I don’t think I can actually explain the situation here without a novel but I’ll try to be as brief as I can. No promises though.

So I’m in a roughly 4 year relationship with a woman I very much love and recently I accused her of cheating. This was not backed but much evidence at all other than intuition and what I thought were missing condoms. Basically I let my insecurities get the best of me. There was an explanation for everything and she isn’t and never was cheating on me I’m just an idiot.

Here’s how it got so bad.the last two years of our relationship can be easily summed up into a game of chase. She pushes for more attention and more initiative and I give just enough to make her wish she had more. Not on purpose obviously, I was just being avoidant and detached likely as a defense mechanism but I digress, our relationship suffered. We stopped spending time with each other and started just spending time around each other. Yeah we’d have our good moments where we talk for hours and love and be dumb and those were great but they were getting rarer and rarer. I stepped further away as I thought I cared less and less, I was getting used to her anxiety and ignoring it, hoping shed work through it instead of doing anything about it. I’d come over and comfort her but then go back to doing what I was doing before in less than a week.

This dynamic simmered for a while until she got an IUD and the hormonal changes made all those hidden emotions so very obvious. It also caused some extreme aversion to being touched by me but we aren’t exactly sure if that’s because of the emotions that bubbled up or if that was just hormonal changes. Regardless she didn’t want to be around me and didn’t want to be touched by me so now I have become the one doing the chasing. I’m the one seeking her attention because I realize she might leave me. It fucking sucked. She started making friends all of the sudden and I’ll be honest we were both a bit friendless before, too wrapped up in eachother I suppose so this was a new experience for me. She’d never really gone out without me nor I without her. So those emotions festered and I began to feel replaced and insecure. I thought she’d stopped caring about me, loving me, because she was struggling to show it. And I told myself I’d be there through all of this with her, I told her no matter how her hormones affect her and our relationship I’ll still stay because I love her. But when she started going out, when she started texting me less, when she didn’t respond for hours, and when her friends got her to try and enjoy things that I could never convince her to do, I got really jealous.

When she wouldn’t respond I’d check when she was last online and if it was after I had texted or I watch her come online and not respond I thought she hated me. I’d never experienced that before, I’d never worried I didn’t know how to handle it. I let my paranoia consume me and when I was cleaning her room as a surprise for when she came home from seeing her parents and when I found those missing condoms I had a panic attack. I called and called and called and she wouldn’t answer. I called her sister and then her dad because I needed to know I needed an explanation to reassure me. And I got one, she was totally right. I was freaking out over nothing and I’d obliterated our trust. I fucked up bad.

That was yesterday, we’ve talked and while she has seriously considered breaking up with me, she still wants to see a couples therapist and try to get back what we once had. I feel so stupid and I don’t know how to prevent this from happening in the future.

It feels like I’ve had these moments of clarity before where I saw how bad I was fucking up this relationship and I swore up and down to myself that I’d do something about it. I’d change this time. But I don’t think I ever did? I’m so afraid this is just gonna be another one of those moments where shits really bad and I can see how terrible I’ve been but the moment things start going back to normal I stop putting in effort and fall right back into old habits. I don’t want that. I can’t keep doing this to her. This is the first time we’ve had something this big so maybe it will be different but I can’t bank on it. I don’t want to forget.

How do I control my emotions in the future? How do I not bottle them up until they explode out? (She especially stressed that my accusation really caught her off guard. She had no idea I was feeling this way.) How do I remember to feel?