Dear Meredith,

This might be a smaller issue, but it kind of sheds light on other snags in my relationship. I have been with my partner for nine years. I met him when I was 24 and he was 33. We live together now with no kids. A few days ago, we were looking at pictures on his phone and I see he is messaging a woman I have never heard about before. I see he has been messaging her a lot. I ask, “Who’s that?”– and he loses it. He yells at me, accuses me, leaves and deletes all their messages, and puts a lock on his phone. (He ends up forgetting the passcode to the lock he put on, so now he can’t use his phone either, lol.) Mind you, I do not have a history of checking his phone, so the lock was pretty unnecessary.

The next day, he says she is only a friend and they were catching up. I asked if she knew about me and he said yes, and that she wants to have coffee with both of us. Now the day after this, I bring up the coffee idea and he says, yes, she wants to. I said, “That could be cool; what’s her name?” He LOST it again. He said he “doesn’t mind leaving tonight, that I can’t wait to get my claws in his phone, that I am playing mind games, and if this continues we should take some time apart.” All I did was ask her name, and he refused to say it. If he can’t bring himself to say her name to me, why is he talking to her? He says we will meet up for coffee with her but won’t tell me her name?

All this seems like an out of proportion reaction. He has boundaries/rules about the male friends in my life – who I can talk to and when. But he breaks all his boundaries with his friends that are women. I ended up seeing some pretty flirty messages between them, all initiated from him and not her. It bothers me that he can give emotional flirty attention to other women, and doesn’t have the time or energy to give any to me. (We have a very lacking physical love life, I will add.) Should I just shrug off the hidden relationships like I have for so many years? Should I shrug off the lack of emotional connection he is willing to give me? Is there a better way to approach him? Have I stayed in this too long? Am I making things harder than they should be?

– Starting to spiral