I [24 M] am not comfortable with my GF's [25 F] relationship with her best friend [25 M] after snooping through her phone. What do I do about it?

I would like to preface this all with some facts about me, I am currently a 4th year Uni student and my girlfriend, S, is a 6th/final year student. I have a photographic memory (relevant later on) and I have been diagnosed with OCD and Manic-Depression (which basically means my mood swings between compulsive/ridiculously over-productive/not sleeping for days/doing risky things and being paranoid/obsessive/depressed).

At the start of our dating journey, late 2016, we decided to talk about all of our previous relationships and sexual experiences (in hindsight, we probably shouldn't have?), I asked her about her previous sexual history with one of her best friends of 7 years, J , but she revealed that they had "hooked up once while travelling in India", she said it was a "travellers high" and she regretted it when she came back.

I am naturally a very paranoid person but I trust her most out of all the people I know, but I can always tell when she's lying...and I felt quite uneasy about her answer; so I did a bad thing and snooped through her phone (yes, bad, I know), and when you look where you're not supposed to you find things you didn't want to find; Intimate and explicit, sexual, romantic conversation, sexting and talking about meeting up a couple times, a month after the trip in India. I weeped really hard for the first time in my life as I read through the conversations because I felt guilty for looking through it in the first place and had felt betrayed that I was lied to by one of my most trusted people.

Initially, I didn't tell her I snooped because of how ashamed I was, and held it in for a solid 6 months' during which I was superficially acting as though everything was okay. In the meantime, whenever we did hang out with J, they were really chummy, with heaps of inside jokes and I felt like they had a really special bond.

I finally broke things off out of the blue late last year because the deep anxiety and obsessiveness over "what they had>what we had" became too much for me to handle in my own head.

In the time since the break-up, I gained a better handle on my mental health issues and got help, I have improved dramatically since. We started talking again last month, and I apologised and admitted to her that I invaded her privacy and looked through her phone and told her what I found. She said that that had explained my previous actions and that it "all made sense".

We talked it all out and our relationship at the moment is, I believe, going better than it ever has before.

Now, I love this woman, and I'm sure she loves me. So I don't want to put her in a position where I am an abusive and possessive partner by telling her I am not comfortable with her best-buddy J, nor do I want to suffer the constant struggle of having J in our lives.

QUESTION I'm not sure what to do with this J situation and I wish I knew how to approach it properly. Are there restrictions I should put on them hanging out? Would me being better friends with him help the situation? How do I unread the sexts that are burnt into my memory?

TL;DR My girlfriends current best-friend had a sexual relationship with her 3 years ago, which she underplayed and now I feel really weird about them hanging out. I don't want to be abusive but I also want to set my standards down for what kind of interactions I'm okay with.

Submitted April 05, 2019 at 08:04PM

I would like to preface this all with some facts about me, I am currently a 4th year Uni student and my girlfriend, S, is a 6th/final year student. I have a photographic memory (relevant later on) and I have been diagnosed with OCD and Manic-Depression (which basically means my mood swings between compulsive/ridiculously over-productive/not sleeping for days/doing risky things and being paranoid/obsessive/depressed).At the start of our dating journey, late 2016, we decided to talk about all of our previous relationships and sexual experiences (in hindsight, we probably shouldn't have?), I asked her about her previous sexual history with one of her best friends of 7 years, J , but she revealed that they had "hooked up once while travelling in India", she said it was a "travellers high" and she regretted it when she came back.I am naturally a very paranoid person but I trust her most out of all the people I know, but I can always tell when she's lying...and I felt quite uneasy about her answer; so I did a bad thing and snooped through her phone (yes, bad, I know), and when you look where you're not supposed to you find things you didn't want to find; Intimate and explicit, sexual, romantic conversation, sexting and talking about meeting up a couple times, a month after the trip in India. I weeped really hard for the first time in my life as I read through the conversations because I felt guilty for looking through it in the first place and had felt betrayed that I was lied to by one of my most trusted people.Initially, I didn't tell her I snooped because of how ashamed I was, and held it in for a solid 6 months' during which I was superficially acting as though everything was okay. In the meantime, whenever we did hang out with J, they were really chummy, with heaps of inside jokes and I felt like they had a really special bond.I finally broke things off out of the blue late last year because the deep anxiety and obsessiveness over "what they had>what we had" became too much for me to handle in my own head.In the time since the break-up, I gained a better handle on my mental health issues and got help, I have improved dramatically since. We started talking again last month, and I apologised and admitted to her that I invaded her privacy and looked through her phone and told her what I found. She said that that had explained my previous actions and that it "all made sense".We talked it all out and our relationship at the moment is, I believe, going better than it ever has before.Now, I love this woman, and I'm sure she loves me. So I don't want to put her in a position where I am an abusive and possessive partner by telling her I am not comfortable with her best-buddy J, nor do I want to suffer the constant struggle of having J in our lives.QUESTION I'm not sure what to do with this J situation and I wish I knew how to approach it properly. Are there restrictions I should put on them hanging out? Would me being better friends with him help the situation? How do I unread the sexts that are burnt into my memory?TL;DR My girlfriends current best-friend had a sexual relationship with her 3 years ago, which she underplayed and now I feel really weird about them hanging out. I don't want to be abusive but I also want to set my standards down for what kind of interactions I'm okay with.