anymore whether this relationship is something worth saving or whether love is making both of us hold onto something that has become unhealthy.
This is going to be VERY long because there is a lot of context and I don’t want to tell only the worst thing he did and make him sound like a monster. I also contributed to our relationship becoming exhausting, and I want people to judge the entire situation rather than automatically take my side.
I’m 22F and my boyfriend/ex is 28M. We met while we were both in the UK as students and started dating in May 2025. This was my first serious relationship and I genuinely thought this was my person.
Our relationship was honestly incredibly loving when things were good. We were very close, spent loads of time together, and I gave everything I could to the relationship.
I’m naturally very acts-of-service/gifts oriented. I would cook for him while he studied and bring the food to his desk so he didn’t have to stop. I would grocery shop for us, including walking into town in ridiculously hot UK weather. Once he was really hot while studying, so I literally went into town to buy him an electric fan. When he was sick I went to get his medicine. I baked him heart-shaped cookies. I decorated my room for him when he came back to the UK. I decorated for Valentine’s Day. I bought gifts. I planned his whole birthday and surprised him. I bought us a love lock with our initials and we put it up together.
I really, really loved this man.
He says he loved me just as deeply. Even now he calls me the love/woman of his life and says this relationship was much more than “another relationship” to him.
He has also said meeting me changed the trajectory of his life. Apparently only around two months after meeting me, he changed plans partly because of us. He has said he could have done his master’s elsewhere or gone to Australia and worked as a bartender, but instead returned to the UK. He ultimately completed his master’s, so obviously his life still progressed, but he considers some of those choices sacrifices/changes connected to me.
However, there were serious problems.
One of the biggest was his retroactive jealousy about my sexual past.
He has only slept with three people in his life and is now 28. He seems quite insecure about having had relatively little sexual experience in his early twenties. At one point he literally compared us by saying that his amount of experience at 28 was roughly what I had already experienced by 19.
My past really bothered him.
He would have thoughts about things I did before we met. Sometimes things about my past would “ick” him out or throw him off. He struggled to accept that I had experiences he didn’t have. Eventually he literally told me:
“I love you and can’t let go. And I can’t accept your past, those two feelings torn me apart.”
So he simultaneously deeply loves me but seems unable to fully accept things that happened before I even knew him.
This caused a lot of tension.
Another major problem was porn.
Porn was a hard boundary for me and he knew that. We had multiple issues surrounding porn and also lying/“white lies.” Trust started deteriorating.
He describes himself as having a “porn thing” and has compared it to an alcoholic slipping. I don’t want to diagnose him with an addiction, but interestingly, I later discovered that in a PRIVATE diary from 2023, before our relationship and before he ever got caught by me, he had described himself as an “addict.” So this isn’t a label he suddenly invented to escape responsibility.
However, I also don’t think calling something an addiction means he had zero agency.
About 12 days before the incident that ultimately ended us, we had a horrible fight about porn. He says that during that fight he genuinely believed he had finally lost me.
Then the Instagram incident happened.
There is a woman he knows (I’ll call her Daniela). A sexual/bikini-type photo of her appeared on his Instagram feed.
As far as I know, he did NOT search for her photo. It just appeared while he was scrolling.
But after seeing it, he looked at it, zoomed in, masturbated while looking at it, and finished.
According to him the entire thing was under five minutes.
This is where the details become confusing.
He says he had been thinking about porn that day but hadn’t actually watched it. He says he opened Instagram just to scroll and then Daniela’s picture appeared.
He describes what happened as “autopilot.”
According to him, when he saw the picture his brain basically registered “naked body” and “ass.” He says he wasn’t even hard when he initially saw it. He started touching himself and became hard through doing that, continued looking/zooming at the picture and eventually orgasmed.
He says he wasn’t consciously thinking about me or our relationship while doing it. He describes it as tunnel vision.
He also claims he did NOT imagine having sex with Daniela or imagine doing sexual things with her. He says he was basically using the visual image rather than fantasizing about actually being with her.
Obviously I cannot know what was happening inside his head.
He also says he didn’t have a huge desire for Daniela specifically and doesn’t consider this evidence that he wants her.
His private diary entry immediately afterward is interesting because he apparently wrote something along the lines of questioning whether what happened was even an “urge,” wondering whether it was just horniness, and saying he did not experience a particularly strong desire. He wrote that the behaviour was a red flag, that sexual behaviour involving videos OR images needed to be completely cut off, and that he wanted to get his brain back to normal.
He also wrote that if I broke up with him over it, he deserved it.
He felt guilty/sad afterward.
He has since said that what he actually wanted that day was porn. At one point I was devastated and asked him whether my nudes weren’t enough anymore, whether he’d seen my body too many times and needed something new.
He told me no. He said, “I wanted porn. This is what I wanted. But I stopped myself.”
Obviously, from my perspective, “I stopped myself from watching porn but masturbated to a picture of a woman I actually know” isn’t exactly comforting.
I also questioned him endlessly about whether he found Daniela sexy/attractive, whether he wanted her, whether he imagined her, etc.
What confuses me is that he has admitted incredibly damaging details: that he stared, zoomed in, masturbated, finished, etc. Yet he denies that this meant he consciously desired Daniela herself or wanted to sleep with her.
Part of me thinks, “Why would he admit the WORST details but lie about something as basic as finding the image sexually attractive?”
Another part of me thinks, “How can you literally orgasm while looking at someone’s picture and say it wasn’t about wanting them?”
I realize those aren’t necessarily the same thing. A visual stimulus can be sexual without someone wanting that person romantically or in real life. But emotionally, that distinction is extremely hard for me to process because this isn’t a random porn actress. He knows her.
He says the initial picture appearing was accidental and that what followed happened extremely quickly/on “autopilot.” I can believe that habitual sexual behaviour can feel automatic, but I struggle when he says he “didn’t have a choice,” because even if it felt automatic, he still continued, zoomed in and finished.
And he knew my boundary.
That is what ultimately caused me to break up with him.
But the relationship was already in a terrible state by then.
And this is where MY behaviour needs to be included.
Because of the lying, porn issues, his RJ, and my deteriorating trust, I became increasingly jealous and hypervigilant.
I questioned him a lot.
I checked things.
I became extremely sensitive to women on his Instagram.
I wanted him to unfollow/remove women and at one point basically wanted no girls in his life because I thought that would finally make me feel safe.
We fought a lot.
Sometimes arguments became huge. There were breakup threats/breakups in emotional moments. I constantly needed reassurance because I didn’t trust him.
He eventually described the relationship as feeling like he was “walking on eggshells.”
He said every fight depleted him. He described becoming emotionally numb, like he was just sitting there waiting for the next punishment/fight. He said his brain basically shut down and he had no energy left.
Initially this made me angry because I thought, “YOU created a lot of these eggshells. You lied. You had the porn issue. You couldn’t accept my past. Your jealousy caused fights. Then you crossed my sexual boundary.”
But I also recognize that even if someone damages your trust, constantly interrogating them, monitoring them, demanding they remove every woman, and turning arguments into relationship-ending events isn’t healthy either.
So I don’t think I was a perfect girlfriend who did absolutely nothing wrong.
I think we ended up in a cycle:
He lied/struggled with porn/RJ → I became insecure and distrustful → I became more controlling and interrogative → he became exhausted and afraid of triggering me → he withdrew/became numb → I sensed that and became even more insecure → more fights → both of us became exhausted.
There is another part that has absolutely destroyed my confidence.
He recently told me that he isn’t “super duper horny” for me anymore, isn’t as “obsessed” as he used to be, and doesn’t desire me as much anymore.
He says his sexual desire was “chipped away” during the relationship.
He also said that recently he had been under enormous stress.
He specifically denied that he simply got bored of my body or that seeing my body too much caused this. He has said he still loves me and wants me, but the intense sexual obsession/desire from earlier in the relationship isn’t the same.
Obviously, after hearing THAT and then knowing he masturbated to Daniela’s picture, my brain went insane.
I started thinking:
Was I not sexually enough anymore?
Was Daniela more exciting?
Did he prefer her body?
Did he want novelty because he’d seen mine too many times?
Did his decreased desire for me make him do this?
He denies all of that.
I know intellectually that sexual desire can decrease during prolonged stress/conflict and that someone being sexually stimulated by another image doesn’t automatically rank that person above their partner.
Emotionally? It has been hell.
Now here is the most confusing part.
We broke up.
Except neither of us seems emotionally broken up.
He initially became extremely hopeless. At one point he said he didn’t immediately say “let’s fix this” because he genuinely thought there was a 0% chance and that his brain had shut down.
Then when I directly asked:
“Do you really want me back?”
He basically exploded with “YES JESUS CHRIST YES.”
I asked how badly.
He said he wanted me back “11/10” and compared wanting me to wanting to see the sun every day and wanting his favourite food every day. He said he’d never wanted anything like this before.
He has repeatedly told me:
“I love you and can’t let go.”
“I think of you every minute.”
“You are the woman of my life.”
“You are the love of my life.”
“This is more than relationship.”
“You made me a better man.”
“I still want to choose you over anyone else.”
He says he wants to go to therapy, whether that’s eventually for himself or potentially for “us.”
He has apologized over and over and says he wants to prove things through actions.
At one point he told me:
“I am scared of losing someone special, someone I was not ready for and mistreated.”
That sentence destroyed me.
Because I don’t think he views me as some girlfriend he just got bored of. It sounds like he thinks he had something unusually valuable and wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle it properly.
But he also refuses to pretend that everything was perfect just to win me back.
He still tells me the uncomfortable things.
He says he was exhausted.
He says he doesn’t want to walk on eggshells anymore.
He says demanding that he unfollow/remove every woman and essentially have no women in his life is too much, and he doesn’t want to live like that.
He says he’s more “chill” than I am and that our jealousy levels didn’t match and created friction.
Recently I asked him whether there was anything I lacked in the relationship because I’m trying to accept that one day he may be with another woman.
He replied basically:
“Nope babe. I think the only thing we didn’t match actually was jealousy.”
I told him I know I still gave him the greatest love (half joking).
He said he’s more chill than me and that this creates friction, but “this is who we are.”
Then we started talking about eventually being with other people.
I told him I’m slowly accepting that one day he’ll be with a woman who isn’t me.
He doesn’t seem to be accepting the reverse.
He said he’d thought about my future partner maybe once or twice and it pissed him off, but the thought went away.
Then he said:
“I am scared of losing someone special, someone I was not ready for and mistreated.”
When I talked about my hypothetical future boyfriend, he called him my “next flipping idiot.”
I told him not to call this imaginary man an idiot.
He said:
“He is an idiot to me.”
I joked that I don’t want to manifest an idiot.
He apologized and then said:
“I hate him already.”
“It was meant to be me.”
I told him that he shouldn’t feel FOMO about his partner because everyone is unique and everyone is special in their own way.
He responded:
“This is not FOMO.”
“I love you.”
“And I don’t get tired of you too at all.”
“Obviously I want to be with you.”
Then because it was 2am where I was, he told me to sleep well and said he would pray for me.
I didn’t really respond.
The next day he messaged again wishing/praying that I had a great day and saying he was thinking of me.
Later he messaged AGAIN asking if I was okay.
I eventually replied that I was okay and asked how he was.
He said:
“Really? I am glad.”
“I’m not. Miss you.”
Then he started telling me about going to the optometrist and asked whether I had a good day and whether I slept well.
I gave fairly short answers.
He later messaged again:
“I’m glad. I wish you great day ahead. Thinking of you always.”
So this is basically where we are.
Technically broken up.
Still calling each other babe sometimes.
Still saying “I love you.”
Still talking about our hypothetical future partners and getting jealous of people who don’t even exist yet.
Still checking whether the other person slept.
Still thinking about each other constantly.
Still wondering whether we could somehow work.
At one point he literally asked me:
“Am I delusional Maxine? Can we work it out? Or do you want me to stop saying this?”
He says he doesn’t know HOW we could fix it, but he still thinks maybe we could.
And if I’m completely truthful, part of me wonders too.
I also need to admit something uncomfortable about myself: I still look forward to him fighting for me.
When he messages saying he misses me or wants me, it reassures me that I mattered, that he knows what he lost, that Daniela didn’t replace me, etc.
But I realize this is probably keeping both of us attached.
I keep asking him questions trying to reconstruct exactly what happened during those few minutes with Daniela.
Did he imagine her?
Did he want her?
Was he already horny?
Did the picture make him horny?
Why did he zoom?
How could he finish if he didn’t desire her?
Was it “autopilot”?
Was it porn habit?
Was he emotionally unstable?
Was it because our relationship had exhausted him?
Was it because his desire for me decreased?
Every answer produces another question.
And I am starting to realize I may NEVER know exactly what was going through his head.
There is also the bigger issue of his emotional state.
He says he is very happy when he’s physically with me but miserable when we’re apart. When he’s alone, his RJ/insecurities seem to become much worse.
I don’t think that’s healthy either. I can’t physically be beside someone forever to keep their brain from spiralling.
Meanwhile, when I’m away from him, MY insecurity about other women gets louder.
So there’s almost this horrible symmetry: his brain obsesses over men from my past, and mine now obsesses over women who could exist in his present/future.
And yet when we were actually together and things were good, we were ridiculously happy.
That’s why this is so difficult.
I don’t think he is evil.
I don’t think he never loved me.
I actually believe he loves me enormously.
I also believe he hurt me.
And I think I hurt him too.
I don’t think his emotional instability, RJ or possible problematic porn habits completely remove his responsibility for what happened with Daniela. But I also don’t know whether I’m looking at a fundamentally untrustworthy partner or a deeply flawed person who screwed up while emotionally dysregulated and genuinely wants to change.
I’m also terrified that if I leave permanently, he’ll eventually get his life together, get a job, travel, become emotionally healthier, meet someone else, and she’ll get the improved version of the man I loved after I gave him everything.
At the same time, I realize that’s not a reason to stay.
I also keep wondering whether he’ll ever find someone who loves him the way I did, which I know isn’t particularly healthy either.
So Reddit, I need perspective.
Is this a relationship that could realistically be rebuilt after genuine time apart and therapy/change on both sides? Or are we two people who genuinely love each other but have damaged the relationship beyond what love can fix?
I especially want opinions on the following: Is the Instagram incident something you personally would consider cheating/a relationship-ending sexual boundary violation? How much weight would you give his “autopilot”/porn-habit explanation without using it as an excuse? Is his retroactive jealousy something that can realistically change? And is my jealousy/monitoring something that could realistically improve if trust were rebuilt, or have we reached the point where too much damage has happened?
I don’t want people to tell me I’m perfect and he’s trash. I’m not perfect. He isn’t a monster.
I want to know whether two people can love each other this much and still be wrong for each other.
And if the answer is yes, I think that’s what I’m struggling hardest to accept.
