My bf doesn’t know that my father owned a mining company
I’ve been feeling an enormous weight of guilt recently. My (20F) boyfriend (21M) is an environmentalist and used to be involved in lots of protests. We sort of stumbled into this relationship and I’m a very private person so he doesn’t know much about me or my life. Now that it’s getting a lot more serious it feels like I’ve lied or tricked him into this and I don’t know what to do.
My dad leased a small scale marble mine for 10 years until I was around 9 when he couldn’t afford to pay the environmental permits anymore and sold off the lease. My parents own a business now and have an upper middle class income.
From what he tells me the mine never saw much profits and he didn’t earn enough to pay taxes. But we were never struggling and had a lot of monetary help from my grandfather.
It wasn’t exactly glamorous work. I would only see my dad once every couple weeks. Because money always seemed tight my parents would scream and fight with each other constantly.
The fact of owning a mine to me is comically wealthy and evil even though that is not how it seemed growing up for me. I just feel like I’ve done something horrible and irredeemable being attached to this. I’m in very liberal circles and pretty much no one in my life knows about this. I’ve kind of been feeling sick to my stomach living with this skeleton in my closet. I don’t know what to do I want to be able to sleep at night. I want to be someone who deserves love and not seek forgiveness.
Posted Aug 4, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC