So I snooped and maybe she's lying about what I found

Refusing to fess up to the truth is something I'd have a big issue with, too. Especially over something as trivial as a di*k pic on a train (from a woman over 50) that's even more strange. Extreme provocative dresser over 50... well, if you got it, flaunt it, but it's also a sign that she's a big flirt.

This passage puzzles me because it makes it sound like she wanted to contact him, and perhaps did contact him, even after having just told you in the preceding two sentences that she could not contact him as she did not have his number.

[B]She's saying that she did not call him and did not invite him over. What really happened, she says, is that on that Sunday she wrote him an email restating no commitment. So: either she called and he came over (and then what happened? did they sleep together? i'll never know). Or, she wrote him an email saying no contact was still in effect, without having any reason I could see for her to send that email, because presumably no contact had still been lived up to. She's saying what she feels so bad about, maybe doesn't want to tell her shrink about, is breaking no [contact to restate no contact, which seems weird to me but who knows?

To what extent do you believe this?

You asked for my take. I look at it in three steps.

1. How much do you believe this passage, that you are the love of her life?

I believe it about 92%. We have a lot in common: the same terrible childhoods, the same chronic illnesses, the same way of viewing the world, same sense of humor, love PDA, like to hold hands. When we go to parties, she does not flirt, nor do I, so we're on the same page with that.
I do sense she has a lot of secrets, however, that the love her life will never know about unless she slips up. Early in our relationship, she said that she's never cheated on a bf. Then, a while later, she began talking about the "only" time she cheated on a bf, with another guy who thought he was her boyfriend too. So, basically, she was cheating on two guys at once.
I've noticed that when we're with her old friends, she monitors my conversations and glides in effortlessly to forestall further talk when it's about her and the old days ...

If there is a lot of truth in that, then:

2. How do you feel about her, aside from the lying?

Well, I do wish she'd tone down her manner of dress a little, maybe cover up those big breasts a little, maybe not have this crazy need to be the focus of attention wherever she goes (and also claim that she doesn't care about that at all), and she gets it, from men and women. But other than that one big thing and that one smaller thing, she's about as perfect as they come, for me, despite what my therapist says (see below).

If you got past the first two steps, then the third step is perhaps the most challenging.

3. Everyone is flawed, of course, and I do not judge her; in fact, I have a lot of compassion for her. But it seems that a relationship with her comes with a lot of challenges. Take for example contacting the abusive ex. I can believe it could happen innocently; I can believe that in a fit of despair she would almost by reflex contact someone that had been a consistent place for her, even if abusive (similarly, people are often reluctant to leave their abusive partners in the first place). But it sounds like there might be a lot of such events/drama in her life. So even if her heart is in the right place (see question 1 above), I think that there are going to be times that it will be challenging to be with her.

Yes, this is absolutely true. She's going to be challenging for me a lot of the time. My therapist once said, she might be a great a woman, but I do not think she is the right sort of woman for you.
(Not unimportant here is the fact that I've been diagnosed with complex PTSD and trust/betrayal issues are a big part of cPTSD. So, yeah, she will be challenging for me in particular.)
Drama might as well be her middle name. I mean, she's the lead singer, songwriter and leader of a band that has some notoriety in the local area and beyond, so drama might expected from one such as her.


I'm not so sure that you can't trust her--I mean, for example, I'm not so sure that she would just out-and-out betray you by intentionally sleeping with somebody else when under no emotional duress--but she sounds very stressable and impulsive, inclined to do things that are not outright betrayals but are hard for her to admit to and hard for her to explain. If I am right, and if you are with her, that will make things challenging for you.

How much do you find that when she feels safe, she is still impulsive and volatile? Or does that tend to fade when she feels safe?

This is so insightful of you. Unbelievably so and incredibly helpful to me as I try to sort this out. First, she was under stress in both of the cases above, both of them having to do with abject loneliness and the need to connect with someone, anyone. Don't exactly buy that for the dic pic incident, however, for various reasons. But I know she was having a horrible time w/ her then-abusive narcissist boyfriend. She's also under stresses of all kinds all the time, mainly related to health issues and chronic pain.
When she feels safe, she is not one bit volatile and impulsive only with her shopping. As far as I know. She's genius-level smart, though, and has sides of her I've never seen, if only because they're not relevant to our relationship, in her opinion. Foreign languages learned in an instant, got an MBA just to get one, love of astrophysics, knows more about medicine than most doctors, can talk about anything with anyone, was invited to MIT to mediate conversations between scientists and the loopily creatives, because she has her feet solidly planted in both worlds. She is a remarkable person.

So if you can trust her in the sense that she won't out-and-out betray you, but she is very challenging in her impulsiveness and lack of candor about it: what do you think? Do you/could you care enough about her to be willing to try to deal with the challenges that she inevitably brings?

Bill

Certain things about her behavior that you describe is getting a little close to home for me, and why I got diagnosed with Borderline traits.

Thank you so much, loyddsss and TishaBuv, for your very kind words.

Given that you just don't know, what are the pros and cons of deciding this right now? --versus-- what are the pros and cons of waiting? In other words, on the surface at least there might be an option of allowing the relationship to continue and seeing what you, she, and it become.

You are saying that this relationship led you to make a significant, challenging, healthy change in your preferences and behavior (stopping drinking).

that is correct.
What other such changes (positive and/or negative) can you attribute to this relationship?

-started surfing again for exercise, eat better. just feel healthier over all.

-- she does tend to be a walking trigger for my cPTSD stuff, what with her outlandishness, her way of dressing, her sexy hot clothes she wears on stage, her fake boobs, etc. Yeah, I've got jealousy issues about past boyfriends and behavior of hers, and i'm working on that stuff. the fact that at the start of us she wasn't completely disengaged from her narcissist ex does have me on eggshells about him. she had stuff of his to return, tons of pix of them on a recent vacation, a yellow pad sitting next to me at the breakfast table that i looked in. she was venting her rage at what asshole he was. line that haunts me still: i will never let you come in my mouth again; i only did it this time because i promised i would and I keep my promises.

And what about for her--what changes have you noticed in her that could be attributed to the relationship?

My girlfriend lied to me a few weeks back maintaining no-contact with her abusive narcissistic ex, during a moment of loneliness. We sort of got through that but things still didn't seem right with her so I did a little snooping and stumbled upon a handwritten document from two years ago about her soliciting a penis pic from a stranger on a dating site. Okay, there's that in the past. But in the present, she wrote me a long explanatory text that just does not jibe with what she wrote in the past. Below is the back and forth. I'm less concerned about the dic pick (although it never occurred to me that she would do such a thing) as I am with the possibility that she is lying to me in here and now.

And can we please keep the morality of snooping to a minimum? I had suspicions about something else and found this instead My bad. But there it was.

She was on a train texting with a dating-site stranger who said he had a 10" penis and writing notes about what was going on. She's 30 years older than he is. Here is what she wrote on her pad:

"So now the 29 year old wants me to send him some naughty photos. 'No, you idiot, I'm on the freaking train.' So I asked him for one. He said he needed something to make his package reveal itself to its full 10” height. What the hell am I doing? He's totally preoccupied with the size of my breasts and he's not shy about letting me know. There's something a little hinky about this whole thing. I'll have to ask him a lot more questions. At least he's responsive, if sex directed.

"Okay, so he just sent me a text which I opened in public, on the train, of his enormous schwanz. Now I don't know what to do. I want to look again, but a boy is looking over my shoulder. Holy cow. My lips are burning.”

A few days later, she wrote: "So Mr Dic Pic dropped off the face of the planet after I sent him a photo of me in my bathing suit. Nothing too revealing but certainly boobiful. Probably boinking another conquest. So very strange.,,..."

So, after seeing this, I said to her, "Really? You did this?"

She said she'd write me a text about what *really* happened. Here's what she wrote:

"That person wanted a photo from me (not what you think) and naive me, I thought by asking him for a photo first I was somehow safeguarding I don't know what. I was new to the whole online dating thing, and I got scared and deactivated my account shortly thereafter. I asked for a picture because he asked me for a photo and I didn’t believe he was going to send one…I thought it was some kind of game. Yes, I was naïve, I was an idiot. I didn’t even know it was called a **** pic. Again, I thought it was a game, and I was really wrong about that. I wish it had never happened, but it did. I made a mistake. I didn’t know what I was doing. Perhaps I was in a fugue state of my own…how am I supposed to know? What I can tell you is that it never happened again. And then he started stalking me." Regarding her getting turned on by the photo: "As I told you I described a physiological response. I’d never seen anything like it.”

Leaving aside the matter of asking for the dic pic itself, what bothers me most is her response to me. It strikes me as a pack of fabrications.

First of all, she's a woman in her 50s who has seen a lot in her life. Naive 22-year-old she is not.

Also, the writing on the train reveals a women who may be confused by what she's doing but definitely knows *exactly* what she is up to when she solicits that dic pic and her response to it seals the deal. There is nothing in there that paints her as a naive or an innocent bumpkin or someone who thought she was engaged in a game.

And then, after receiving that pic, she waited a few days, then sent him one of her own, not naked, but clearly designed to keep him interested. So she had time to think about the 10" penis and then decided to respond, to continue the exchange -- not exactly the response of a naive and or/horrified person. I guess he dropped off the scene at that time but he came back a while later and who knows what happened then. At some point, however, he became a stalker.

As to the “fugue” state possibility, that just strikes me as bizarre.

When we first started going out, she mentioned she had a stalker and led me to believe it was her rotten X from right before me. Turns out it was this 29 year old, still after her two years after the train ride.

Anyway, if you read the train-ride writing, then her own explanation to me, do you buy her explanation or not? I'm in love with this woman-- Oh, lord -- and I've spent a good amount of time looking for any excuse I can to believe her explanation to me, but I can't. I just don't buy it. But maybe I'm in the wrong here just as I'm in the wrong for snooping (although I do feel my reason with justified).

Im sorry i looked, too, because i may have put her in a position where she felt like she had no choice but to lie. But if lying is one of her go-to escape routes, i guess that's a good thing for me to know.

could you be a little more explicit -- about her, not about you, of course.

I might have missed this above, but how long have you been seeing her?

1.5 years or so.

So it sounds like there are a lot of positive effects on both sides so far.

There might be advantages to this: She could be a sort of treatment for you. You have the chance, with her, to learn to deal with the triggers rather than get upset or leave or whatever else might have happened with them in the past. It sounds like, so far, she triggers you but that triggering has not been so major as to threaten to become a dealbreaker.

Sadly, such is not the case. Combine cPTSD, booze, a binary tendency, and a trigger and you've got a dealbreaker almost every time I melt down. I've broken up w/ her a dozen times but she won't let me go and she forgives me my many trespasses the moment I come out of my booze-fueled conflagration. At times, I've begged her to just let me go, but she refuses.

So, yes, she is a walking minefield for me. And yes my shrink says that while she might be great, she isn't great for me in particular. But we continue on -- hopeful that this time, with booze out of the picture, I can control my meltdowns better. And so far so good.

But this trust thing, born of the dic pic situation, still looms. Sobriety has kept me from acting out on it, but it is a problem. I'll be bolted awake at 2 am with her on a train, the tape of what happened unspooling from the get go and wrecking my sleep, with thoughts of her doing the same or similar with me in the picture.

What have you been doing to work on that stuff?

Well, the big thing is stopping drinking, which has had a huge impact. I'm also seeing a great psychiatrist who is much more than a pill pusher and is experienced, to the degree one can be, with cPTSD and how to try to fight it, mainly using DBT.

To me, the significance of the above depends on how far removed in time she is from that relationship. It sounds like not so long, given your expression recent vacation. It does not surprise me that she would have some residual entanglement with him. I consider that rage to be an entanglement of sorts. If she was really past him he just wouldn't matter, he'd be irrelevant and there would be no rage.

Yes, I followed the narcissist by less than a month up to four months, depending on which way my gf presents it at the time of talking about it. But, in any event, I'm close.

So therefore to me this is something to tell her if you are going to see if you can save the relationship with her. But I wouldn't come at her wanting to forbid things. My approach would be to tell her how her contact with him makes you feel, and see what sort of reaction you get, and specifically see what if anything she offers to do to help you. I mean, it is easy to say No contact ever but I wouldn't be eager to create an explosion point when some contact can quite likely occur just in the normal course of life. Trust, when possible, is much better than forbidding and/or snooping.

I have told her how her contact with him makes me feel, in response to which she said she would redouble her efforts at no contact. The no-contact failures, however, have not occurred in the course of normal life.

Is this something that you would want to pin down with her, who is more experienced/naive? I wouldn't. The way I see it, she might need to have that image of herself. Why would you want to destroy that self-image? Remember this:

A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

--William Blake

Many of us have images of ourselves that could not stand up to the searchlight of truth, but these images have their value for us. Stay away from attacking or destroying hers in the name of truth.

Have you tried getting up, even though it's the middle of the night? That would be unpleasant but perhaps better than ruminating?

// I have tried that but not often enough. Last night, the 2nd to last night i'll be spending w/ my gf for a month, I didn't startle awake but I did have bad dreams all night about something that happened during the day (see below) and secrets and hidden stuff. Nothing I could do about them, really, because I was asleep but they sure do make me feel undone and uneasy in the morning.

I would see that as a type of therapy. And with that kind of listening orientation I would not expect her therapist to express an opinion as to whether to leave or stay with you.

Okay, yes. I do know that a few weeks ago, the therapist said something, regarding my gf's last two bfs, me and the narcissist, that really pissed her off. the T said, wow, you sure know how to pick em.

but for the most part, the therapist stays in the background.

That certainly is a concern.

With regard to commenting on your progress, I wouldn't call that needing to appear innocent, because I was thinking of innocence more in terms of sexual innocence/naivete.

agreed

Another reason she might lie is because, in the past, she was harshly punished when caught doing something wrong.

I know she felt harshly punished by everybody who sort of condemned her after what happened when she was 15. other than that, she was never punished by her parents, who were totally hands off and certainly her mother had mental illness problems of one sort or another. never really loved or took care of her daughter, just let her be or put her down for not being as smart as her. after hrer parent's divorce, her mother slept around a lot, lots of men coming through the house, etc. my gf calls her a total narcissist.


This example of her saying that she congratulated you, and then agreeing that she didn't, could be really instructive. I wonder what would have happened to her in the past if she were with a previous guy, especially the abusive guy, in this situation. Could you discuss that example with her further? In a nonthreatening, nonjudging way, perhaps you could ask her to think about what brought her to lie about the text messages. Perhaps she didn't even realize it was a lie; perhaps in her mind, she had already congratulated you.

No matter how I come at such a question, she'll feel interrogated so I best not bring it up. However, I do think you're 100% right, in her mind she had already congratulated me. I don't know how to feel about that.

How long ago was the boob shot narrative you shared?

Roughly 1.5 to two years before we met, although when we met, he was still in her life as a stalker. Yes, I know that's a long time before we met and people do change, but imo they change less in their, say, mid 50s than they do in their early 20s.

It is possible that she still does dic pic stuff, but how likely is it, in your judgment?

somewhat possible, either that or something similar. I know she has the boobilus pic she sent the guy still on her phone, I don't know if she still has the dic pic still on it, but i wouldn't be surprised.

Yesterday, we were out driving, got a little lost, and I picked up her cell phone and suggested we use the GPS. I don't have her password and she knows it. But she snatched that phone away from me and got a grip on it like state secrets were involved. I said, you can put your password in, you don't have to tell me. She said, No, I won't do that while I'm driving. But, of course, she's done that tons of times in the past. I said, what do you have on there that's so secret? She paused a split second too long, imho, and said, I'm establishing boundaries. she didn't say nothing was on there, just the boundaries thing. She looked pretty ... twitchy and nervous about the thought of me having access to her cell phone, like she was certain I'd go past her GPS and start snooping and find stuff she didn't want me to find.
A gloomy half hour passed and I basically let it go. But, my dreams haven't let it go, nor my thoughts during the day.
Why so sudden a snatch? Why did she say she wouldn't put her password in while driving? What the hell is on there?
Anyway, it made me feel super insecure and super unhappy with feeling super insecure. Especially when we have two more days together before we don't see each other for a month, with the dic pick thing still bedeviling my brain pan.

Well I think that you are tolerating the uncertainty and stress pretty well, now that you've stopped with the drinking. She gives you a lot of triggers, and you have managed to not blow up. That says a lot.

I'm doing my best. Yesterday's incident nearly put me in meltdown mode. Some part of me thinks I need to talk to her about it before she leaves tomorrow, but I wouldn't know what to say to her other than, the way you grabbed that phone away from me made me feel pretty damn bad and insecure and worried and suspicious, and I just don't know how to process those feelings.

But maybe I just need to take the moment and file it away as a nothing thing to me mindful of when considering our future.

As always, I'm unsettled and unsure and living in limbo. Ugh.