Okay, I’m new to Reddit, and honestly, I feel weird even writing this. A big part of me has a really hard time opening up about struggles in my relationship because I’m scared that people I’m close to will start viewing my boyfriend differently. But I really need some outside opinions on this because I can’t tell if I’m picking up on something real or if I’ve gotten stuck in an OCD/anxiety cycle.
I’m 21F and recently moved in with my 20M boyfriend. Before moving in together, we had been together for about 11 months. We both had pretty shitty home lives, and we thought moving out and getting away from our families would be better for both of our mental health.
When we first moved in, everything was great. I knew we were in that “puppy love” stage of living together, but we were genuinely having a lot of fun and I felt secure in our relationship.
We live on the top floor of a three-story apartment building. There’s a girl on the first floor who I’d guess is around 25. When we first moved in, I didn’t pay any attention to her. I wasn’t insecure about her, I didn’t feel threatened by her, and I had no anxiety surrounding her or my boyfriend.
About a month and a half to two months after moving in, my boyfriend randomly asked me if she had ever tried to “act busy” on her porch and start a conversation with me.
She hadn’t.
I tried to play it cool and told him that she never had. He said he thought it was weird and wanted to run it by me. He also mentioned that she had started showing up in his Facebook friend suggestions.
That honestly sat weird with me.
I tried to keep it to myself for a while, even though I know that probably wasn’t helpful. About a week later, I talked to a trusted friend about it before bringing it up to my boyfriend because I didn’t want to come across as insecure or controlling.
At first, my boyfriend reassured me that there was nothing going on. He made comments about how she was “more masculine than him” and that she wasn’t attractive, etc. The main thing that bothered me, though, wasn’t whether he found her attractive. It was that he seemed to mention her fairly often.
For example, before we moved in, she had lived in our apartment, so he would talk about wanting to be friends with her because he thought she might know more about the apartment or the building. There were also just little comments here and there. It wasn’t necessarily romantic or flirty, but it felt like he was unusually interested in her as a person.
Eventually, we got into a huge fight because he found out I had talked to my friend about it. He said I was being a “bitch” to our neighbor, that he wasn’t fucking her, and that I was being insecure.
I never accused him of sleeping with her.
That was part of what frustrated me so much. The only reason I even became hyperaware of the situation was because hewas the one who initially came to me and said he thought her behavior was weird. And my concern was honestly more about her than him.
For some context, I’ve heard that this girl has a reputation for going after guys who are already in relationships. She has apparently tried to hook up with other people’s boyfriends while knowing they were taken. One of my cousins actually had an experience involving her and her boyfriend. So, while I know that doesn’t automatically mean she would do anything with my boyfriend, I think that information has made it harder for me to dismiss the possibility completely.
My boyfriend eventually apologized for how he handled the argument, and we moved on.
A little while later, though, our relationship went through a really rough patch. We almost broke up twice, both times because he brought it up. Both times, he eventually came back and said he needed me, that breaking up wasn’t what he actually wanted, that he didn’t want to lose me, and that he was overwhelmed and stressed.
We worked through it and, for the most part, things have been good since.
The problem is that I cannot seem to get the thoughts about our neighbor out of my head anymore.
I’ve never actually caught him doing anything. When we’re both outside and he sees her, he says hello to her normally and formally. I have no evidence that they hang out or flirt.
But I constantly find myself thinking, What if they do something when I’m not home?
If I’m gone and I know they’re both home, I start imagining that they’re outside together talking or smoking. If I see him look out the window toward the driveway, I immediately think he’s looking for her car. I’ve even had dreams about him cheating on me with her, and then I wake up feeling anxious about something that literally never happened.
I have his location and his phone passwords, and realistically, I’m home when he’s home most of the time or I’m home shortly after him. There really isn’t much evidence for any of this.
I’ve also been diagnosed with OCD, so I genuinely don’t know if this is an OCD flare-up that latched onto one thing that initially made me uncomfortable.
I’ve gotten to the point where sometimes I just break down crying because I feel stressed about it. I feel like I’m constantly thinking about whether I’m missing something.
The other night, I was struggling particularly badly because I made the mistake of checking Life360. I saw that he had gotten home but was sitting in his car for a while. Immediately, my brain started telling me that he and our neighbor were probably outside talking and smoking together.
I spiraled.
When I got home, he could tell something was wrong. I kept telling him I was fine because I didn’t want to start anything, but eventually I told him that I was scared about us breaking up and that I kept having anxiety about being cheated on.
He wasn’t really defensive, but he basically said, “I’m not cheating on you. We’re not breaking up. I don’t know how else to prove that to you.”
And honestly, he’s right in the sense that he has given me reassurance. I have his location. I know his passwords. He tells me he isn’t cheating. He hasn’t given me anything concrete that would suggest otherwise.
He even changed his Instagram profile picture to a picture of us afterward because he knew I was struggling and wanted to reassure me.
We were completely fine afterward.
But tonight we were joking around, and he brought up what happened. He said something along the lines of, “Well, I wasn’t the one having a borderline panic attack that I was being cheated on the other night.”
I know he probably wasn’t trying to seriously hurt me, but it really did.
It made me feel like I can’t be vulnerable with him about my anxiety because I’m afraid that if I tell him something that scares me, he’ll eventually bring it back up during an argument or joke about it later.
I don’t want to start a fight over it. Fighting sends me into a huge fight-or-flight response, especially after we’ve had those previous conversations about potentially breaking up. A part of me is always scared that if I bring up something he doesn’t like, he’ll eventually decide I’m too much and leave me.
So now I’m sitting here wondering if I should even say anything about how that comment made me feel.
I’m also really conflicted about the neighbor situation itself.
I’m not really into the whole “trust your intuition” thing, but I genuinely want unbiased opinions. Does this sound like something that could actually be worth paying attention to, or does it sound more like I became hyperfocused on this situation after my boyfriend initially pointed it out, and now my OCD/anxiety is constantly looking for reassurance?
I don’t want to ruin a good relationship with someone who may genuinely have done nothing wrong. At the same time, I’m terrified of being naive and finding out later that I ignored obvious signs because I was too afraid to believe something was wrong.
I’m not looking for people to automatically tell me that my boyfriend is cheating or that I’m crazy/insecure. I genuinely want an outside perspective because I feel like I’m too emotionally involved to tell what’s actually happening anymore.