I ended a 5-year relationship because of retroactive jealousy Retroactive jealousy ruined my relationship.

Hey, everyone. I’ll try to summarize my story and vent here because I think there are people who might be going through something similar, and honestly, this is something that destroyed me for years.

I dated an amazing person for 5 years, but I ended the relationship because of something I never could get over: retroactive jealousy. From the start of the relationship, I knew that my ex had been with two partners before me. Even though she was super respectful with me, it bothered me in a way that I couldn't control.

It all started when we met. A week before, she had gone to a beach house with some friends of ours at the time, and at that beach house, she met a guy she ended up hooking up with. I found out about it later, but when we started getting involved, I didn’t care too much about it, honestly. Of course, it bothered me a little, but not anywhere near what was to come.

A few months later, I was talking to a friend, and he casually mentioned that they had hooked up by the pool, and it was more than once. That’s when my world crashed, and it marked the beginning of a mental torment that would last for years. Images started popping up in my head, and I felt inferior, and this lasted for a long 5 years, with me thinking about those scenes and comparing myself to that guy every single day.

She was my first intimate partner, but I wasn’t hers, and that weighed on me a lot. I had no experience, and she already did. Knowing it had been in a pool made me feel terrible, like, “Damn???". Anyway, this lasted for years until June of this year, when I had another trigger that really destroyed me: discovering that one of the guys she was with also hooked up with a girl I liked before dating her. For me, it felt like that guy had gotten everything I wanted, and I wasn’t “good enough.” This threw me into a cycle of insecurity and comparison that seemed endless.

During the relationship, I constantly