I (26M) accidentally read my girlfriend’s (24F) diary and now I don’t know if I can trust her or myself

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I (26M) have been dating my girlfriend (24F) for almost 3 years. Most of the time, things feel good when we’re together in person. We laugh, we’re affectionate, and everything feels normal. But whenever we spend time apart, especially for more than a few days, she becomes distant over texts. Colder. Less present. It starts to feel like I’m talking to a different person.

Recently, during a trip, something happened that I know was wrong on my part. I accidentally opened her notes app, where she keeps her personal diary. I was going to close it immediately, but I saw my name and the words “I want to get rid of him.”

I froze. I shouldn’t have kept reading, but I did. I read entries from about six days before we saw each other again.

She wrote things like “I can’t stand him anymore” and “I don’t know if I hate men, hate him, or if I’m just jealous.” The word jealous came up multiple times. I don’t even know what she would be jealous of. I’ve always tried to include her in everything in my life. My family, my support system, my opportunities. I’ve always been there for her.

Two weeks before that trip, we had seen each other, and I asked her directly if she was happy. She said yes. I told her I was afraid of losing her and that I was willing to work on anything that was bothering her so we could be happy together. She hugged me and agreed.

But in her diary entry from that same day, she wrote something like “He said such nice things, but I simply couldn’t care.”

Another thing that hurt a lot was when my pet of over 10 years died. I was completely destroyed emotionally, and I leaned on her for support. At the time, I noticed she started becoming more distant over the following days. Later, I read that she wrote she did feel bad about the situation, but couldn’t handle me bothering her with it anymore.

After all this, I confronted her, not about the diary, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I had read it, but about feeling like she wasn’t being honest with me emotionally. She admitted she had been confused and not fully honest about how she was feeling. She said she didn’t understand herself completely at the time.

Since then, she started addressing this with her therapist, and I can see that she has made some changes. She’s more present. More attentive. She seems more emotionally available than before.

But the problem is that I don’t know if I can trust it.

It’s like I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see, and now I can’t unsee it. When we’re together, she feels loving and real. But I can’t forget that there was a version of her that wrote those things about me.

I like her. I really do. That’s what makes this so hard. But sometimes it feels like she’s two completely different people. The one I’m with, and the one she is when she’s alone with her thoughts.

I also live with the guilt of knowing I invaded her privacy. She doesn’t know that I read it. And I don’t know if telling her would destroy everything or just make things worse.

I don’t know if those entries were just moments of anger and confusion, or if they reflected how she truly felt deep down.

Has anyone been through something like this?