Hi Meredith,

Last November I moved out of state for a new job. I arrived knowing no one but quickly got into some social activities that gave me a few good groups of friends. A few months later, in January, I started dating my current boyfriend. The relationship is going very well and I’m very happy with him, but there has been a small “bump.”

Within these groups of people I’ve met, I became friendly with a girl I will call E. She has a crazy work schedule and lives a little bit out of the city so we didn’t run into each other too often, but when we did we got along well. Once my boyfriend and I started getting a bit more serious, he would come out with my friends and I thought it was great that everyone could get along.

The problem started around June when I noticed that more and more frequently, my boyfriend would say something like “I grabbed coffee with E today,” or “Did you hear xyz news from E?” (I should point out that they work close by, so grabbing coffee isn’t totally improbable). The problem wasn’t that they were hanging out, it was that they were hanging out more than she and I were hanging out. I tried to make a lighthearted complaint about it, saying that she should find her own boyfriend, and he played it off like my jealousy was “cute.”

I tried to change things on my own. I would text E more and invite her to do more things. But she always had an excuse and yet continued to write on my boyfriend’s Facebook wall, text him all the time, ask him to meet for coffee, etc. I finally couldn’t take it anymore when one day, within 10 minutes of me getting a “Sorry, I’m busy this week!” text from her, my boyfriend’s phone lit up with a text from her asking him to grab a drink.

I told him how I felt and he said I was being irrational, she’s just a friend, etc. I told him I was uncomfortable with the amount of communication and time they spent together because it was so much more time than I was spending with her. I told him that I didn’t want to be controlling but I did want him to know that I would be more comfortable if he stopped seeing and talking to her so much. Long story short, he stopped, though begrudgingly, and E and I no longer are friends.

I’m happy that it’s over, but now my boyfriend thinks I am insanely jealous, and anytime he makes plans with a female friend, he says something sarcastic like, “Is it OK, Mom?”

I have guy friends. He has girl friends who are wonderful and I have no problem with him seeing them. Actually, because I am new to town, many of his girl friends have “adopted” me into their circle. We often all hang out as a group and there are no problems, yet he still has this image of me as jealous.

So my question is … how do I fix this? Is our relationship just going to be a long string of him feeling like I’m a jealous lunatic and me feeling like I did the wrong thing by expressing my feelings? I want our relationship to be healthy and each of us to have our own healthy friendships but I am afraid my boyfriend will never see me as capable of that. Thanks for your help, Meredith and readers!

– Falsely Charged with Jealousy