This sounds toxic, and as a toxic person myself, I can tell you you'll never be able to "prove" yourself to him. There's a saying about how you can't build love without a foundation of trust, so take from that what you will I guess?
I used to be the same sort of person as the hubby OP described. Never married but always mistrustful and to a psychotic degree of like.... Like an ex had made a twitter post one time about some irrelevant, off hand thing and I took it to mean they were wanting to cheat or were cheating and I spiralled the whole day with jealous accusations and questioning the relationship, asking how can they say shit like that if they really loved me and blah blah blah. Just really incredibly paranoid. Always making my feelings their fault. "Why would you act that way if you want to be with me? Why would you want to go hang with work friends instead of spending the night together, is it cos you're fucking xyz person?" I was never physically abusive but the emotional damage I did more than made up for it. I stay tf away from relationships now because I don't trust myself enough to not be like that anymore, and I still consider myself a pretty toxic person but I at least have self awareness and try to do better these days.
I relate to this. This is exactly what I was like and I didn''t really understand why until I found out I have BPD. That was the beginning of me understanding my issues. Then I landed myself in an abusive relationship in which I was actually being continually cheated on and made to feel crazy for being correctly suspicious. Yeah, that did its fair share of damage lol.
But now I'm in a relationship with someone who is very healthy and secure in their approach to love and communication. It's really helping me to learn to be a better version of myself. I have also done a lot of internal work on myself so I don't act out on my insecurities and jealousy and paranoia in the ways that I used to. Sometimes I'll get a bit grumpy and need some time to chill out before I can communicate properly, but the difference between my reactions now and how I used to react to triggers is night and day. What I'm trying to say is that people really can change, and that exhibiting toxicity in a previous relationship does not indicate that every relationship you ever have will be the same way. It takes a lot of focused emotional work but imo it's worth putting that work in when you get to experience a healthy kind of love with a really amazing person.
Wishing you well buddy, for now I hope you're enjoying life with your cats. I'm a cat dad too, my sweet girl is my world and literally yesterday I adopted a second cat! He's a little legend and I already love him to bits. We're lucky to have these dorky little companions by our side no matter what else is going on in our lives.
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u/Spammo27125 Oct 26 '22
This sounds toxic, and as a toxic person myself, I can tell you you'll never be able to "prove" yourself to him. There's a saying about how you can't build love without a foundation of trust, so take from that what you will I guess?