I still think my boyfriend doesn’t find me attractive

I’m sorry, I’m going on a bit of a rant here because I cant sleep and I have work in the next few hours.

I’ll try to keep this as short as possible, my partner (m23) and I (f21) have been together for a little over a year now, we had known each other probably 6 months before we started dating. When I met him I was completely smitten, and when I learned that he liked to read and play video games I fell even more for him. The problem came when I tried to ask him out and he (very politely) declined, saying that I wasn’t his type. I was fine with that, and we continued being friends. It escalated to flirting, then to a fwb. During that time we both had developed feelings for each other, even to go as far as telling one another “I love you”.

I didn’t see the point in staying fwb if we love each other, so I asked him out again, he declined saying I wasn’t attractive to him and that I was “too big” for him.

I was heartbroken, as soon as he told me and I processed what he had said I was in tears. He told me he still wanted to continue what we had, but not start a relationship with me. I was okay with it because I love him so much, and I thought as long as I’m with him it was okay.

I was wrong. He would talk to me and ask me to see if I could get numbers for girls he liked, or he wouldn’t kiss me in front of other women he thought was attractive because he wanted them to know he was Technically single, and when he found out they had a boyfriend he would come running back to me. I was a last resort. I asked him why that was, why couldn’t we just stop and just be friends? What made him keep coming back to me? He said it was because he didn’t know when this would happen again. He told me he thought he was going to end up dying alone and I was the one thing preventing that.

To make this slightly shorter I’ll stop there with the past, we’re together now and in a relationship, we even live together. The only problem is, is that now I feel unattractive. Now everytime I look in the mirror I think about those things he’s said to me. When we have sex I dont get fully naked because I’m worried about how I’ll look. When he says I’m beautiful and that he loves me, I dont believe it.

I know I brought this on myself, I just didn’t think it would last this long. I love him and hes so kind to me, so sweet and loving, so goofy and playful. He means the world to me. I just have this nagging voice in the back of my head that he still doesn’t find me attractive. Even when I know its completely irrational for me to think that. When I bring it up to him, he gets hurt and upset that I’m still bothered by the things he’s told me. He says he’s still paying for his past actions and that he finds me attractive now, he just had to grow into it, and that I need to look past it.

But I cant, i dont know how.

Sorry this is so long, I didn’t mean for it to be. Thank you for reading.