I’m 29, married, and honestly, I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me sometimes. My husband is, by all observable metrics, a good man. He hasn’t given me any concrete reason to question his fidelity since we’ve been together. He texts back promptly, he doesn’t hide his phone, and he makes time for me even when he’s dead tired from work. But despite all of that, I have this insidious, gnawing insecurity that crawls up my spine whenever I see him laughing at something on his phone or when he takes a few minutes too long to reply. Maybe I’m just paranoid—or maybe I’m responding to unresolved trauma masquerading as intuition. I wish I could say I’ve always been this suspicious, but the truth is, I used to be chill as hell in past relationships. It’s like something cracked open in me the day I found out he cheated on his ex-wife.

Now before anyone jumps on the "once a cheater, always a cheater" bandwagon, let me just say: people can change. We’ve all heard the quote, "Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future." That said, how do you trust someone who’s proven capable of deception? Especially when you weren’t the one who got lied to, but you know someone else was. My husband admitted it pretty early in our relationship. He said, "I was a different man back then," like that version of him lived in another body entirely. He didn’t justify it, which I appreciated—he just owned it. And for some dumb reason, maybe arrogance, maybe naïveté, I believed I could be the exception. I thought I was different enough, good enough, smart enough to be the woman he wouldn’t betray. But now, two years into this marriage, that knowledge lingers like an app running in the background, draining my emotional battery even when everything seems fine on the surface.

I catch myself analyzing his tone, his body language, even the most mundane changes in routine. If he skips his morning kiss or seems distracted during dinner, my mind starts constructing hypothetical infidelity timelines with CIA-level detail. It’s exhausting. It’s like being your own private investigator in a case that hasn’t even been opened yet. What’s worse is that I know how unfair it is. He doesn’t deserve to be interrogated every time he has a bad day. I read somewhere that "projection is when you dislike something about yourself and attribute it to someone else"—and maybe that’s what I’m doing. Maybe I’m projecting my fear of not being enough onto him. Maybe I’m scared he’ll do to me what he did to her because deep down, I think I’m just as disposable. Isn’t that pathetic? To measure your self-worth based on someone else’s sins?

And still, I don’t want to be this woman. I don’t want to play emotional detective or police someone I claim to love. I want to trust him, truly trust him, not just say it and hope my voice doesn’t crack. I’ve been seeing a therapist who specializes in relationship anxiety and attachment theory, and she said something that hit me hard: "You’re not reacting to him—you’re reacting to the narrative you’ve built around what he might do." That stopped me cold. Because she’s right. I’m so damn focused on worst-case scenarios that I’m sabotaging the best-case reality. He’s here. He’s loyal—at least from everything I’ve seen. He still reaches for my hand in bed, still brags about me to his friends, still asks for my opinion before making big decisions. How much more evidence do I need before I stop treating him like a ticking time bomb?

So I guess I’m asking: why am I so insecure in my relationship? Is it self-esteem? Is it trauma? Is it just me being a dramatic, controlling idiot? I’m trying to get better. I read books. I journal. I’m taking SSRIs. I’m not passive about this, because if there’s one thing I don’t want, it’s to become the reason this marriage crashes. He’s not perfect—none of us are—but he’s trying, and so am I. There’s this quote from Esther Perel that I remind myself of often: "Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets." I know I need to give him those drops, not with blind faith, but with informed hope. I need to believe that growth is real, and that past behavior, while informative, is not always predictive. I’m learning to accept that the only control I really have in this relationship is over my own reactions and assumptions; and maybe that’s enough to start turning this fear into peace—even if it’s one difficult, imperfect day at a time.

Thanks for reading 😘

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