Relationship Stress - An Online Community for You

Tip of the Day

by AlyGalaxy

4 hours ago

How I did everything wrong

by charmingBranch7954

1 day ago

...See more Hi everyone, I've been on 7cups for nearly a decade, since my teens. This is my first time posting here, and the first time opening about my life, so please bear with me if you can, this might take a while. I've always been the quiet elder child of the house. Expected to just take it like a man, bear all responsibilities and do as I'm told. Brought up in an abusive household, I could barely ever speak up, let alone stand for myself. I tried to escape that, while also providing for my family, by joining the army at 16. But things didn't go too well there. Due to my soft spoken nature, I was constantly bullied and taken advantage off. And one day, disaster struck when I fell on my back from like 15 feet on training. Everyone was fearing I might not walk again. I did somehow recover, enough to move, walk, and eventually run, but I do have back pain at times. The greatest help with my recovery was my then girlfriend, who I had met online at the age of 17, after coming back home. The internet was a simpler space back then, and not everyone was hiding who they were. We both met at a vulnerable point in our lives, and I had severe doubts if I could ever be loved. But she assured me I did, and we loved each other with utmost passion. Making plans to move in together, get married, have kids. However, that would only last for 7 years, when out of nowhere, she hit me with "I'm sorry, I fell out of love". Without her, I felt lost again. I had lost my anchor. I held on somehow, going back to my old ways and bad habits, chatting with people online since I'm too introverted and don't really socialize irl. I found someone else, went through the same again, and she did the same, though this time it was a 2 year long relationship. Quite the cycle, isn't it? But idk, this time it hit me harder. Things couldn't get any worse, right? You'd be wrong. About 2 years ago, I had joined a new workplace. And what do you know, a girl actually did like me, at least for a while. But just my luck, I was going through a bad phase, dealing with a breakup, death in the family, and my dad suffering two strokes, coupled with financial struggles. I pushed her away, thinking that I was protecting her, but I only hurt her. So deeply that she would go on to say yes to a guy her dad picked for her to marry. That guy would go on to break her heart, and she would lose all hope in love and marriage, calling the whole concept ***. So here I m, lost, broken, guilty, alone, living a goalless life, with no real will to live.

Shame…

by rj1808

December 23rd

Need some opinions

by hollieakers90

December 23rd

Let it Go!

by CheeryMango

December 8th

I need help and advice

by SpiritTea

December 7th

Losing a childhood friend/crush

by yellowSailboat5818

December 7th

I need the courage to leave: Looking for support from someone who can relate *TRIGGER WARNING*

by modestRaspberries7557

November 24th

...See more Ive been in a ten year long committed relationship with a person who is most likely engaged to someone else. We started off great. We met in 2013 after I had my daughter but before her father and I split. My current fiance and I both worked at the mall. He claimed he was single but I told him I was in a relationship. We were just aquantences. We exchanged numbers but I didn't talk to him much. He would ask me if I wanted to hang out but I always said no. At that time I was in an abusive relationship. My daughter's father would monitor all my devices, watch me in the bathroom, hit me, and rape me throughout that year. In 2014 my daughter's father and I finally split (he had enough of feeling like the bad guy). Weeks later I asked if my current fiance wanted to hang out, he said yes and we set a date. Things went great. We got along well together and we started dating. Within a year he was telling me he loved me, talking about marriage, and taking me on vacations with him. He started saying we were soulmates and everything. He made me all these promises. Thoughout the next several years red flags began to raise for me. His stories about working at the hospital made littlle sense, his sudden departure to Hawaii for work when he asked me to go with him, his work trips to the upper part of the state every week, his unwillingness to cohabitate despite claims of wanting tto live together. It was all strange but I trusted him at his word and thought nothing of it until last year. He rented a shed a couple of cities over, had it since I met him, but the rent was beccoming too expensive so he wwas moving. He had his things, my things, and things that his aunt, uncle, and cousins own in the shed along with items from previous relationships. I had asked a few times about the relatives' items and the ex's but he was always defensive about it. I figured since he had lost his parents at an early age he was just unable to talk about things like family and relationships so I dropped it. Until I found a frame that I had never seen before. It had cardstock cut into hearts with 2 maps underneath, the first was labelled where we met and was dated 2005, the second was labelled where you proposed and was dated 2014. We had started dating iin 2014, we met a year prior to that and he said he was single and had just gone through a bad break up. I asked him about the frame, he turned white, and immediately started laying into me calling me crazy and asking me why I was looking through his things. The frame had been laying on top of a pile of frames. I did not go looking for it, it was just there, like it was something new he just recieved. I had never seen it before. Then I asked about the dates. He said it was from another relationship from before we were together. He said he had told me about it. He never said he was enaged before, as far as I knew I was his only fiance ever. Regardless he kept yelling at me and calling me crazy for looking or even asking about it. Making it sound like I was in the wrong when he told me he was single in 2013. Somehow we moved passed this. This year, in about April, the situation at the shed was bothering me so I decided to do a background search on him. I ended up finding adresses between him and another woman his age from 2011-present. The woman had the same name as his cousin whose item's he was keeping in his shed and instead of being a teenager like he insinuated, she was almost 40 like him. I ended up finding all her soical media accounts that claimed he was her fiance since 2014, and that they had been together since 2005. On top of that I found messages on his work *** between him and another ex where he claimed to still love her and miss her and made a huge story about how he was sailing off of the Florida coast when he was in Michigan, with me. Everything I found destroyed me. I didn't know what was real annd what wasn't. I confronted him about what I had found and he told me his cousin is an immigrant and he posed as her fiance to help her with immigration. This story sounded tooo ffar fetched to be real so I made an effort to contact her directly. He continured to belittle me and make me feel like a monster for looking into the situation. Then word got back to him that I had emailed her, suddenly he started telling me that I needed to stop looking into this because his aunt was going to file a restraining order against me because the email I sent whent to his other cousin which is a minor. Note that at this point we had been together for 10 years and I have never met his aunt, uncle or cousins. The only names of cousins he had ever mentioned were 2, one boy and one girl, and he made them sound like children between the ages of 7-15. Then with the email, suddenly a new name is added to the list of cousins. The name he used for this cousin was the same name he used when talking about an ex's friend. Nothing he was telling me made sense. I just felt like a monster and I started thinking I was wrong and paranoid because he said I was. Then in July I recieved a pocket dial from him. I answered and heard him talking to another woman, telling her not to kiss him because his breath smells, saying to her let me see that sweet a**, she told him she made him cookies, and they traded I love yous after he said he had to go. I was shocked. I tried facetimiing him 3 times. He denied every single call. Then I just cried. He called back minutes later and immediately went on the defensive. I told him I heard him with another woman, he denied it and told me to talk to his firend. He claimed he was trying to facetime me so I could see one of his aunt's tenants, he said the voice I heard was a man and he was not talking to a woman. I did not want to talk to his friend, I just told him over and over again I did not want to be with him anymore. He yelled at me and told me to shut up and listen and to talk to his friend but I wouldn't I just kept repeating what I heard. He told me I was wrong and he wascoming over. When he arrived he walked straight to my daughter and told her I was crazy and paranoid and I didn't know what I was talking about (I did not talk to my daughter about any of this). Then he came into the room with me and proceeded to tell me his version of the story over and over again while calling me crazy and claiming I did not hear what I heard. He offered to take me to the location where he was and I accepted. We drove past the parking lot where he was but he would not take me into the actual lot. I asked him to go in but he refused. That night, at 3 am, I took the door camera off my apartment door and changed the locks. The next morning I turned tracking off my phone, blocked him, and took off for the day. Towards the afternoon he started calling me from a different number, testing me, and threatening to use law enforcement to fake a wellness check in order to regain entry to my apartment. I told him we were fine but he would not relent. Eventually I returned his call. Eventually it came to a point where I had to go back home. He made me realize that I was not financially stable at the moment and I did not have access to transportation. He used these things against me to get me to calm down and come back. I did. Then he was back in my apartment that day. He erased all the calls and messages he left but when he was gone, I recovered them. For my sake. A month later I recieved another pocket dial from him. This time from the other number. This time, it went to voicemail and was recorded. I saved the recording to a seperate device. I listened to it. It was him and the woman from before talking about thier anniversary. She was asking if he was going to keep her company and he said he couldn't because he had listing appointments (he didn't). Again when I heard this I wanted to break it off again. He made another story about the woman being his aunt and he was at lunch with his whole family, it wasn't just them. At this point he has changed his story about both of these incidents everytime I have brought them up and I caught him in another lie when I made a white lie of my own the other day. Last week I was feeling down about this situation and he was wanting me to talk. I made up a lie saying I found her birth certificate stating she was born in the states. He told me it was a fake just like his was when he had to come over here. He said her documents didn't work which is why he had to pose as her fiance instead. (I never found her birth certifiicate but I did find an article from 1991 placinng bother her and her mother here at the time, she would have been 5 or 6, plenty of time to become a naturalized citizen in the united states). Now I am working to become financially independant from him so I can move on. I am done.

Relationship

by walnuts8199

November 15th

Relationship Loneliness

by Funny1994

November 11th

How do you know it’s love?

by ImALittleStuckInPast23

November 9th

why me

by

November 5th

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