Full-Out Transparency…Part III

If you’ve been following along with my last two posts, you’ll remember exactly where I am about to start off…to when my boyfriend (finally!) came home from Japan.  If not, you may want to go back and read parts I and II.  They’re ultimately about the power of transparency in relationships- all relationships, not just poly ones.

As you might expect, we had a tremendous reunion when he returned home.  Reunion S.E.X. is kinda like “makeup sex”- gooood.  In fact, it was so good I was joking about sending him away again. 😉

Soon after that, I began to notice some things.  Remember Jane, the woman that he went on a date with before he left on his trip?  Well, he bought her the same thing he bought me in Japan, which was a very nice gift.  Only he didn’t tell me he had done it.  I noticed there was an extra package that looked exactly like the one he’d given me, and asked if it were for his wife.  He said no, it was for Jane.  I was very surprised by this, since he had only mentioned Jane’s name once, in passing, the entire time that he’d been gone.

And then I started to become suspicious of his behavior.  For example, I walked over and sat down next to him while he was on Facebook, he logged out, and I had the thought that he  didn’t want me to see who he had been talking to.  Of note here, is that literally only twice in my life had I ever questioned the honesty of any partner I’d ever had.  And both times it turned out there was a very good reason for me to be questioning- namely that they were lying/cheating.  In other words, I am not normally prone to being suspicious at all.

So I asked him if there were anything he wasn’t telling me, pointing out his behavior.  He said no.  He then offered to let me look on his Facebook.  I declined.

And then he put up a funny thing that someone had sent him on Facebook, told me to read it, and announced he was going to take a shower.  Set up.  He wanted me to read his Facebook, to “prove”, he later said, that he had nothing to hide.  I obliged.  I scrolled quickly through a few things and then looked for his private messages with “Jane”.  It struck me that there were quite a few of them.  That they had talked a lot while he was away.  And, I didn’t read every word, but enough to see that they’d had some very sexual exchanges about fantasies, what he wanted to do to her, how she was making him so horny that he had to go touch himself, you get the picture…

I have to say I was pretty shocked.  Not angry at first, more like sad and scared.  I fessed up to my snooping (again, I’ve never snooped either, except in those two other cases), and we talked about it.

This would all slowly sink in over the next couple of days, during which time I also began to question whether almost everything that came out of his mouth was a lie.  This was not fun for either of us, to say the least.  It’s not that he had technically done anything “wrong” in his interactions with Jane.  It’s that he had concealed from me the fact that he’d even had any contact with her at all.   Things certainly seemed a lot different than “I’m not sure I’m interested and we’ll probably just be friends” , and yet he hadn’t given me any updates.  Simultaneously, he was very transparent about the interactions he was having with the women in Japan.  I was starting to understand that there was a reason I’d suddenly become suspicious of him.  My intuition had been telling me something was off.  And I was very angry.

I know I’m gonna take flack for this, but you will have to wait for the next blog to find out how we resolved this, and all the learning we got from it.  Rest assured, my boyfriend is not an ass, even though it may seem at this point that he is. 🙂  And also, there is a very happy ending here, which I promise I will tell very soon!

 

 

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