I (25M) caught my girlfriend (26F) texting her ex and deleting the history

I (25M) had been casually seeing a girl (26F) for 4 months until we decided to make it official and exclusive at the start of this month (March). Things have been going great, however one day while I was over her place I had seen she had gotten a phone call from her ex – which she brushed off as him being crazy and wanting her back.

There was an incident a few days after we became official, where she checked my phone and found DMs from back in November (when we first started talking) where I exchanged some flirtatious messages with someone I knew from college. She blew up at this situation, as well as with a few other DMs she found from that same time period, and basically considered ending our relationship then and there. She was upset because when she asked about some of these girls in the past, I just described them as being friends. Would I be hurt about that too? Sure. However there was plenty of evidence and even more recent interactions with those same women where I either ignored them or gave dry responses.

Her checking my phone like that however got me a little suspicious of her, and I know it’s toxic but a few days later I decided to check her phone to see what she might’ve be hiding. My curiosity about her ex given that she had received calls for him lead me to searching his name, only for me to find messages talking about how she actually saw him in late January, and even hung out with him to celebrate his birthday. She wrote to a friend: “we’re getting mani pedi’s and French food” which she explained meant her, the ex, and a larger friend group – however I really wasn’t sure what to believe given she had lied about them hanging to begin with.

Regardless, this had happened before we were officially dating and exclusive. So regardless of how upset I was I decided to let it go given that I myself wasn’t super clean before we started dating either.

Flash forward to a week later, she’s been acting really strange with me saying that she’s feeling off and see’s us differently. She starts talking about how her timeline in life was to get married and have kids in the next two years, and mine is in the next 4-5 so she doesn’t feel good about waiting that long. Totally understandable stuff, but we discuss it and put it behind us.

Later that same day, I’m having friends over for a housewarming. She gets a little too intoxicated and goes to bed early. By the time I say bye to my friends and clean up a bit, it’s around 1:30AM. I walk into my room and see her asleep with her phone just out of reach from her hand. I then notice she’s gotten a few text messages from her ex.

I know it’s wrong, but it was so late that my intrusive thoughts got the better of me. I see two messages sent at 1:30 responding to a message she had sent that I couldn’t see since she deleted it. She actually went as far as to delete the messages from her recently deleted folder as well. He was using that iMessage feature where you reply to a specific message so I could see that she had sent him something that same night but not it’s contents. I lost my cool and searched more threw her messages to find recent messages from her friends telling her to block her ex, and even a message from back in January where she was complaining that her and the ex didn’t make love the night she saw him because he found out about me.

The worst part? I replied to the ex with “??” Since I had no context to the conversation. He proceeds to ask why I’m up so late, and if I plan on picking him up or should he Uber to her place… him so casually asking that set me off and I went ahead and asked him to Uber. We were at mine, and by the time he arrived there it was already 4am. I put her phone down and saw the string of calls he made after arriving. My proudest moment? No, but I regret nothing.

The next morning when I confront my gf about it she says the usual it’s not what it looks like. She claims she had only texted him to share some recent changes in her life that would legally allow her to get married in the next two years. She then tells me she kept talking to said ex as he was sharing his plans to buy a house soon, and that he apparently told her he wanted her back and that she could move in and in two years they could be married and have kids. It turns out this legal issue she had was the main reason she and her ex broke up, because they couldn’t get married because of it.

She’s claiming all that doesn’t matter to her, and that she loves me so much that she’d rather be with me than follow the timeline she had set in mind. But none of that really sits right with me anymore, and to be honest I don’t know how I can trust anything she says now.

Writing this out already shows me what I should do. But I do really love her, and outside of all this messy stuff we really make each other happy. We’ve spoken on end about our futures together, I even met her parents and there were plans for her to meet mine. Is it possible to move past something like this? Could you even trust someone again after all that? I’m struggling to feel like I ever could.

TLDR: Caught my gf texting her ex and deleting the trail of messages. Only to find out one of the things they were talking about how their plans for the future were now aligned.