I'm in a messed up situation with my boyfriend, and I need some outside perspective :/

Seven years ago, I was dating this guy. We had a really great connection, and our relationship was so good. But I was going to college, and I ended things with him, which is something I’ve always regretted. Over the years we lost contact with each other, but I always thought about him and our relationship.

Fast forward a few years, I really wanted to talk with him and reconnect again. So I got into contact with him, and we both instantly knew we still had strong feelings for each other, and we connected again instantly. After talking for about a week, he confided to me that there was another girl that he was getting closer to, and they told each other that they liked each other, and that things were moving towards a relationship. But now that I had come back into his life, he knew he wanted to be with me. But he said he didn’t want to hurt her, and he had been avoiding her because he was so concerned about hurting her. He said he had basically put her on the back burner while we had been talking.

I was a little hurt, but I understood where he was coming from. I just magically appeared in his life again, so how could I expect him to just drop everything to be with me? And we lived states away from each other. If I were in his situation, it would have been a hard thing for me as well. But it was still a painful experience. It took him a few weeks to tell her that he had met someone else and that they couldn’t be together. She was hurt, and said she needed space to process. It took a few more weeks for us to have the “we’re officially dating”, exclusive talk.

We’ve been dating for eight months now, and I just moved last week to be with him. Everything has been going ok, but I’ve been having extreme anxiety about our relationship. He’s very social, and he has a lot of girls who are friends. It makes me a little uncomfortable. But I’ve been managing that pretty well, until I saw that he got a text from this other girl, who he had almost got into a relationship with before we started talking. I knew he wanted to still be friends with her, and he told me he was going to reach out to her at some point. But he didn’t tell me they were talking again, and to just have to come up out of the blue because I saw he got a text from her was a shitty way to find out. I wish he had just told me about it.

So I overreacted, and started to cry, and he was really baffled. He didn’t think it was a big deal. He said he was worried about how I reacted to a text, how I was going to react to something bigger. I said I was just worried, because he had feelings for her before, and I was worried that the feelings would grow again. He told me that he was used to pushing down feelings for other people, because he’s had to do it a lot in his life. He told me that she has a boyfriend now anyway, so she wouldn’t try anything with him. I feel like he says all the wrong things to try to reassure me, and he just made it worse. I was still upset, and he couldn’t understand why I was still upset. I told him I just needed reassurance from him, and for him to tell me that he loved me. He got upset at me, and said, “How many more times do I have to say it?” He had to go to work, so that was pretty much the end of the conversation.

When he got back later, I tried to pretend that everything was fine. I felt like the worst person in the world, making such a big deal about the situation and letting my anxiety and insecurity rule me. I know you can’t depend on other people for constant reassurance, it’s not fair to them. I know I have to look inside myself and work on all my anxiety and insecurity issues. But I also feel like he did not handle the situation well at all. I was still upset, and we talked about it more. I was unfortunately a little drunk at this point, and I just emotionally dumped on him. We didn’t come to any sort of good conclusion. I asked him if he would tell me who he was texting when he was on his phone, and he responded, “God, I’m really worried you’re just going to start stalking me now.” This made me feel like shit. I know I was behaving irrationally, and that I don’t have any right to invade his personal space, but he made me feel so much worse about the whole situation.

I don’t know what to do now. I’m completely lost. I’m still hurt, and I’m still worried, and I have no idea what to do about it. I don’t feel like I can talk to him about it, because he responds so negatively. What do I do?

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