#and i'm tired of always having to minimise myself or not speak out too much or not be too controversial

[archiveofyearning]

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[gettin-bi-bi-bi]

Hi Maddie, first of all thank you for everything you do for us. I'm having a hard time letting go of these thoughts about my bf finding someone better than me, getting tired of me or liking this other girl he keeps talking to and being friendly even though she told him she liked him twice (before we were together). And I know it's my own insecurities and me being jealous bc they're only friends even if they talk everyday, and I should trust him more but my problem is that I keep having these thoughts, and I fear I'll make it happen with the law of attraction/Murphy's Law/Manifestation and all that crap. I know I KNOW how dumb and pathetic that sounds, but I don't know what else to do. I can't tell him all this, dumping my own insecurities on him. But whenever he acts distant or ignores me or whatever it starts to happen again. I start feeling insecure and afraid. And I realize that no way of being in a relationship, always fearing he might leave me for this other girl. What should I do?

I want to preface this with saying that I always find it hard to relate to that kind of jealousy you are describing because I am not prone to being jealous at all. I can relate to some of the other insecurities you are mentioning regarding him acting “distant”. I just want to say this because I really don’t know if my understanding of jealousy in the sense of ~fearing your partner might leave you for someone else or cheat on you~ is nuanced enough and I cannot speak from experience in terms of how to get rid of jealousy. Anyway....

In my opinion you are kinda right and wrong about “not dumping your insecurities onto him”. Right in the sense that you should not expect of him to stop talking to other girls or this girl in particular and that he cannot fix your insecurities for you. But wrong in the sense that you absolutely should be able to tell your partner that you recognise some issues of insecurity and jealousy within yourself and that you try to work on that. Play with open cards here.

You already know that this is your problem to work on but that is much easier when your partner knows that you are working on it and doesn’t keep observing some weird behaviour from you without really knowing what’s on your mind.

Admitting that you have insecurities isn’t the same as acting jealous. When you say “I have these trust issues and I want to work on that” then you make it clear that you recognise it as your problem. Jealousy would be if you make it his problem. And you are already aware that this wouldn’t be good. But I don’t think it would be helpful if you kept all of this away from him. He is your partner after all and one way of working on this could be to have an open conversation about these issues and what triggers them for you. And that’s not to tell him “I’m insecure about x so you have to stop doing x”. It’s to tell him “I am aware that this is something I have to work on and I hope I have your support in this”.

What can help is therapy to get to the root of why you are having such a low self-esteem and trust issues. If you generally got problems with anxiety that probably adds a lot to that, too, and can be addressed in therapy. Another (possibly additional) approach is also to learn to get your self-worth out of other things and not just from your relationship/your partner. You gotta learn to accept that even a relationship that’s going fine might end one day for various reasons you can’t control - because someone falls out of love, because of outer circumstances or incompatibility, whatever. And life still goes on. You never know what’s gonna happen and it’s best you try to enjoy it in the moment for as long as the moment lasts. And in order to do so you gotta learn to trust your partner when he says that he loves you and wants to be with you. There is always the chance one of you could fall out of love or you grow apart - that can happen with or without other people in your lives. And if he doesn’t give you a good reason to believe he’s unfaithful (and being friends with a girl isn’t a good reason!) then you just gotta learn to believe him when he says he loves you.

It can take some time to internalise this but for example when you think he is behaving “distant” it’s possible that that’s not at all how he sees/means it. He might just be busy and that’s his goddamn right - he doesn’t have to be available 24/7 to prove his loyalty and love to you. And you know that in theory. But part of ~working on it~ is to constantly remind yourself that him having a life as an individual human being doesn’t mean he loves you any less. He is allowed to have a rich life including some aspects that have nothing to do with you. Maybe he can give you that reminder, too, sometimes... but mostly you gotta hammer that into your brain yourself again and again. You have to learn that you are significant in other people’s lives even when you are not around, even when they are not talking to you right now. Just like you don’t stop loving him on a day when you have a thousand other things on your plate. I’m gonna take the wild guess that you a) do not actually think about him ALL THE TIME and b) that you have other people that you are close to whom you also love in some way and their existence doesn’t minimise what you feel for him.

I had some relationship insecurities as well for a while (and I can’t guarantee they will never pop up again). The only thing that helped was to talk about it. I’m in my first proper relationship and some issues I didn’t ever expect to come up within me but they did and if I hadn’t said something to him then we probably would’ve broken up just bc I would have piled it all up. But I sat him down, talked about it, we tried to understand the problem together and then find a solution. And sometimes that was a solution only I could work on and other times it was something he would have to work on or both of us. A lot of it was rooted in my anxiety and previous bad experiences (with friendships and family) and whenever I feel that coming up in me I have to take a step back and be like “no, Maddie, he isn’t this ex friend who hurt you” or “this is NOT the same thing as that other situation from 10 years ago”. That is something I have to do on my own - but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have told him about those memories and be like “hey, I think some of my anxieties in our relationship are tied to this and that experience from my past”. It helps him to understand me better, to know me better. And it helps me to not have to explain myself all the time because he ~understands me now~ and he sees that I’m making progress, you know?

Maddie