My boyfriend [28M] complains about our relationship to his friends and family, but tells me [27F] everything is fine. I'm confused.

I've been with my boyfriend, Chris, for nearly 5 years now. We've been long distance for the past 3 years while I've been in school. Long distance hasn't been too terrible for us - we're both independent people so we're okay with doing things on our own, and we manage to see each other every few months. I thought everything was going just fine until recently.

It started about a year ago. Chris spent three weeks with me at my apartment at school. It was great having him there, and I enjoyed it. Every moment that I wasn't in class we spent together and we did a lot of fun stuff. All in all, I thought it was a great visit. But then, a couple months later, I was home and meeting him and his mother for dinner. His mother and I arrived at the restaurant within a few minutes of each other, but Chris was running late, so the two of us were just chatting alone while we waited for him. In the course of the conversation she brought up Chris's recent trip to visit me and said "I'm sorry you guys had such a lousy time, I know you were looking forward to that visit." I was confused and asked what she meant and she said "Oh, Chris just said it didn't go very well." Seeing my surprised expression she immediately seemed upset and backtracked and said "Sorry, maybe I wasn't supposed to repeat that!" and asked me to forget she'd said anything. She and I have always gotten along very well, so I really don't think she was trying to fuck with me or anything like that.

On the way home that night I told Chris I was sorry if he didn't enjoy the visit and asked if there was something wrong. He acted shocked and immediately got defensive, insisting he'd had a great time and even if he hadn't just spending so much time with me would have made it great. I figured there must have been some miscommunication between him and his mom, so I let it go.

But then it kept happening. The next time he visited, he told his friends that the trip was going badly and he couldn't wait to get home. Once again, everything had seemed to go fine as far as I could tell. Once again, when I asked him about it he acted hurt and insisted everything was great.

The final straw was last weekend. I was receiving an award for my program at a fancy awards banquet with my professors and classmates. It was a big deal to me. I'd forgotten my phone in the car, so I borrowed Chris's phone to send my mom a picture of my award. When I opened his texting app, I discovered that throughout the ceremony and the dinner he'd been texting one of his friends complaining about how lousy the visit was going, how boring the ceremony was, how he was unhappy with our relationship, and how he "was going to need a vacation from this vacation". The fact that he sent all these texts complaining about me on a night that was supposed to be celebrating an achievement that was really important to me really, really stung.

I didn't mention that I'd seen the texts - I know they weren't intended for me to read, and I guess I still stupidly hope that he'll respect me enough to tell me himself if something is actually wrong. Once again tried to ask him if everything was okay or if I'd done something wrong. I told him I wasn't mad, I just couldn't make a change if I didn't know what was bothering him. Once again he acted hurt that I would even suggest something was wrong, and told me that everything was fine, that he loved me and was proud of me. When I tried to press the issue, he changed the subject. It's been a week now and I still haven't been able to get him to have any kind of productive discussion about our relationship.

Reddit, I'm at a loss here. Clearly everything is NOT fine but my boyfriend won't communicate with me about it at all. The only explanations I can come up with are that he's either lying to his friends (bad) or he's lying to me (worse). I don't understand why he's doing either and I don't know how to fix it if he won't talk to me about it. Help.

TL;DR: My boyfriend keeps complaining about me and our relationship behind my back, but every time I try to talk to him about it he either changes the subject or insists everything is fine. I don't know why he's doing this and it's stressing me out!