Two weeks ago, my girlfriend called around three in the morning and woke me up. She couldn’t stop thinking about something, she said. She needed to tell me everything. By the end of that conversation, I had ended our relationship.
Before we became official, we dated for about three weeks. We talked for three or four hours a day, saw each other often, and shared what felt like every detail. I thought we were clearly heading toward exclusivity, though we hadn’t established it yet.
During those weeks, she was also spending time with a male coworker. They went to IKEA, had lunch, exchanged gifts, and went out after work. He openly expressed interest, even asking whether they would be dating if they weren’t coworkers.
Their outings continued after we became a couple. She left a smiley-face sticky note on his desk when he missed work. They had dinner and visited a bookstore, where he bought her another gift. She also told me he had held her chin in an elevator, apparently trying to make a move. According to her, he left before she had time to react.
Later, when he messaged that there was an emptiness in his heart because she wasn’t at work, she told him they were just coworkers and he shouldn’t say things like that. She did set a boundary then. But until that phone call, I hadn’t known about any of it.
There had already been one clear lie. When we visited IKEA together, I casually asked when she’d last been there. She said she had gone alone. Eventually, I learned she’d gone with him.
There was another disclosure, too. About a month into our relationship, she told me that a man she’d introduced as a friend was someone she had slept with three years earlier. They had planned drinks, although that never happened. She later removed him from her social accounts, as she had offered to do. Her past wasn’t my objection; the delayed explanation bothered me.
During the late-night call, she said she hadn’t wanted me to overthink things. She considered the coworker interactions normal, and his talk about other dates had made her think he’d lost interest.
I couldn’t reconcile all those missing details with how much we talked. I felt I couldn’t trust her, so I left. Two weeks later, I’m still wondering whether ending it that night was reasonable—or whether I reacted too quickly.
