Queer Advice 71: trust degraded
"We spent a fucked up amazing weekend together, crying, processing, having lots and lots of gay sex..."
Welcome to Queer Advice, a feature where I answer love and relationship questions from anonymous internet users. Today’s question is from someone wondering if they should stay in a relationship after moving far away and learning about their partner’s cheating-adjacent behavior.
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I’m an almost 30 year old nonbinary person, who just moved about 7 hours away from the place i’d been living the last 10 years or so for grad school. Long, long story short, my most recent ex (mid-30s and also nb) and I met really soon after a toxic relationship ended for me. I was caught as long as I knew them between wanting to get closer and wanting to run away while I tried to work thru a bunch of my inner turmoil and hurt. We dated for a year and a half, and when I was moving we broke up after lots of back and forth and trying to figure out what might work. I was completely emotionally shut down and tapped out and I couldn’t feel anything that was happening to me in that time.
I had missed them the month I was gone and doubted everyday why we ended things, even though I also knew my own capacity was completely depleted and it felt good to just focus on myself. We cried on facetime together a bunch of times and eventually we decided to see each other again (as homos do) for a romantic two day getaway under ambiguous circumstances. They had proposed it to me as a ‘hybrid model’ under the guise of “we love each other, we have amazing sex, we can spend time together and enjoy each other’s company without the pressure that has been obviously freaking you out for so long.” We spent a fucked up amazing weekend together, crying, processing, having lots and lots of gay sex, unpacking each of our fears and triggers that led us to not always be able to be honest with each other… and at the end of the weekend, I found out they had started a relationship with an acquaintance of mine that they met at my going away party.
There’s a lot of trust degraded between us right now. They feel like I abandoned them and that they can’t trust my love. I feel like what they did was super fucked and dishonest to both me and this girl they had started seeing in my absence. We both have ~stuff~ we’re trying to work thru, but there’s so much love there, and so much fear at the same time. Right now we’re in this limbo where we both have affirmed that we want this thing but we are so afraid of each other and feel really insecure to pursue it. It’s a confusing situation and I don’t know what to do!!! Should I give up and move on? I am so scared of losing them and I am also so scared of trying to learn to trust each other again.
can we love again? 29
It’s weird that your ex kept their new relationship a secret until the end of your sex weekend. This is a really deceitful and manipulative thing to do--even though, if I’m understanding the timeline correctly, you were broken up when they started dating---there’s no reason your ex would hold back from disclosing their new relationship except that they knew it would be a big deal to you and they wanted to get you back and into bed first.