Yeah, my bad, I know I kind of skimmed over that just because it would end up being several posts on its own. I can always try to go into it a little more if need be, I'm just never sure how much to bring in and how much to leave out because it's complicated.

We have had a lot of issues in the past that all seemed to stem from communication issues, which then led to trust issues on both sides. To keep it short, I messed up kind of badly in the past (no cheating or anything like that) and basically gave him a good reason to mistrust me.

One year ago, I was still friends with an old FWB because I stupidly thought that things were kosher because I was dating Pete, and for me, when you're dating someone, you naturally don't want to be with anyone but them, you know? Of course, it's not that simple and I put blind faith in that knowledge without regard of how things might look to Pete. Anyway, old FWB started saying some inappropriate things and I didn't know how to handle it because I was worried about a lot of stupid things. I thought I could figure out how to take care of it myself without hurting anyone, and of course that's not how it turned out.

So over the past year I've worked to rebuild trust with him. We've talked about it a lot over the past year and talked about it in counseling for a few sessions. We've examined it from every angle possible and we were able to understand each other a little better in counseling. I think one of our biggest issues was that we were not on the same page when it comes to our natural level of communication, so that's been a big thing that we've been trying to work on.

For example, he would get really irritated when I didn't text him to let him know my ETA from getting off work (retail, so it's not always consistent). So I really tried to make it a point to keep him updated on when I thought I'd be getting home. But it still doesn't always come naturally to me to stop what I'm doing and text him to tell him what's going on. I dislike texting and I don't like to text when I'm hanging out with people.

I'm not sure if this explanation was too long or too short, buuuuut maybe I should add it to the OP to add some clarity.