A lot of things have happened-- some good, some not so good.
It's been interesting finally being able to spend a LOT of time with my SO. Not "a lot" as in 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but "a lot" as in I didn't feel like time was a constraining factor. I really got to live with him, including all the boring bits like having to go into work one day while he was supposed to be on vacation (really, people?!) and going to Wushu training most evenings (sorry, hon
). I've been around town to a few places just with his mom, struggling to use my not-quite-as-limited-as-before Spanish with her as we shopped for food or clothes. I bought ice cream for her by myself! Not that that's difficult, haha.Our relationship has had some ups and downs, though.
Several weeks before my visit, during our planning phase, my SO had been hanging out a lot with a girl from work and she ended up kissing him. At first, he had just wanted a friend to talk to and do things with to take his mind off of the distance in our relationship... but, admittedly, it was very stupid of him to spend so much time with her, alone, if he knew that he was feeling insecure and weak in our relationship. He told me he had been taking walks with her and spending time with her after work, talking with her and giving her hugs... apparently it did not register to him that this could happen, even though I told him BEFORE the incident that the amount of time he was spending with her and his physical interactions with her were making me uncomfortable and that there was a strong possibility that she was interested. I definitely let him know how disappointed I was.
While I was fairly quick to forgive and give him another chance-- they both regretted it, he apologized sincerely, and I know that he is not the kind of person who would pursue see on the side-- he completely freaked out and immediately made us spend a week without talking so that he could sort himself out. I had so many unanswered questions that I demanded that we end the week early and properly talk about it, so we finally discussed it in detail after we had both thought a lot about what happened and how we felt about it and our relationship. We ended up kind of "stepping back" from the relationship for the weeks leading up to my visit, removing our relationship from public view on facebook and going back to just talking like friends for a bit. This was supposed to end 2-3 weeks before my visit, but it really didn't because he felt like he wasn't ready.
Since I've been here, we have, for the most part, gone back to being an awesome couple (as usual), but this feeling that he can't handle distance and that he's just going to hurt me by cheating on me later on has been lingering with him, and he has not forgiven himself for when she kissed him. One of the reasons that he asked me to stay for so long was that he thought it would fix that. Unfortunately, I recognized that it was a personal issue that he would need to address on his own, and I told him that, but he still wanted to try it and I just wanted to stay longer regardless. A few weeks into my visit, I asked him if we could change our relationship status on facebook back to publicly being together, but he said he wanted to wait until we talked about the future and had a plan for being together again. Okay, I thought, fair enough.
The girl who kissed my SO is 3 years older than him and is a producer at the company he works for, so dealing with the situation has been kind of like walking on eggshells. On the one hand, they have to keep a friendly, professional relationship, but on the other hand, this woman is the fucking embodiment of unprofessionalism. I also discovered a few weeks ago that they have had a "joke" wherein he tells her "te amo" at the end of a work-related conversation. This, needless to say, made me very upset, and he tried to reassure me that it was just a joke because he had been trying to keep her as a friend since she was his only good friend at work prior to the incident. However, the other night, she messaged me asking if she could ask me some questions. I had no idea what she would want to ask me, so I said okay and let my SO know on the side that I wanted to talk to him and asked him if he was lying about the joke, to which he said of course not and that I was scaring him. I said it was scaring me, but I'd talk to him in a bit. She asked me what our relationship status was and said she wanted to hear it from me. I was like, okay... why? We're together. And then THE INTERNET WENT OUT.
So, I went to talk to my SO, and a lot of things came out.
Turns out he had been telling everyone at work that he and I weren't together any more because he was embarrassed from the incident with the girl. He told me he wanted to go on break after I went back to the states so that he could have time to go to therapy and work on himself because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to handle the distance and would cheat on me again. This is a big fear for him because he's terrified of becoming like his father, who cheated on my SO's mother and ended up spending little time with my SO and then leaving them entirely. I understand, in a way, but it's just... how do you answer that? I basically told him I was tired of being lied to (and about) and that he needed to get his (f$*%ing) shit together and act like an adult.