I (21M) think I’m being manipulated by my girlfriend (21F)

Hello, to catch you all up with my situation: my girlfriend and I met on vacation. I lived in Norway, and she lived in Sweden. We agreed to try it out, and we had a long-distance relationship. I later moved to Oslo with some childhood friends of mine for my studies. We lived there for about a year. My girlfriend and I kept in touch and met each other once a month. We had phone calls every night to make the long distance easier for us. Now we live together.

Throughout that year, there were a lot of things in our relationship that I’m still unsure how to feel about, even though they happened months ago. And recently, I feel like she has shown signs of manipulation towards me, and I don’t know what to think.

During my first months in Oslo with my friends, we went out to the nightlife every other weekend. At first, my girlfriend was okay with it, and I was fine with her going out as well. But then she expressed that she didn’t want me to go out anymore. I understood that, since we hadn’t fully built trust yet, so I stayed home and never went out after that. This never changed. No matter what. Even if my other friends from my hometown came over, I still couldn’t go out again. So i always stayed at home.

While living in Oslo, my friends and I would sometimes watch movies together on weekends. When I told my girlfriend about it, there were problems. She said I was with them all the time (which I wasn’t, we worked or studied during the day, and only hung out at night). It always felt like I had to ask her for permission to watch movies with my friends. Keep in mind, we chatted all day, snapped each other, and talked every night on the phone. But if I watched a movie with my friends instead of being on a phone call with her at night, she didn’t like that.

When our lease in Oslo ended, we all moved back to our hometowns. Everyone was splitting ways, and me and my friends were going to be about eight hours apart, so meeting on a weekend would be difficult. My friend invited us to his cabin for a final get-together before everyone went their separate ways. I knew this might be a problem since my girlfriend doesn’t like me going out to a bar. Which my friends would likely do, and I wouldn't want to miss out. So I called her at work (during her break) to tell her I was thinking about going, this was the same day we we're supposed to go to the cabin. I didn’t want to miss it. But she didn’t really seem to care. Hearing that I might join my friends out on a bar, made her frustrated since we had talked about it before. She said 'go if you want', but i knew that it would become an argument. Nothing I said helped. So, I didn’t go, scared that we might have a big argument. She said something like, “I deserve so much better,” which broke me.

Once, when we were on vacation together, I saw a guy she was snapping. I told her I wasn’t comfortable with it, and she stopped snapping him. Then she told me to unfollow some girls on Instagram. These girls were old friends from school I’ve known for about 13 years. It didn’t matter, she wanted me to unfollow them. I didn’t have any contact with them, but unfollowing them just because she didn’t like me following them felt weird. In my opinion, snapping someone directly versus just following someone on Instagram isn’t quite the same thing.

At this point, we are no longer a long-distance relationship. I've moved to Sweden to live with her.

On the topic of Instagram, she randomly wanted to check my DMs one day. I scrolled all the way down, and there were messages from 2019 between me and those same girls, just memes sent to each other, nothing else. My ex was also in my Instagram DMs. We hadn’t messaged since 2022 (long before me and my girlfriend met), so I didn’t see the problem. My girlfriend wanted to read the messages, and I said I didn’t feel comfortable with that. She got frustrated about why I still had those messages. I honestly didn’t even know they were there. I never deleted them because I didn’t think about it. But the fact that she wanted to check my DMs out of the blue that’s what I reacted to.

Another time, when we were walking home after being out one night, we were talking about trust, and I got frustrated that she still didn’t trust me. She said she does, but didn't take me seriously, i was on the verge of crying. I felt sad that after everything we’ve been through, she still didn’t. Keep in mind, I moved away from my studies, family, and social life just to be with her but it didn’t seem to matter. She smirked and laughed a bit at my reaction, which made me even more frustrated.

Once on Snapchat, I was watching public stories highlights. On the public story menu there was this frame of a bikini model there I had never seen or interacted with. I didn't click on it. She reacted strongly to it, asking why I had that there. I said I didn’t know, maybe because my gender on Snapchat is set to “male” and the app pushes that kind of content. I’ve never interacted with that kind of stuff. She didn’t care. She got upset, and nothing I said helped. I tried to give an example on her phone, I said, “Look, have you interacted with that kind of content?” She said, “No, but it’s nothing bad, it’s not like it’s a half-nude male.” I said no, I was just trying to prove a point. We went back and forth like that until she finally said, “I hate you so much right now.” I got up and went out for a walk to clear my head, I never thought she’d say something like that. I was gone for about 1,5 hours. When I got home, she was frustrated that I hadn’t tell her where I went. It felt like she flipped it on me.

Later, my friends were all going home for autumn break, so I wanted to go too to meet up with them. I told my girlfriend, and she seemed skeptical. “You’re going to see them at Christmas anyway,” she said. I finally put my foot down and told her I wanted to go. Once she realized I was going no matter what, she tried to decide for me how many days I should stay. She asked how long I was thinking, and I said, “I don’t know, maybe five or six days.” She replied, “I’d rather it be three or four.” The argument went on for a while. I eventually mentioned that we might go out to a bar, and I didn’t want that to be an issue anymore. I thought it was time she started trusting me, I didn’t want to visit my friends just to sit at home if they went out. So, I stood firm. She said, “Is that how you really feel? Well, thank you for letting me know, now I finally know that.” Then she shook my hand with a passive-aggressive smile. I never went, since the travel prices got too high.

Yesterday we were watching a movie when my friend spammed every Discord server and DM he was in with a token-grabber malware link. I showed my girlfriend, and she noticed one Discord group in particular. This group was just my buddies and two girls, one was my friend’s girlfriend, and the other was an old classmate. Keep in mind, this was an old discord group. It wasn't active and messages we're sent before we met. She got very interested in that group and wanted to see the messages. I showed her, and she started asking a lot of questions about the other girl in that group: “Who is she?”, “Why are you in a group with her?”, “Has she ever been at your place?” (back when I lived in Oslo with my friends). I didn’t understand, we were six guys, and she could’ve visited anyone. Then she asked when I last saw her. I asked, “What’s going on, don’t you trust me?” and she said, “No, I don’t.”

She used to say she did, but now suddenly she doesn’t. I got frustrated. I didn’t understand what kind of answer she was looking for. When I got upset, she said, “Am I not allowed to ask questions?” That changed how I saw her. It felt like she was trying to flip it around to make me look like the bad guy for not letting her be “curious.” After this, she went outside for a walk. When she came back, she sat on the bed crying, saying, “When we moved in together, it felt too good to be true, and now I know it was.” I asked what she meant, but she didn’t elaborate.

She laid in bed crying for a while. I didn’t want to be the one to say something first or apologize, because that’s how it’s always been, and I’ve only just started to notice that pattern. I wanted to wait for her to speak first. When I finally went to bed, she started crying even more, saying that maybe we shouldn’t be together. I started crying too. We talked about the “Discord incident.” She still thought she was just “asking questions,” but this kind of control and suspicion has been ongoing for a long time, and I’m done with it. I’ve been more direct lately and stopped falling for her “tricks.” She said yesterday that I’ve “completely changed as a person.” I think she means that I no longer come to her first or apologize automatically.

About a month ago, I started reading about manipulative traits in relationships, and I feel like she matches a lot of them. However, I’m scared that I might be misunderstanding everything, that maybe I’m the one seeing things wrong. I’m scared if she’s actually manipulative, but I’m also scared that I might just be wrong. I feel very lost and need some insight from others.

Maybe I’m totally wrong. Maybe she’s the one I should feel sorry for. I’m not even sure myself, and I think that says something. I know she doesn’t have a good relationship with her father, and yesterday she told me she doesn’t have a good relationship with some of her friends either, which kind of woke me up. 

A lot of the things manipulative people do, I feel like I see in her, but I’m scared to accept that, because I don’t want this to end badly. Hopefully this all makes sense and wasn’t too much. I just need some insight. Maybe some of you have similar experiences? Thanks.