Here’s the rundown (TL;DR at bottom):
GF (23F) and I (25M) had been together for about 4 years, all going relatively well. The last few months of that time though, she gets more and more pressing about a ring, which I can understand to an extent, (my immediate family has had awful luck with multiple marriages and divorces, so I’m admittedly a bit more trigger shy and concerned about making sure it’s the right one).
Well one day things came to a head that I’d kept on moving the goalposts and being wishy washy, and that either she leaves or we try a sort of break, as she’s convinced that since we’re each other’s first major relationship, I’m thinking the grass may be greener on the other side. I regrettably agreed on the spot for not wanting to lose the relationship, and for a hot second was even on board. This was supposed to go on for around two months, and we each put forward some ground rules (e.g. sex was allowed, but with protection, etc) About a month into half assed dabbling with tinder though, I concluded I’m not the kind of person to do this while still technically in a relationship, and so I approached her about cutting this experiment off early.
She agreed, and that first little while of reconnection was nice. However we cycled back to happenings over said break, where I learned she had in fact seen and slept with 2 people (hurt to hear, but technically I’d agreed to it), with the second making her quite uncomfortable. My first thought was simply to make sure she was okay, but the day after we addressed the very real tension in the room over one party exercising their option to sleep with another while one had not.
We were all set to go see a counselor together (we each had our own separate ones for our own issues) to try and help ease the tension and move forward together, with the goal of better communication and making sure we were on the same page with goals, ambitions, and plans.
The night before, however, she nervously sprung on me that one of the aforementioned boundaries was broken (unprotected sex), which was bad enough on its own, but coupled with the fact that we’d also had “makeup” sex essentially after getting back together, I felt betrayed and ended things on the spot.
Over the next few months, we had a bit of an FWB thing going on, as much as both of us were comfortable with, and we talked about the possibility of reconnecting but were both still very single. A tentative date was set to perhaps start back up, the day I returned from a weeklong trip. Trip happens, I return, and I did not want to approach that subject that night (long day traveling, still processing lots of input received over the trip that perhaps I’d already been too forgiving, etc), but still had a mindset of wanting to do so soon. Yet, we ended up still having sex that night still (again odd FWB dynamic) and parting ways.
Saw her two days later, prepped to ask her out again, which she was excited for for about a 1/2 second before she gave a nervous sheepish look. In the day in between us last seeing and me asking to restart the relationship, she had an impromptu hookup. Her reasoning was that because I didn’t want to restart things when I said, after returning from my trip, that she thought I wasn’t going to at all, that she’d lost me, and that she needed to start trying to move on.
The dynamic is strange now, I still progressed with wanting to try again with her, but obviously there will be a lot to sort out and with a big air of awkwardness to boot. Technically we were still broken up, and a “rule” was not broken like during the dumb break idea, but obviously it still hurts. And I want to think that the her of 4 years prior is not the her of the last 5 months or so.
So as a sort of sanity check, is that a relatively fair approach, or am I being way too naive and too forgiving?
TL;DR: Long term relationship gets rocky over lack of a proposal. Poor decision in hindsight to try and remedy the situation with a non-exclusive break with boundaries. Non-exclusivity was not evenly divided and boundaries were crossed. Became FWB for a while after. Eventually tried to reestablish the relationship, to find that she’d hooked up the immediate night prior. Fair play, or horribly naive?
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