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miserable and scared
Hi Razhie,
I'm asking you this because I reckon you're one of the best on this kind of stuff, and as what I'm just about to talk about is a very serious matter, I am wholly disinclined to listen to a whole bunch of well meant but poorly spelled and poorly thought out advice. Ergo, no public posting.
I'm afraid that my queston will be quite long, as it has a bit of back story. I am 25/f, and have for the bast eleven months been in what I thought was the happiest relationship of my life(also the longest). I have a history of difficult relationships(some of which bordered on the abusive though I was no saint either) and when I met my current boyfriend, I fet an instant connection. We have such a good relationship, we really love each other, i think. But now I have doubts. I am someone who has terrible body image issues, I feel fat even ( I'm size 6-8 U.S.) Even though I know rationally that I'm not. My boyfiend aways tells me he loves my body, and has gone shopping for clothes with me.
Here comes the part which hurts me so much, I can barely write it. This last weekend, we were at a wedding, which involved long train journeys at either end. On both the journeys, I am almost sure that I saw my boyfriend looking at the legs of two thin young girls. Now he has never done anything like this before, not so uch as looked at another woman, and says he does not like very skinny women(I always believed him). But now? You notice I said ALMOST sure. Almost, not quite. I noticed these girls myself, so it is possible that he followed my glance. I am was also feeling so paranoid about my appearance that I was perhaps imagining things. I didn't notice anything like that at the wedding (which I actually quite enjoyed). I would have forgotten the girl on the first train, had it not been for the one on the return journey. What shall I do? I'm so upset, I can't think. I can't bear to look at photos of the two of us. This person whom I loved and trusted might be unworthy of my trust(Liking young girls is a DEALBREAKER). Of course, you can't tell me what to do. I just feel the need to share-also, you might share thoughts on whether paranoia might make me imagine something that simply wasn't there.
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I can’t tell you what to do. But I can tell you exactly what I think you should do:
Get yourself into therapy and talk this over with a therapist or counselor who has experience with people who have deep insecurities and body image issues.
You are not even sure he WAS looking at them, but if he was, who are to you to assume that this otherwise great guy wasn’t thinking ‘Man that girl needs to gain a few.’ Or ‘Whose mother let’s them out that way?!’
Your assumption, that what you aren’t even sure you saw, was sexual in nature is not only unfair to him and tortuous to yourself, it means you need therapy to get your negative thinking and paranoia under control.
When someone has given you NO REASON to assume the worst and when you care and respect that person, you owe it them to assume the best. To assume, that even if he was looking, he was probably just making an honest aesthetic judgment, not some sexual perversion. After 11 months of a healthy relationship, don’t you feel you owe him that much?
You should seriously ask yourself why you are in such a rush to sabotage your relationship?
Now, I’m not sure what you meant by ‘young girls’, however, lets say for a second they were old enough not to be jail bait. If a passing gaze, so short you aren’t even certain it happened, at two attractive young women is a deal breaker for you, then you are going to have a damn hard time finding someone to love. We are visual animals. We get distracted by the physicality of those around us. Notice, I didn’t say sexuality. I said physicality. We all have bodies. We are all aware of one another’s bodies. Only sociopaths separate the body from the person when they look at the world.
So, tattoos, physical disabilities, piercing, skin colour, wild hair and yes, short skirts and tight pants, attract our attention. As young children we are taught not to stare, but you can’t unteach what is a hard fact about humanity: Our eyes are our primary sense. We are distracted by the visual aesthetic. It’s not necessarily sexual, but it does happen. Women and men both get distracted by the physicality of those around us. Blind men get distracted by odd or pleasant voices!
We watch television and movies for Christ’s sake. The very best of us, and our brothers and lovers and boyfriends and even fathers, look at women like Angelina Jolie and think ‘Man she’s gorgeous.’
That isn’t a threat to their loves or their wives or their daughters… That is just an aesthetic appraisal. It’s not drastically different then saying a sunset in gorgeous. We are just so insecure as a society when it comes to sex and our bodies, we treat it as though it is.
This incident shouldn’t have the power to make this unhappy. You aren’t mentally sound if it does and you need more then anyone online can offer you. You need talk therapy, badly. If you keep this up you might loose a good man and if he isn’t a good man, you might not have a solid enough connection with reality to notice and be sure of yourself. You are definately going to loose so much happiness that you could otherwise have.
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