I kept hearing my boyfriend texting while I was trying to sleep. At first I tried to ignore it. Eventually, curiosity won, and after he fell asleep, I went through his phone. What I found was a conversation with his ex that seemed to have only one participant.
There were messages asking how she was doing, birthday wishes, and replies to her Snapchat photos. He had complimented how good she looked. From what I could see, she hadn't answered any of it. He had been reaching out off and on for nine years, right up to the present.
I'm 27, he's 30, and our relationship is fairly new. When we were getting to know each other, we talked openly about our pasts. He told me he had been deeply in love with this woman when he was 21. She cheated, and she was the one who ended their relationship. I understood it as a painful part of his history, something he had since moved on from.
That's what made the messages so hard to fit into the story I thought I knew. He hadn't hidden the fact that she existed. He had told me about loving her and losing her. What I hadn't understood was that he was still trying to get her attention. The relationship was nine years behind him; the attempts to contact her weren't.
The lack of replies didn't make me feel better. If anything, it made the discovery stranger. This wasn't a friendship with occasional birthday greetings going both ways. I couldn't see any exchange at all. There was no new conversation drawing him back in, yet he kept finding reasons to send another message.
I can't tell from a phone whether he's still in love with her, wants reassurance, or has simply never questioned this habit. But complimenting an ex's photos is harder for me to file under ordinary concern than asking whether she's doing well. Whatever he intended, I was looking at attention he was still directing toward someone he had once loved.
I also know how I found out. I chose to look through his phone while he was asleep. That matters, and I can't make it disappear because I disliked what I saw. There are now two uncomfortable things in this relationship: the contact I hadn't known about and the way I discovered it. A conversation about one doesn't automatically settle the other.
When he woke up, I asked him about the messages. He said he just likes to check in on her from time to time. It was a small explanation for something that had been going on through most of his twenties.
We're still at the beginning of our relationship, when those early conversations are supposed to help us understand what we're stepping into. I thought his ex belonged to the background. Now I'm trying to work out what moving forward with him would mean when, as recently as last night, he was still reaching back to her.
