My (20M) girlfriend of a year and a half (21F) wants to break up with me after I express my worry that she no longer loves me.

My girlfriend (let’s call her Samantha) and I have been dating for over a year and a half, but now she seems to have lost her romantic interest in me.

Samantha and I have always had a very loving relationship, and I honestly can’t remember a single fight between us. That all changed after we decided to both join the military.

In June, we signed contracts for our local state’s national guard. The idea was that we would go off for the training and come back home after to use the free college benefits and start our life together. Unfortunately, Samantha had to leave a month and a half earlier for her training than I did.

While we were both away, we would write letters on a very consistent basis, almost every day, and it felt as though our relationship couldn’t have been stronger despite the distance.

However, after she finished basic training and moved into her job training, I stopped receiving letters from her in the mail. A couple of weeks pass and I finally hear from her again, but her letters have become short and the emotion behind them has started to grow dull. Fast forward a few more weeks, and I’m finally graduating. I’m given my phone for the weekend, so naturally, I call Samantha first. She had forgotten about my graduation entirely.

I am obviously saddened by this, but I brush it off as her being busy with the second half of her training. However, that night I am finally able to call her for what I believe will be a long period of time, which excites me since we hadn’t talked for almost 3 months at this point. After being on the phone with her for less than 10 minutes, she tells me that she is going to leave to go watch a movie with her friends.

I become rather upset since we haven’t gotten to talk in so long and all I’ve wanted to do since she left was hear her voice. We get in a small argument over text, but nothing much comes from it.

A week later, we are released from training to come home on a Christmas break. I coordinate with her mom to surprise her at the airport when I pick her up. Upon seeing me, she seems to show little emotion and half-heartedly hugs me.

When we are finally afforded some alone time, Samantha informs me that she has received an article-15 for an incident that occurred during her training just 2 weeks prior. She had gone off base with a few of her friends and returned drunk. We are both upset about this, but I tell her that it’s okay and that I’m just happy she’s safe and here with me now.

As our 2 week holiday leave goes on, I start to notice more and more that Samantha is growing very distant from me. She doesn’t want to stay the night at my place despite the fact that we lived together before shipping out, and she seems to be avoiding alone time with me. One night, I decided to confront her about this and tell her that it feels as though she no longer is displaying the strong emotions for me that she once did. We have a very sad discussion about the struggles of being away from eachother for so long, but at the end of it we are both determined to try to rekindle some of the lost connection. She promises to try to seem more present. I tell her that I’m not expecting her to go way out of her way to be all lovey-dovey, but I that I just missed the connection we had before.

Unfortunately, not much seemed to change after our conversation. As the end of leave approached, I decided that I was going to just let it go and sweep it under the rug as stress from training. I wasn’t happy with the relationship at the time, but I figured it was just a weird fluke.

That was when I found out that a boy at her training (18M), who we’ll call Richard (iykyk), seemed to have a crush on her. I wasn’t upset that she had become someone’s eye candy, but I was upset when I found out that she had continued to message him despite suspecting his feelings for her. She told me that “he was just a friend” and that I needed to trust her because she would never do anything weird.

We got in our first true in person argument that night, and decided to end the relationship to take stress off as we were about to leave for another 2 months of training. Our plan was to remain exclusive and not talk to other people until we could have time to talk about our relationship and our possible future. We were still very in love with each other and didn’t want to throw it away as we had the type of connection that we believed was meant to last a lifetime.

Fast forward another 2 months. I am graduating from the second part of my training, but Samantha still has another month left. We had continued writing letters over the separation, but much less consistently. We begin messaging again as I now have access to my phone. I find out that she practically had to report Richard for sexual harassment after she told him multiple times that she was not interested in a relationship, despite being newly “single”. I feel bad for her.

It’s been a few weeks of me being home now and I’ve become paranoid that she may be seeking male validation from one of her friends at training. While on the phone with her last night, I decided to ask her about it trying not to sound accusatory or crazy ex like.

I ask, “Hey I know this might be out of the blue, but I have something that’s been on my mind a bit that I’ve been wanting to ask. I want you to know that I’m not asking this as a jab at you or your loyalty, but your distance has caused me to suspect that you might be talking to another guy. Is that the case?”

She responds with, “The last thing I want to talk about right now is that. Especially not over the phone or over text.”

This upsets me and I get more visibly frustrated than I should have. She tells me that she doesn’t have time for this and goes to bed.

I feel as though she no longer loves me like she used to and I’m now scared that she may have feelings for someone else and no longer wants to fix our relationship. What should my next course of action be? I still love her deeply and see her as the person who I want to spend the rest of my life with, but this new version of her makes me want to pull away. What if this behaviour is just a stress induced fluke? I can provide more context if needed in the comments. Please help me figure this out. I don’t want to lose this very meaningful relationship.