I (F23) asked my boyfriend (M25) of 2 years about a girl that I saw he had searched on messenger while we were searching up one of our friends to message. It was a girl who worked in a different area for the same company who he met when his company had an event in the area we live in. He lied at first when I asked him and has previously lied on many occasions about things that he’s either caught himself out on when tripping over his own lies or others have dropped him in it assuming he had told me these things so I already have trust issues regarding these kinds of things.
He is an anxious person and I 100% know that his previous lies were not malicious as there wasn’t really any reason to lie, he just felt like he should have told me earlier and got too nervous to say and didn’t want to upset me. No excuse of course but I was able to move past these things as it didn’t feel as if he was hiding them for any other reason, in my opinion they weren’t worth lying about.
I asked him about this girl and if there was anyone else. The next day when I asked again he admitted there was and I asked him to show me his Facebook activity as he had deleted the searches. There was an endless list of just girls. Ex’s, Co-workers, friends, old dating app matches and customers who had come into his work that he had gone completely out of his way to find. This was the same on instagram when I asked him to go on his searches he had obviously deleted those as well so I typed in different individual letters and asked about these people who came up at the top after just one letter. There were so many girls who he didn’t even follow but knew from work or through friends etc and he admitted he looked at quite a lot of them regularly.
I am a very laid back person, there’s people in our friendship groups that he’s dated in the past that I have become friends with and have no issue with. I’m not a jealous or insecure person but something about this really knocked my confidence and broke my trust.
Being nosey is absolutely fine and finding other people attractive and saying that is fine but secretly searching up people who you don’t follow or going out of your way to find people you serve in work that you don’t know is another thing especially when it so many people and so frequent. The lying and hiding is what makes me so uncomfortable with it.
We are very happy and content and are supposed to be moving in together soon and he’s very much supporting that financially. He is so loving and affectionate, genuinely very much in this relationship. He feels so guilty and embarrassed and says he didn’t realise how bad it looked til it was all laid out to him. I can genuinely see he is sorry and is doing everything to make this work and is heartbroken at the thought he might have ruined things with me and I know 1000% he doesn’t have it in him to actually cheat.
He just can’t seem to give me an answer as to why. He says it’s something he has always done and just thought because he never acted on anything it didn’t mean anything and it’s just kind of like a habit that he gets a kick out of but I can’t seem to wrap my head around it. I’m struggling most with him going out of his way to find customers he serves at work as he doesn’t know their full names so has to really look for it.
This is already a long post but if anyone wants anymore details to the situation and how it’s been dealt with so far I can clarify!
TL;DR Excessively viewing social media crosses a line for me and I am just wanting some advice on what searching girls up in this way means and how to deal with it.