hi ! i F20 & my M19 boyfriend keep having the same struggle with relationships outside of ours.
i won’t give every single scenario but just a couple so everyone can see where my head space is at with the situation. i really struggle to understand if he’s being controlling or if im not respecting his boundaries in our relationship.
TLDR ; my boyfriend & i keep arguing about the same situations. he doesn’t appreciate any of my guy friends at all but him having girl friends or talking to my friends is completely okay. there’s been situations with my completely platonic friends that he didn’t like as well as not wanting me speaking to past flings which i completely agreed & cut them off before & during our relationship. i keep trying to talk about the importance of having regular friends & what’s actually a good boundary to have but he doesn’t appreciate that either. i keep struggling to feel like im always doing something wrong & i hate it , am i really doing something wrong ? he says im disrespecting f his boundaries by talking to other guys even if ive been friends with them for years. { sorry if this is a bad tldr im not good at writing them }
we’ve been dating for about 2 months now , known each other for 4. when we started dating i still had a couple loose strings i tied up & left alone which he was aware of. when we started dating i had just moved out of my friends house , when i left he & i were on okay ish terms. we’d been friends for a year & a half. we had a fling for about a month before we ended it & just decided to be friends with no other kind of relationship other than platonic & respectful. alex M25 respected that i got into a relationship & said he wouldn’t reach out much if at all. i sell cakes & he reached out wanting to buy one. i told my boyfriend , mason , & he was not happy at all. he knows of our history & didn’t appreciate that he reached out to me about a cake. i made a comment about wanting to get my cake business off the ground & that to me any business is business. he made a pretty hurtful comment saying that one person wasn’t going to help me with starting up selling cakes more. we argued about it for a minute before i decided to just not go through with making the cake. he said regardless of what the reason was i had no reason to have spoke to him because of our past. i said i agreed but at the same time , i didn’t see the harm in making the cake for alex’s event. he has the same outlook for not speaking to people i’ve had past relationships with romantic or sexual. which i’ve agreed many times & have not spoken to these people even before we started dating but this situation made him feel as though i was lying about seeing it from his perspective.
on the other hand , there’s other instances where no past relationship comes into play & these friendships have always been STRICTLY PLATONIC & it all comes from speculation on his end. example 2 . i’ve had a friend , james M22 , for about 3 years. there has never been an instance where feelings were shared or any past other than friends between us. i wanted mason to meet james as my friendship with him was important to me & i felt like having my boyfriend meet my friends was a respectful thing to do. he was already not a fan of james before they met purely based off him thinking he liked him. which i assured him that has never come up. the meeting didn’t go that great as another one of his friends made a comment to mason about him not liking james & we ended up leaving. i had a talk with james about his friend talking poorly about my boyfriend. we stopped talking shortly after. i didn’t think it was james fault. i come here today because james ended up reaching out to me after 2 months leading up to now to apologize for what happened & we had a mature conversation about it. i decided to tell mason about the conversation where he was not happy , he said i shouldn’t be speaking to him & that i have no reason to reconcile with him or anybody else i’ve cut off for him. i told him i wanted to hear him out because he was still a good friend of mine for years & that i didn’t like being on bad terms with people. he blew me off & we haven’t spoke since then.
this situation isn’t the only one where he’s made comments about disliking any friend of mine , even his own friends reaching out to talk to me where our conversations are about him. he talks to my girl bestfriend F19 pretty frequently & i see no issue because i have trust in her & him. but when it’s vice versa , his friend talking to me , he gets mad at me saying i have no reason to speak to them no matter the conversation.
i slowly feel like there’s no resolve to this problem of having guy friends & it upsets me to feel like i’ll slowly but surely be cut off from everyone that isn’t a female. i’ve spoke to my family & close friends & they said i shouldn’t allow myself to stop being myself & having outside friendships apart from my relationship & i agree. but every time the topic comes up & i try to express myself he gets upset & pretty rude , standing firm in me not communicating with the opposite sex whether it’s justified or not & that these are his boundaries , no room for other opinion.
advice ?
names used in this story are just fillers