I am in a serious relationship with this girl, and we are seriously contemplating getting engaged in the future. However, we often get stuck on one issue: her ex-boyfriends. She keeps in touch with several. She has always been very honest with me about them, but it is obvious that she is very good, old friends with a couple of them, and it makes me uncomfortable at times. Yet, as far as trust goes, I do trust her. She has never given me a reason not to, and we have an extremely intimate relationship.
The problem arises from the fact that before she met me she had planned to go to Egypt with a guy that she has been friends with since high school (she just graduated from college, I am graduating this year). She did not date this guy, but she has told me that they did sleep together, fairly recently (just over a year ago, before we met). Now she is over traveling in Egypt with him, and what is worse, they are frequently sharing rooms while traveling the country!!
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Still, I am confident nothing is actually happening, but she just fails to realize how much this hurts me. A large problem is that she used to be in a two year relationship where the guy was extremely jealous and overly controlling, to the point where she told me he even wouldn’t let her leave her house sometimes. She has deep scars from this, and is very sensitive to being controlled.
Two other things complicate the scenario.
The first is that when we started dating, our relationship originally had a sort of expiration date. I was leaving the country to go study for half a year to finish my degree, and she was going to spend a few weeks in Egypt and then move to the Middle East for an indefinite period of time. (Our majors are International Studies, to explain the traveling theme here…). It was implied that we were going to break up when I needed to leave for my studies (I was scheduled to leave first). Yet we both fell very hard in love with each other. Still, I left her when the time came, and this was a decision we both agreed upon. Unfortunately, after less than