So, I’ve been with my boyfriend for about a year and three months. Early into our relationship I caught him lying about hanging out with a friend of his of very questionable character. Because of that my trust with him was damaged; we’d constantly fight about where he was and what he was hiding from me.
Fast forward to now. He’s no longer friends with her; she deceived him and he cut her off. Anyways, I cannot bring myself to forget the past, even though he continues to try to make it up to me. Every time we argue about something I bring up the past and I’m still so hurt and angry by it. I can’t let it go, but I do want to be with him. We’ve been trying on our own to fix things but we’d like to seek out help and opinions.
Response:
It’s critically important to come to a resolution about how you’re feeling about this situation and forgive your boyfriend for what happened. Forgiveness allows couples to move beyond a betrayal of trust. Forgiveness doesn’t involve condoning what happened or forgetting about what occurred, but it entails being able to see your boyfriend in a new and positive light and not hold negative feelings about what he did.
Because you’re not able to forgive your boyfriend, the issue continues to come up, especially in times of conflict.
We’ve developed a research-based process to help couples work through such problems. Essentially, we’ve created a set of exercises and conversations that couples need to work through to be able to create a mutual understanding of the problem. A situation where both you and your boyfriend can see each other’s point of view and take steps to resolve the problem for once and all. The details of this process are more than we can cover here, but they are explained in detail in our book, Broken Trust.
In short, there are things you and your boyfriend can do to remedy this problem and enjoy your relationship.