I've been living with my girlfriend for over a year. We've been dating for a little longer than that. In January her brother died in a vehicle collision, and it was quite traumatic for the both of us. Shortly after I went to college for a few months, and she blames me for having left her alone. She didn't have many friends that weren't my friends before we were together, and over the months I have pretty much dropped contact with them all because they aren't turning out to be nice people at all (drunk driving, picking fights).

She changed jobs and is now a supervisor at a distribution warehouse. She's good friends with her co-workers, but I haven't met any of them yet. She has some medical problems that mean her window of opportunity for having children expires in about five years, around the age of 25. This has caused her to put enormous pressure on me to have children I am not ready for. I told her that I would talk to a counselor of some sort to help get me on board in time, but she compromised and said if she got a dog that would satisfy her immediate need to mother something until I was ready to have kids. This doesn't line up with her biological clock line of reasoning, but I accepted. She got the dog.

She's been texting a friend of hers from work, Chris, almost constantly when we're home together in our limited overlapping home time. She's gone to sleep over there three times, once because we argued and the other two because of various emergencies. She has not let me come along. She won't let me kiss her goodbye when he came to pick her up, saying that she doesn't want him to see her as 'a girlfriend'. I checked her phone one morning and saw him say Good Morning Babe, and they both said 'I love you' the night before.

I confronted her with this and she said they just meant love like siblings, but that she was also uncomfortable that he called her Babe and that she'd tell him that wasn't okay. In a later argument she defended him; he just mistakenly spoke to her like he used to to his ex girlfriend.

I really want to believe her story but with everything that has gone on it all looks really bad. I could check her phone again to see how they've been talking recently, but all that would do is confirm my suspicions if they were true and not disprove them if they're false. The only way I know I can stop worrying about it is if we spend more time together and not have anything like that go on again, but I don't know if that's feasible.

Last night she was upset that I hadn't gone to a counselor yet, that even though she had gotten the dog, she assumes I still won't be ready to have children in time for her without help. She may be right. For the first time in my life I threw up due to stress.

I really want to make us work, but I don't know how to go about sorting our issues. How can I fix something that just tears me apart to think about?