My boyfriend is convinced I'm cheating but I'm not, and never have. Help me please

[Firenza1501]

Some background first. My boyfriend and I have been together for 5 years besides an off period of a few months in 2015, and have been long distance for 3.5 years of that. During the off period he dated another girl who basically wanted him to be her son's stepfather and hooked up with a few others, and I hooked up with one friend and two randoms from my college. The "breakup" was not my choice so I struggled to even think about dating anyone else and the hookups basically sucked and made me feel like shit. When we got back together (January 2016) it was contingent on him moving to where I live within 3 years. At this point I fully intend to marry this guy and he has said that he feels the same way - we love each other very much and wouldn't be putting in the effort for long distance if we didn't. For me, I already consider us married. He is my partner and I have committed fully to him.

I spent 6 months where he lives recently and left just over a month ago. I had a party two weeks after leaving that was basically all chicks and 2 guys that I barely know that a friend brought. I got super drunk because I was mixing all my alcohol, and my boyfriend was also drunk with a friend, so I excused myself from the party and we drunk Facetimed. We were having fun for a while and his friend was cool, until suddenly my boyfriend thought he heard a male laugh in my room and hung up. I called him back and he was convinced that I had a guy in my room and that I was cheating on him. I toured him around the apartment on Facetime (at that point everyone had left) and my roommate came and said hello, and he then thought he saw her glancing in a corner of my room and laughing - so again he thinks I'm hiding someone in there even though I have now shown him every inch of the place. We cry and fight about it and the next morning he decides to believe me. Except that he doesn't - he proceeds to get mad at me and accuse me of cheating every night for the next week, saying he just "has a feeling" and I've been "acting weird", then forgiving me and trusting me, and then repeating. He even tried to trick me into showing him my text messages, at which point I gave him all my social media passwords, my iCloud password, shared my location on my phone, and offered to take a lie detector test because I AM NOT CHEATING. I have never had any desire to cheat on him (See background: I didn't even like hooking up with other people when we weren't together!) and this whole thing came so out of nowhere that I have no idea how to even begin to approach it. Even with all my passwords he still thinks something is up and won't let it go, his "gut is telling him something is off". The only thing off is his intuition and I am extremely hurt by all the false accusations he is making.

He stopped mentioning it for a while and things were okay. We had a few fights and arguments and he was quick to get mad at me and I was not treating him the best that I should be. Then on Saturday of this week he was drunk with his friends and eventually we Skyped, with his brother on skype too. I was in my bathrobe because I had a spa night at home. I took a long shower because I had painted my room and cleaned all day, I did a pore strip and face mask, binge watched grey's anatomy, and had a glass of wine and some popcorn. We skyped with his brother there for a bit and then they hung up and my boyfriend said he would call me back in a few minutes. He called back on skype and said he has still been concerned about cheating. I told him I have never cheated and that I love him and he said he talked to his brother about it and his brother had also said that I had not given him any reason not to trust me so that was reassuring. But then everything turned. I took my robe off because it is hot in my room (I live in SoCal) and he thought that was weird because I never sit around naked (I do when it's that hot, just not very often). He said he was sure someone was in my bed with me, performing explicit acts on me while we were talking on skype. I showed him my whole room, under the bed, in the closet. Then he thought he saw a person in the mirror and hung up. I called him back. I show him everything again. I demonstrate that it's not even possible for a person to fit under my bed because the space is too small. He still thinks someone is there. He still thinks I'm cheating. I lie on my bed and my remote for my air conditioner falls off the bed onto the floor. He freaks out and says that he heard the door close. I explain that it was the air conditioner remote but he doesn't believe me and thinks that someone just left my room. I'm so upset at this point that I get dressed and go to my car to drive around. I keep him on FaceTime the whole time so he can see that I'm alone. He then thinks I'm driving someone home. I show him the whole car, except when I move around to the trunk, it's locked, because it always stays locked until I press the unlock button. But he thinks that means I am avoiding showing him the trunk. I open it as quick as I can and show him the rest of the car and the surrounding area. He still doesn't believe me. At this point I'm so upset I'm driving too fast so he tells me to pull over. So I pull over on the closest side street. He tells me to check my tires so I try to turn the flashlight on my phone on, but when you press the home button on an iPhone during a FaceTime call it pauses video. So he immediately assumes I paused the video to drop someone off. I only pulled over because he asked me too and I only paused FaceTime because I was trying to turn the flashlight on to check my tires which is what he told me to do. I wasn't even thinking about it pausing. This continues back and forth for hours. At one point I start making up a lie about having someone else in my room and cheating on him so that we can try to move forward because it would honestly be easier than being stuck like this, but I can't maintain the lie because 1) I can't lie to him, never have been able to and 2) it's not easy to completely invent a story on the spot. But then even though I keep telling him that I was alone all night and I have never cheated on him he still doesn't believe me. I eventually get home from maniacally driving through the night (around 4am). We go back on skype. I'm now icing a head injury because I banged my head on the steering wheel in frustration. And just when it seems to be calming down, he says he knows someone is in my bed with me. AGAIN. While I am icing my head. So I turn the light on in my room and sleep with Skype on and pointed at my full body and no blanket. I'm thinking things will blow over the next day but he's still convinced. He still doesn't believe me. I just keep telling him I love him and that I'm telling the truth. But all he can say is that he will try to believe me but he doesn't.

There doesn't seem to be anything I can say to make him believe me, and yet I haven't actually given him any reason to not trust me. We had a bit of a rough patch recently where we were having petty fights but we got over it and everything had been good for a while when he started this. I have done everything short of installing cameras in my room to prove that I'm not cheating but he still won't believe me. I WISH I was cheating so we'd have something to work on, so we could move forward in some way even if it hurts. But I haven't ever cheated on him. The thought disgusts me, I would never do it, I barely even have friends here let alone guy friends let alone people I would allow myself to be vulnerable with, emotionally or physically. And the friends I do have I barely see because I want to be available to talk to my boyfriend whenever possible and I've been focusing on my health lately.

Is there a way for me to bring him back to earth? Something I can do or say? Should I just leave him alone for a while to figure put things on his own? Or will that be worse because he'll think my absence means something? I'm so desperate to get him back, I love him more than anything, he is my whole world, and I need him to believe me and trust me, but I have no idea what to do anymore. I'm at a complete loss. I'm so anxious and depsressed, I can hardly breathe, my heart is constantly racing, I can't eat or get out of bed. And he's visiting here in a few days and I'm terrified to see him but also desperate to hold him in my arms.

Has anyone else had a similar situation happen? What did you do? Please help if you can, I need my boyfriend back.

[autumn1790]

His actions are completely uncalled for, and you should not submit yourself to his tyrannical demands. If he doesn't believe you for even a few seconds, how can your relationship survive. A relationship is built on trust, and he doesn't even have none--he has negative trust. He also has no respect for you--if he respected you, he would not constantly assume you're cheating, and he would take ypu at your word. Your trust in him is or will disappear as well with this behavior. He is emotionally abusive and ridiculously insecure--you deserve a whole lot better. This is not normal. No one should be this accusatory.
They say those who accuse their partner the loudest of cheating are the ones doing it themselves. Something to think about. Kind thoughts to you!

[Honour]

I'm honestly physically sickened reading this, and I won't be mincing my words. Jesus Christ, how the hell are you even with this asshole still? Like seriously, what the fuck? Why do you tolerate this BS and put up with his shit? What do you get out of this very unhealthy "thing" between you both? It's not a relationship at all, it's a living nightmare. It's driving you insane. He's walking all over you. He doesn't love you. He doesn't respect you. He doesn't care for you. Like autumn said, he is emotionally abusive to the extreme and is just... so insecure, he needs some serious help. This is without doubt the worst case of freakish paranoia I have ever read. Red flags everywhere. RUN FOR THE HILLS! Kick his scummy ass to the sidewalk, and leave him there. Seriously. You don't need this.

We set our bar in life of how we want to treated, loved and respected. And right now, yours is dragging you down so low, it's impacting on you physically and emotional. I can't stress this enough: sometimes women think they're going to be "the one to save their partner, because they love them unconditionally" and women think their partners will change because of them. Nuh uh. It doesn't work like that. People will change because they want to, not for any other reason.

Please consider yourself above him. The world and your life shouldn't revolve around his whims and wants. You are being taken for granted, and no amount of "love" will change that.

[TSM]

I would just tell him something like you admit to cheating and tell him bye, or just cut off all communication without saying anything. He already doesn't care anymore and you will see it with his reaction. He won't change even if you admit it. At this point it just looks like he is just trying to make you suffer. In the 0.00000001% chance that he actually does care he will come back and try talking to you again.

[dglynn77]

I would just tell him something like you admit to cheating and tell him bye, or just cut off all communication without saying anything. He already doesn't care anymore and you will see it with his reaction. He won't change even if you admit it. At this point it just looks like he is just trying to make you suffer. In the 0.00000001% chance that he actually does care he will come back and try talking to you again.

I disagree. Terrible idea. He sounds mentally unhinged, and admitting to cheating, albeit false, could make things even worse.

Firenza, I really hope this is just a story, because no one deserves to love someone who treats them so terribly. This man clearly has no regard for your personal safety and wellbeing. Pulling over and getting out of your car in the middle of the night can be disastrous in some areas. No one who loves you would make you do that. He would urge you to call roadside assistance if he truly thought there was something wrong with your tires in the middle of the night.

I know what it is like to be hopelessly in love with someone who did not love me, but rather played with my mind and used me. I know you think you can fix this, but I want to tell you something. You can either choose to continue this insanity of a relationship, change everything about yourself to try to please him and still not be enough and be miserable, or you can realize that true love is someone loving you as unconditionally as you love this man who do clearly doesn't deserve your love.

Please end this now, and protect yourself before it is too late.

[snow]

I would have probably done the same a couple years back. Show my SO everything around me if I got accused of cheating, but now that I have been in this relationship for a while and know how it feels to be trusted, this would not even in the slightest be possible.

There is nothing you can do to prove to him that you are not cheating. If literally showing him everything on video (WITHOUT HESITATION!) does not change his mind, then nothing else will. He has this obscure idea and no matter what you do, he will not believe you. I would confront him and tell him that he has to decide whether or not he wants to trust you. If he does, he needs to stop accusing you of cheating. If he does not trust you, then there really is nothing else to do but to figure out if it is worth spending time and effort on a relationship with a person who does not trust you without any reasons.

If you have not given him a reason to not trust you and done everything humanly possible to prove that you are not cheating, there really is nothing left to do. How can you prove you did not do something that he is convinced you did?

Also, and this is a little sketchy, but sometimes cheaters project onto their significant others. They will accuse them of cheating to make themselves feel less guilty of cheating themselves :/

[Harlequin]

Not gonna lie, sounds like he's probably cheated or cheating. That's the sort of absolutely bonkers bullshit a paranoid cheater would pull.

It's time to cut him out of your life and move on, if for no other reason than to protect your sanity. Nothing good is going to come from this, and you will be much better off without him. You may have had some truly lovely times in the past, but he's no longer worth it. No one deserves to go through what you're going through. Please take care of yourself.

[NewToLongDistance2016]

Some background first. My boyfriend and I have been together for 5 years besides an off period of a few months in 2015, and have been long distance for 3.5 years of that. During the off period he dated another girl who basically wanted him to be her son's stepfather and hooked up with a few others, and I hooked up with one friend and two randoms from my college. The "breakup" was not my choice so I struggled to even think about dating anyone else and the hookups basically sucked and made me feel like shit. When we got back together (January 2016) it was contingent on him moving to where I live within 3 years. At this point I fully intend to marry this guy and he has said that he feels the same way - we love each other very much and wouldn't be putting in the effort for long distance if we didn't. For me, I already consider us married. He is my partner and I have committed fully to him.

I spent 6 months where he lives recently and left just over a month ago. I had a party two weeks after leaving that was basically all chicks and 2 guys that I barely know that a friend brought. I got super drunk because I was mixing all my alcohol, and my boyfriend was also drunk with a friend, so I excused myself from the party and we drunk Facetimed. We were having fun for a while and his friend was cool, until suddenly my boyfriend thought he heard a male laugh in my room and hung up. I called him back and he was convinced that I had a guy in my room and that I was cheating on him. I toured him around the apartment on Facetime (at that point everyone had left) and my roommate came and said hello, and he then thought he saw her glancing in a corner of my room and laughing - so again he thinks I'm hiding someone in there even though I have now shown him every inch of the place. We cry and fight about it and the next morning he decides to believe me. Except that he doesn't - he proceeds to get mad at me and accuse me of cheating every night for the next week, saying he just "has a feeling" and I've been "acting weird", then forgiving me and trusting me, and then repeating. He even tried to trick me into showing him my text messages, at which point I gave him all my social media passwords, my iCloud password, shared my location on my phone, and offered to take a lie detector test because I AM NOT CHEATING. I have never had any desire to cheat on him (See background: I didn't even like hooking up with other people when we weren't together!) and this whole thing came so out of nowhere that I have no idea how to even begin to approach it. Even with all my passwords he still thinks something is up and won't let it go, his "gut is telling him something is off". The only thing off is his intuition and I am extremely hurt by all the false accusations he is making.

He stopped mentioning it for a while and things were okay. We had a few fights and arguments and he was quick to get mad at me and I was not treating him the best that I should be. Then on Saturday of this week he was drunk with his friends and eventually we Skyped, with his brother on skype too. I was in my bathrobe because I had a spa night at home. I took a long shower because I had painted my room and cleaned all day, I did a pore strip and face mask, binge watched grey's anatomy, and had a glass of wine and some popcorn. We skyped with his brother there for a bit and then they hung up and my boyfriend said he would call me back in a few minutes. He called back on skype and said he has still been concerned about cheating. I told him I have never cheated and that I love him and he said he talked to his brother about it and his brother had also said that I had not given him any reason not to trust me so that was reassuring. But then everything turned. I took my robe off because it is hot in my room (I live in SoCal) and he thought that was weird because I never sit around naked (I do when it's that hot, just not very often). He said he was sure someone was in my bed with me, performing explicit acts on me while we were talking on skype. I showed him my whole room, under the bed, in the closet. Then he thought he saw a person in the mirror and hung up. I called him back. I show him everything again. I demonstrate that it's not even possible for a person to fit under my bed because the space is too small. He still thinks someone is there. He still thinks I'm cheating. I lie on my bed and my remote for my air conditioner falls off the bed onto the floor. He freaks out and says that he heard the door close. I explain that it was the air conditioner remote but he doesn't believe me and thinks that someone just left my room. I'm so upset at this point that I get dressed and go to my car to drive around. I keep him on FaceTime the whole time so he can see that I'm alone. He then thinks I'm driving someone home. I show him the whole car, except when I move around to the trunk, it's locked, because it always stays locked until I press the unlock button. But he thinks that means I am avoiding showing him the trunk. I open it as quick as I can and show him the rest of the car and the surrounding area. He still doesn't believe me. At this point I'm so upset I'm driving too fast so he tells me to pull over. So I pull over on the closest side street. He tells me to check my tires so I try to turn the flashlight on my phone on, but when you press the home button on an iPhone during a FaceTime call it pauses video. So he immediately assumes I paused the video to drop someone off. I only pulled over because he asked me too and I only paused FaceTime because I was trying to turn the flashlight on to check my tires which is what he told me to do. I wasn't even thinking about it pausing. This continues back and forth for hours. At one point I start making up a lie about having someone else in my room and cheating on him so that we can try to move forward because it would honestly be easier than being stuck like this, but I can't maintain the lie because 1) I can't lie to him, never have been able to and 2) it's not easy to completely invent a story on the spot. But then even though I keep telling him that I was alone all night and I have never cheated on him he still doesn't believe me. I eventually get home from maniacally driving through the night (around 4am). We go back on skype. I'm now icing a head injury because I banged my head on the steering wheel in frustration. And just when it seems to be calming down, he says he knows someone is in my bed with me. AGAIN. While I am icing my head. So I turn the light on in my room and sleep with Skype on and pointed at my full body and no blanket. I'm thinking things will blow over the next day but he's still convinced. He still doesn't believe me. I just keep telling him I love him and that I'm telling the truth. But all he can say is that he will try to believe me but he doesn't.

There doesn't seem to be anything I can say to make him believe me, and yet I haven't actually given him any reason to not trust me. We had a bit of a rough patch recently where we were having petty fights but we got over it and everything had been good for a while when he started this. I have done everything short of installing cameras in my room to prove that I'm not cheating but he still won't believe me. I WISH I was cheating so we'd have something to work on, so we could move forward in some way even if it hurts. But I haven't ever cheated on him. The thought disgusts me, I would never do it, I barely even have friends here let alone guy friends let alone people I would allow myself to be vulnerable with, emotionally or physically. And the friends I do have I barely see because I want to be available to talk to my boyfriend whenever possible and I've been focusing on my health lately.

Is there a way for me to bring him back to earth? Something I can do or say? Should I just leave him alone for a while to figure put things on his own? Or will that be worse because he'll think my absence means something? I'm so desperate to get him back, I love him more than anything, he is my whole world, and I need him to believe me and trust me, but I have no idea what to do anymore. I'm at a complete loss. I'm so anxious and depsressed, I can hardly breathe, my heart is constantly racing, I can't eat or get out of bed. And he's visiting here in a few days and I'm terrified to see him but also desperate to hold him in my arms.

Has anyone else had a similar situation happen? What did you do? Please help if you can, I need my boyfriend back.

There is nothing you can do, this is his problem. I experienced something similar, granted the guy and I were not LD. The guy started accusing me of cheating and flirting w/other guys. He wanted to text pretty much 24/7 and felt hurt if I didn't want to stay on the phone w/him for hours after we had just hung out the entire day, he even wanted to start looking through my phone, I said no. He started throwing tantrums and crying, I felt sorry for him, the 1st couple of times. I only dated him a short while and I felt completely drained, I had never wanted to be single so bad as when I was w/him. Leave before you get trapped, he will try to pull you back in saying he will get better, but he won't.

[rache82]

wow, there is nothing else to say but, wow! That's insane. He needs to get over this, plain and simple. If he doesn't, there's going to be so many issues.

I'll tell you my experience here. My Long distance partner got a room mate at about the same time we made things official back in January, for help with the rent, yet, I would feel quite insecure about it. I did try and try but I couldn't get over feeling like it even though I knew that he wouldn't cheat and he would tell me over and over again.
It's taken me seven months to finally feel OK with it. But when it was happening, I kept thinking that I needed to be so careful because it's going to eventually push him away - my one true love who loved me just as much as well.
We are fortunate that I am over it.
Anyway all this to say, that if he loves you, he needs to trust you. The opposite implies that there is some insecurity he must have which he's not telling you about.
You haven't given him any reason to doubt you as you've told us and his brother pointed out to him, so this his problem, just as I found out it was my problem.
Never feel that you have to show him every single inch of your place on cam; that is just insane.
Perhaps he needs to talk to someone if he won't let this go; It's something I would have had to consider doing if I didn't fix my brain in this regard.

Truly, all the best!

[TaraMarie]

Before we were married my husband rented a room in his house to a woman he had known for years. They lived together for about 8 months. I did NOT run around accusing him of cheating on me daily, although he could have if he wanted to, whIch he DIDNT want. I probably wouldn't be married to him right now if I had behaved that bat crap crazy. Your SO is behaving like a controlling, childish, possessive lunatic. If you think it's bad now, imagine how much WORSE it will be when you are physicslly living together and he is driving past your job to see what you are doing, or showing up at your girls nights because he doesn't trust you. You mother and father would probably tell you to get out of this relationship. That's what I would tell my daughter. Please take my advice. No good will come from this type of behavior.