I just realized that my ex was even worse than I thought.

I (21F) was broken up with by my ex-boyfriend (24M) a little over a month ago.

This ex and I dated once before, years ago. We broke up and went our separate ways for a while. He dated another girl, we’ll call her Tara, and we had no contact for years. I still had some feelings for him, and I did regrettably tell him that after finding out he was dating the new girl, but said that I expected nothing and just wanted him to know. He turned me down, and I didn’t contact him again out of respect for her (which should have stopped me from contacting him at all, but I frankly was in a bad place and I have always regretted doing that).

Some time ago, I found out that they had broken up and sent a text telling him that I understood if it had been too long and he didn’t want to try again, but I still cared about him. He ended up accepting, and we hung out for a month or so before officially dating again.

Of course, I did want to know what happened with that breakup, because I had heard that they had ended on good terms. He told me that their futures just didn’t align (her going to a nursing school and him working full time about two hours away), and so they’d broken up amicably. I never brought it up again, assuming that was that.

Later, he sat me down and told me he was considering dumping me. His reasons for feeling unhappy in our relationship were that: he thought I didn’t make time for him, he felt that I was too immature for him, and our relationship felt more like a friendship. He mentioned to me specifically that he knew our relationship didn’t feel right because “my relationship with Tara never felt like this.” At the time, I was too upset to register it, but later realized that that was an insane thing to say. At the time, we made up, and decided to try to work things out. However, later that same day, he texted me and told me that he thought we should break up after all. I told him that I understood, and that was that.

Days later, I would come to find out from a friend of mine that he had been texting Tara THE ENTIRE TIME WE WERE TOGETHER. My friend’s boyfriend is a close friend of my ex, and my ex admitted to him that he had never stopped contacting Tara. He never, ever mentioned to me that they were still in contact, not even when I asked him about her directly. He didn’t bring her up at all, despite the fact that they were apparently talking almost daily. He intentionally let me believe that they weren’t speaking.

Apparently, he asked Tara for advice on OUR relationship, and she advised him to break up with me because it “just didn’t sound right.” Then, after, he got drunk with the same friend’s boyfriend and told him that Tara was just “so much more mature” than me. In that same night, he ranted about me for about three hours and called me an alcoholic (I drink maybe once a week and he knows this), said I was handling the breakup terribly (we didn’t speak a single time after he dumped me), and that I was just so immature and didn’t understand how to be in a serious relationship (this man used to ghost me for hours when we had plans and then text me at 9 p.m. saying he’d had to work overtime).

Somehow, in all of this, it didn’t occur to me to consider this cheating. However, the other day, we were talking about past relationships, and one of my coworkers asked me about my recent ex who had “basically cheated on me.” I said that he hadn’t, and she pointed out to me that texting your ex and lying to your current partner about it is at the very least emotional cheating.

I was floored. I’m still not sure if I can even consider it cheating in my own mind, but it somehow gets worse. I found out from my friend today that he’s been seeing a girl from a different city that he met on a business trip from his previous job. The job that he quit a month before we broke up.

I thought I was mostly over this breakup, but this has made me so angry all over again. I had gotten to the point where I did still think about the relationship, but only in a fleeting, “yes, that happened” way. Now I’m realizing that that jerk was at the very least planning his next girl while we were together, even if he didn’t start anything. For whatever reason, I am struggling to say that I’ve been cheated on, even if I think this may be emotional cheating. It’s just so frustrating and I’m tired of it.

Other information that paints a better picture of this man:

1. He texted MY mother after he dumped me to tell her that he “didn’t know what I would tell her”, but that he shouldn’t have to beg for my attention and had broken up with me.

2. Would throw a fit if I didn’t spend enough time with him, but then spend every moment we were together texting or making work calls and ignored me

3. Told me that he wanted me to do research on adult relationships because I “clearly didn’t understand how these things worked”

4. Refused to compromise on anything (example: he preferred calling, I preferred texting, so I had to call him every day or he’d get upset)

5. In a conversation the morning of the breakup, gave me a list of issues he had with me and told me that he would give me a month to change, and if I did, we would stay together, but he “expected nothing to change”

Yeah, I’m glad we’re done. I put up with much more than I should have because I cared about the man I dated the first time and thought that he was just stressed from a new job, but he had just become a jerk in the three years we weren’t speaking.

Mostly, I just wanted to rant about this new information and the breakup again, because most people in my life are no longer interested in hearing about these things after it’s been so long and talked about so much. But I also kind of want to know if other people consider this cheating. I guess just let me know.