My(19M) Significant other(19F) admitted she’s keeping a guy around in case I leave her. Is it cheating?
Kinda wild title I admit, I started talking to this girl recently and she would constantly tell me about different guys that liked her and wanted her attention.
At first, I was like okay, good for you, but as she kept mentioning them I asked her, “did you flirt with them in the past?”. I had no problem if she did – her past is her past and not mine – but I just wanted to know why they were always pestering her if she gave them no attention. She told me she never has, and I believed her.
A week later, we were studying together and I was helping her with her work. As I was swiping between her notes and her textbook, I saw a message from a guy sending a flirtatious comment to her. I know this is wrong, but I was curious and I looked at the message.
I saw that before I met her, she had been flirting with this guy. I was a little taken aback, as she had told me she didn’t flirt with him in the past.
I got kinda upset, but then I saw there were at least 5 other guys that she was flirting with in the past. Look, the fact that she flirted is not what bothers me.
I’m not someone that has a bunch of “phases” but I get the need for attention. But lying about it to me is kinda odd, and it suggested to me there was something more.
I confronted her about it, and she got kinda hysterical, saying she would cut all of them off and that I meant more to her and blah blah. We established we were going to exclusive after that.
The next week, I saw a guy texting her again, in a flirtatious way. She didn’t flirt back but she responded, and I asked her if she’s cutting off all the guys that are trying to get with her.
She said yes, but this guy isn’t like that, and she’s only friends with him because he’s the friend of her best friend. I was a little sus, so I asked her to scroll up on the text messages if that’s fine.
She scrolled up, and there was a message from him to her asking if he could send an explicit picture. She rebuffed him in the moment, but kept engaging with him later on.
It wasn’t flirty but I asked her why she wanted to keep talking to someone who wanted to breach their “friendship”. She claimed she felt bad cutting out her best friend’s friend, and I didn’t really believe her.
We called her best friend up and she said she’s not even friends with the guy anymore. At this point, I started getting really suspect.
I started boiling down to why she really wanted to keep talking to him, and she eventually admitted that she was just keeping him around in case I left her, and she engages with him to keep me in check.
This put me in a spiral. Number one, it’s wildly manipulative to keep someone around to keep me in check, and number two, isn’t keeping a backup option cheating?