Patterns of Abuse: The Mystery of the Manipulative Metamour

Note: For the purposes of this post, I’ll refer to my abuser as “The Comedian” and his roommate/nesting partner as “The Meta” (as in metamour).

In the aftermath of my abusive relationship last year, I called on community to protect me and each other as well as to hold The Comedian accountable. A small handful of people came through. The rest either ignored me, dismissed me or outright gaslit me. Having experienced his cycles of abuse from multiple angles, I know that he’s already tried to convince some of you of false narratives around me. The people who’d believe them won’t really matter to me anyways, but I believed him once too

When The Comedian and I moved in together, the “roommate” I had posted a long thread about their relationship. I was convinced that it had to be a lie. I spent a long time spiralling after I moved in with him trying to figure out what had really happened between them. Re-reading her account after he moved out, things are starting to make more sense. 

So here’s an amalgamated version that represents both of our perspectives of what had happened at the time. The regular font is my version, as I thought it had happened. The text in bold is a paraphrased (for brevity, clarity and anonymity) version of The Meta’s account from just after it had happened. In the centre in square brackets are the realizations I’m making as I put them together. 

As with anything related to trauma, of course The Meta’s account may not be a full or entirely accurate account: there may be things she forgot or remembered out of order, there may be things she may not feel the same about now, there may be things that were purposely left out. That can also be said of my side of the story, though I’ve also begun collecting screenshots that I’ve been using to fact-check myself. 

But I think the patterns will speak for themselves.

The Comedian, who at the time was just approaching 30,  met The Meta through a mutual friend (who was also older than The Comedian) on Facebook. They both immigrated from the same place and even went to the same high school, though they hadn’t met there. They had a flirty online thing happening and, as The Comedian told me, she was already in the picture when his fiancee asked to close off their relationship. 

Originally, I was told that his fiancee wanted to close off their relationship because of pandemic safety, but when I asked if they’d open up their relationship again when the world opened up, he then told me that it was because his fiancee had found out he’d been cheating. Eventually I’d also learn that his fiancee discovered he was cheating when he fell asleep while we were texting (most likely sexting) and, because he set his phone screen not to turn off, my messages were still on the screen when his fiancee came to bed and after scrolling through some of our conversation, began to start asking questions. 

[Sidenote: I found this out months later and by then he “couldn’t remember” what messages she saw, so I don’t know which of our sexts she’d seen.]

After their relationship closed—just like we’d done—The Comedian and The Meta tried to remain friends. She invited him over because she had “extra dessert” and when he arrived, it turned out she’d made an entire cake just for him and then the sex just happened.  

It was The Meta’s first serious relationship. She was 25 when they met, but she was introduced through someone she trusted so she saw him as already vetted. 

[I learned after the entire incident that this mutual friend not only was a much older man who routinely chats up barely legal girls online and has a repeated history of “crazy ex-girlfriends.”]

They clicked and started a casual sexual relationship. She knew he had a fiancee but she thought they were in an open relationship, but it turned out that their relationship had already closed. She still ended up sleeping with him a couple more times, which is when he told her that he knew he should’ve broken up with his fiancee since before the pandemic. 

Once he’d been kicked out, he told me about it just before midnight and sometime after 1am, he was with me. But I didn’t want to jump into anything with him so I told him I was willing to be a friend to support him through it but that was all I could say right then. I wanted some time to process and then I was going to have some big questions to ask. After that, he decided to go stay with his mom so that “our first night together could be special.” 

He told me that he was going to stay at his mom’s for a while and then “weirdly” his ex went on vacation and let him petsit so he could pack up his things. We discussed what happened with his ex, our relationship status and his apartment hunt practically everyday but he hardly ever had time to see me. 

But The Comedian, as he explained to me later, needed a place to store his things from his ex’s apartment while he found another place and The Meta had an entire spare bedroom. When he started to move his things over, she suggested that he just stay with her since his things were already there. At that point it was clear that they’re just friends and he told me that she knew about me and that we were talking about being serious. 

Around this time, he also started seeing a third person. He didn’t tell me about her until after their first date. But he told me that he explained that he was polyamorous and that he was seeing a couple of other people as well. She was monogamous but she understood the situation and was okay with it. He told me that they might sleep together as he was on his way to meet her. 

And he told me that they did afterwards, remarking to me that it felt so good to be able to talk about it with me and that he was glad that I was so comfortable talking about this stuff. He thought I really might like them and he was hoping that he could introduce me one day. I told him maybe, but I hadn’t really had to do that kind of thing before so I wasn’t sure if I was ready yet. But I told him that we could talk about it if they decided to get serious. 

But while he was living with The Meta, he started to post videos of them hanging out and cooking together on his Instagram stories. The dynamic between them seemed a lot more intimate and friendly than I would’ve expected from the type of friendship he’d kept describing to me. When I brought it up, at first he got defensive and said that it was totally normal to post videos of his roommates online, then he told me that she asked him to stop anyways.

We’d also discussed the possibility of posting us to his social media. It wasn’t off the table, but it wasn’t something that I really wanted to do anyways. Especially while his broken engagement was still so fresh.

A month or two later, as he’d told The Meta, he decided to break off the engagement and his fiancee had gotten so upset she kicked him out. The Meta had gone to bed early that night so it wasn’t until she woke up the next day that she saw his frantic 2am texts asking if she was up. She asked him what was wrong and he told her what happened. Since she had a spare room after her “crazy ex roommate” moved out, she offered him the room until he could find a place of his own. And he did a couple of weeks later. 

From what I could understand, it was sometime after that that she’d found out about me, but it was something that he never actually explained to her as they started to get more serious. That was also around when he told her that he didn’t do “the whole social media relationship thing,” and she started to realize that she was kind of his sidepiece. 

[The anecdote about the “crazy ex-roommate” had been one of my earliest red flags. I was also told that The Meta knew about the other person he'd been seeing as well. But looking back at what she wrote, I don't think that was the case.]

A few weeks later, he moved into a house with three other roommates but he took his time moving his stuff over. The internet there turned out to be really crappy, so he told me that he started to go back to The Meta’s apartment to use her WiFi. Once he’d moved out however, they started to talk about possibly being friends with benefits again or even starting a relationship, but it was really back and forth. 

We eventually decided that we were some kind of partners. But then he asked if we should also talk about saying “the L word” to each other. I was taken aback. I told him eventually, but I’d need some time before I was ready to say that. 

But hearing about the dates he was having with this third other person, I started to feel like I was a sneaky little secret. So he took me to an outdoor fete where he posted me to his Instagram and eventually brought me to another party that inside a closed restaurant with a bunch of unmasked people. I kept my mask on and sat uncomfortably as I watched him flit around the room socializing. But I liked seeing how happy he looked so I didn’t complain. 

When he came back to our table, he told me that he was really happy and having a really great time. But he also was going to have to head out because he was going to have a movie night with The Meta and one of her friends since she was supposed to come until the event limited their capacity. 

But he had this sudden impulse to invite me along. He thought I’d really like The Meta and that he really wanted to introduce me. I told him I wasn’t sure about it, that I was tired, but I was excited that he seemed so excited to introduce me to his friends. 

It didn’t really come up again but eventually I had to bring up the possibility of us revisiting the idea of him moving in. I was getting worried about my financial situation and asked if I could reserve the option as a Plan B if things got really bad. I was facing the possibility of having to move back in with my estranged father and I felt pretty desperate. 

A little after that he decided to break up with the other person he’d been seeing (punctuating it by throwing the crystals she gave him off a pedestrian bridge near the house he was living in at the time) and was working up the nerve to break off the on and off situationship he had with The Meta in order to focus more time on our relationship and getting his life together. 

Which is why, he told me, he went over for dinner and ended up quarantining there after finding out he had COVID. Apparently, sometime after he moved out, the second bedroom became unusable, so he was staying on the couch. But once it was clear that they both had gotten COVID, they started to sleep in the same bed to look after each other. By the time they started to feel better, they’d decided to start having sex again—which he notified me by explaining that he’d taken a while to respond to my text because he’d fallen asleep after sex (“lol”). 

When I was shocked that they’d made that call. We fought over it. He convinced me that he really thought he already talked to me about it, or else why would he tell me like that? So we ended up making up after he also explained that she’d sprung the idea on him suddenly. A few days later he’d try to convince me that he told me that he was going to stay there a few more days and I sent him a screenshot of a text that said otherwise. He wasn’t a huge fan of that.

When I finally saw him, after we’d just finished having sex, he realized he also forgot to tell me that they’d stopped using condoms. As he told me, things were getting hot and heavy when she suggested that they didn’t need to use condoms since she had an IUD. Which is also when the whole chlamydia thing happened. 

Things were calm for a couple of months while they were still seeing each other. But then he got his positive COVID results while he was over so he had to quarantine with her. She had to tell her building that she was quarantining with her boyfriend to keep her explanation simple. A few days before their quarantine was over, he told her he wanted to talk and asked if she wanted to actually be his girlfriend. 

She agreed but the next day she felt like something was off. She didn’t feel like anything changed and she felt hurt by some of the things he’d done so the status of their relationship seemed to be in limbo. 

[After I moved in, I learned that he was the one that asked if they still needed to use condoms since she got an IUD. If it also wasn’t clear through my paraphrasing of The Meta’s account, they’d also been sleeping together the whole time before this point. 

I do think it’s worth noting that COVID does impact the brain. I don’t think it made him lie, but I do think it made him forget which lies he’d told me at that point.]

While The Comedian had been quarantining with The Meta, it turned out that the lease on her apartment was also coming up in a couple of months and she was starting to stress about finding somewhere else to go. So even though we’d already started talking about potentially moving together, they decided to start looking for a place together because she also was in a really tight spot and needed the help—her lease was coming up so it was more urgent than my potentially rocky housing situation. If it got to that point, we would figure out what was possible then. 

He’d told The Meta about our conversation and she understood that we were talking about living together and that he might move out to find a place with me later. I was hurt, but I figured, I wasn’t going to leave somebody else in the lurch if they needed it more. 

They were still sleeping together but her lease was coming up when The Comedian suggested that they move in together for financial reasons. She liked him so she agreed to start looking for something together. 

[Which means that after he found out that I wasn’t financially solvent enough to support him (and promising to be a financial safety net for me), he turned around to find a new place to live. 

He would also later tell me that after her moved in, he’d also gotten the fantasy in his head that I would end up moving in with both of them and have some sort of sexy nesting triad or something. I’m starting to wonder if that was the plan all along.]

They started to look for a place together and he made sure to tell me how they made such a great team. They really seemed to have their communication figured out. So once they moved in together, they became “Boyfriend and Girlfriend.” But she wasn’t really feeling it, he said, so they decided to just be “roommates who care about each other.” 

But things were going well for us for a while. He’d kept telling me that he was kind of excited to say the L word to me but he didn’t want to rush me and he also wanted to be sure that he really meant it when he said it. But sometimes he’d mouth it to me when I wasn’t looking or when we were lying in the dark together and he’d wonder if I ever noticed. I hadn’t, but then it was suddenly all I could think about every time I looked away from him. 

After all the communication we’d had through the conflicts, I felt really safe with him and maybe I was in love with him. Was I so traumatized that I couldn’t tell someone I felt safe with that I loved them? So I decided to take the leap of faith and I said it to him, explaining that I wasn’t saying it to make him say it, but that I just wanted to express how I felt and know for myself that I could do it. 

He didn’t end up saying it to me then. And I actually didn’t mind. It was exciting to realize that I could feel love for him but I didn’t need to hear it back from him. I felt loved by the way he treated me and, at least at that point, that was enough for me. 

Days passed by and I even became comfortable with the idea that he might never say it to me, and I’d be fine with that as long as the relationship still felt good and if it stopped then, well, it wouldn’t matter if he did anyways, did it? It would be almost a month later before he would, as I came back after leaving for work to grab my water bottle. He handed it to me and as I turned to leave again, he said it. 

When Halloween rolled around, I told him it was a special time of year for me so I was hoping that we could spend it together. He told me that he’d already made plans to have a movie night with The Meta and her friend. He asked if I wanted to come and have that movie night, but I was still hurt about him choosing to move in with her, on top of the way I found out they were sleeping together, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to hide it in person, so I told him I didn’t think I was ready for that yet. 

He decided to bail on the movie night to spend Halloween with me. But then I had a pain flare and ended up in pain the whole day anyways. I told him that I felt guilty for making him miss out on having a good time with The Meta to end up just watching me be sick and in pain. He told me that he was glad to be there. 

It was a little after that when he’d tell me he loved me and a few days later, I asked him if I could and then posted a carousel of cutesy pictures of us together, including one of us sharing a kiss. He seemed so excited that I wanted to and immediately shared it to his story. 

But soon after, The Meta went onto social media to find a picture of us looking cozy and cute in his story—she was crushed. She was the one who needed to be kept hidden.

[This is where I'm afraid to admit that my ego began to cloud my judgement and I placed the blame on her for lying when I first read this. I had seen him post her to his story and when we talked about it, he looked so dejected when he told me she told him to stop that it seemed believable.

I’m also assuming this is when she got my social media handle. The Comedian had told me that she’d gotten it when she asked for a picture of me and he said he’d sent a screenshot of my Instagram profile to her. I don’t know when this supposedly happened though, he couldn’t tell me that.]

They moved in together soon after, but things started to get rocky between the two of us because of the instability of his relationship (or non-relationship) with The Meta. She started being passive aggressive and posting about him on social media and in their group chats. She was hot and cold. She was the one who couldn’t make up her mind. 

She was still a little uncomfortable with their relationship dynamic because she liked to take her time responding to messages, but he would be texting her every day, all day. But she convinced herself that she was being unreasonable and that he was being amazing and he always had nice things to say. So she agreed to actually move in with him. 

The Meta found out that I’d gotten upset that he chose to move in with her instead of me, which was something she’d also brought up to him as a concern. But we all settled into a schedule where he’d spend part of the week with her and the rest of the week with me. She didn’t mind it, but she felt weird that he’d try to maintain full contact with her while he was with me, cutting into our time together.

Then one day shortly before the holidays, he texted me in a panic. He’d screwed up. He and The Meta had taken some sexy photos together after he told her that he wanted to make some content for his OnlyFans. He posted them (making sure to tell me that both their faces were cropped out) and when he told her, she’d gotten really upset and he realized that he hadn’t been clear. He deleted them and they were able to work it out eventually. 

When the holidays came around, he told me that he talked with The Meta and worked it out that we would spend Christmas Eve together and that he’d go back home to her for Christmas and that he’d come back to see me by New Years Eve, and then he’d go back to her again for New Years Day. I told him that if she wanted to spend New Years Eve and Day together, I didn’t mind. It would actually be more special for me for him to be there on the 2nd because that would technically be our anniversary if we counted it from our first “date.” He told me that he’d come back the next day and we’d spend it together. 

While we were together on Christmas Eve, he told me that she had just texted him and told him that she’d invited some friends for Christmas dinner and that I could come too of course. I was reluctant to agree but I felt guilty for rejecting the last invitation, and I didn’t want The Meta to think that I disliked her specifically, so I accepted. He headed back first to help her get ready, and I started to put myself together, including putting together a little gift to bring for her. But I was anxious about going over there and it ended up triggering a pain flare and I decided to stay home. That’s how I spent Christmas that year: alone and in pain. 

He came back a few days later and I told him I was sorry I couldn’t make it. He told me that her friends all bailed anyway so they just spent the evening together anyways. We spent New Years Eve together—though at midnight when we tried to give each other a New Years kiss, she called to tell him Happy New Year. I was a little annoyed but I accepted it. He was supposed to go back the next day because New Years was important to her, but he told me that she told him not to worry about it so he stayed with me instead. 

Their relationship had also become more turbulent by then. She’d realized mid-sentence when she was talking to The Comedian that he was distracted on his phone. This was also around the time that the OnlyFans incident happened when they were cuddling after sex and she’d complained about not feeling desired and he told her that the pictures he’d posted of her on OnlyFans had done well. But she eventually forgave him.

The Meta also felt like she couldn’t ask for his time. He hadn’t talked to her about spending Christmas with her and didn’t come back until after New Year’s. He did ask her if it was important to her, kind of last minute, and she felt like he was expecting her to say no.

[This was part of the reason I took his word that she’d been the one that was lying. If he hadn’t spent Christmas with her, and he hadn’t spent Christmas with me, where did he go? Where had he been inviting me? Where was I going to end up?]

But I started to get really insecure. He was telling me he loved me and that we were going to build a life together, but he was living with her, they had friends together and they were making holiday plans together. I felt like I was being breadcrumbed and it was pissing me off. 

At one point I got so sick of the arguing that I told him that I didn’t care anymore, we were done. He couldn’t believe it, I was just going to give up? But I was tired. I was done. 

However, by the time he came to pick up his things and left, my resolve cracked and I got scared that I was being too harsh. So I called him and asked him to come back and we made up. 

The night before his birthday, he’d been with me. He told me that he wanted to spend it with me. She called him right at midnight, as I was trying to give him a birthday kiss. He answered the phone and the volume was too loud so I clearly heard her say, “Happy birthday babe!” 

I asked him why she was calling him babe if they were just “roommates who cared about each other”, and he promised that’s just how she talked to all her friends. I accepted it, but I started to feel off about everything. 

By Valentine’s Day, I’d found out she’d been checking my social media whenever they’d fight and he’d come over to visit after her profile showed up in my story views—not long after I found out her social media handle. Apparently she’d accuse us of making fun of her together, even though at that point, I wasn’t asking about their private business outside of what the status of their relationship was and he wasn’t telling me anything negative either. When he did tell me that things weren’t going smoothly, we wouldn’t discuss details and I’d suggest some conflict resolution strategies they could try. 

So when I offered to change up our date schedule to let her have Valentine’s Day and he told me that she didn’t really care about it, something felt fishy and I decided to check her social media. “Why did I think I could find the love of my life without leaving my house?” she’d tweeted. 

I started to ask more questions, and he told me that he really thought that she didn’t want a relationship. He hadn’t seen her tweets because they’d already blocked each other on Twitter. So then I started asking more questions and he said it had to do with her trauma and that he knew it was his fault. He also told me that she’d pulled a total 180 and seemed to be upset by our relationship. 

Around this time, communication habits we’d practiced smoothly until then also began to fall apart and he’d start panicking and telling me that he knew he had to be better, even when I thought that I was the one in the wrong. He also started to describe her weaponizing mental health and psychology-speak against him and how she developed her brand around mental health activism so everyone thinks she’s an expert.  I asked if he felt like he was being manipulated and he said that it hadn’t occurred to him but maybe she was. He was going to break up with her when he went home. 

He told me that she’d been upset but they agreed to try to just be friends. A little while later he warned me that he was still going to post a happy birthday for her on social media and that he was going to go home to have dinner with her. I felt guilty that she’d ended up hurt just before her birthday, and I went to check her Twitter… Which is how I found out that she just turned 26. I’d assumed that they were around the same age or older. 

The Meta felt like she couldn’t post a happy birthday for him to her story because it’d upset me and she didn’t want to cause any tension. But he did come home for the night of her birthday. 

A few weeks later he started a new job where he could work from home. He’d also kept a couple part-time jobs, including a gig he’d taken over from me when I started working on a different full time contract briefly. He didn’t tell me for a few weeks that the contract that she’d been on—that meant that they didn’t have any time to spend together—had ended, and she was unemployed. 

By then, he told me that she didn’t seem interested in looking for a job, especially once he got onto a full time one of his own. He said that she would pick fights over chores and then get angry at whatever he did anyways. Then when he’d try to talk to her about it, she’d ignore him or leave the room without saying anything. Or she’d say she didn’t want to talk until he was just about to leave to come see me. 

Around that time The Meta has also tried to create a chore schedule for the apartment. She asked him about what chores he did and didn’t want to do and they agreed that she would cook and clean the bathroom while he would clean the kitchen after she’d cooked. But he’d keep “forgetting” to do it before leaving to come see me, and when he was with me, tell her that she could just wait until he got back. She tried to switch chores with him, so she’d cook and clean the kitchen while he cleaned the bathroom once a week. 

Then I started to pay more attention to her social media. What he told me she was saying didn’t seem to match with what she’d post. He told me that she liked to embellish things online for the attention and that she’d find people to pick fights with so she could incite her followers to harass them. It lined up from what I’d seen of her Twitter so I asked if he felt worried, but he said that he had it under control. 

That is until I started to see her tweet some problematic things that seemed to presume consent from men online to make graphically explicit sexual comments about them or to send them sexual images of herself. And there was a very suggestive tweet that implied that she was sleeping with someone that she shouldn’t. Based on what The Comedian told me, I started to worry that she was using his housing to sexually abuse him. He said I had nothing to worry about. I told him then I trusted his judgement so I’d back off. 

Also around that time, she’d driven him to sell his phone to someone. She stayed in the car as he went to meet the person he was selling to and fell asleep. She woke up when he got back in the car, so when he told her that he had to wait ten more minutes, she thought he meant that he was letting her know that he already had waited the ten minutes, so she started the car to leave. He got upset and asked what she was doing and that she doesn’t listen to him at all. As she’d told him before, she went into shutdown (though she didn’t use this language but it’s what she described) because she felt triggered and he accused her of using the silent treatment.

[What’s insidious about this part is that I’d already told him about being autistic and I’d explained meltdowns and shutdowns to him. I had told him that when they happen, I needed to withdraw into a sensory-safe place and that I needed very gentle prompting. By this point in time, we would’ve already dealt with it during our arguments, and he was completely understanding and accommodating for me at the time.]  

The next week, we were together again and we shared a romantic moment together. As I pulled away from our kiss, he started to cry and confessed to me that he’d slept with The Meta and he felt so guilty for lying to me. At first I was upset because I thought it’d been after our conversation and if he’d wanted to keep sleeping with her, he should’ve just told me. And then I found out that it’d happened before our conversation. 

When I started to get upset about lying to me while I’d asked him about it directly, he started to tell me that he’d been so ashamed and he didn’t want to make me worry more since I seemed so concerned. He continued on to tell me that he hadn’t intended on it, but she’d kept making advances and rubbing up on him and touching him when he kept telling her to stop. He said he felt guilty because it’d make her feel bad and that when he woke up from a nap and she was in his bed, he just went along with it. 

I told him I wouldn’t be upset if he wanted to and was struggling to communicate it to me, so to be honest if that’s what happened. I explained how what he was telling me was really serious. I told him it was coercive, and even if it wasn’t abusive, it was still toxic and I thought he needed to just get out of the apartment. He told me that now that he’d told me, he felt like he’d be able to handle it better and that he was going to handle it. 

Another day sometime after that, before he left to come see me, she noticed that the bathtub was dirty so she asked him to clean it before he left. The next day she realized he cleaned only the bathtub and didn’t touch the rest of the bathroom. She texted him about it, after which he accused her of trying to sabotage his relationship with me and stopped replying to her messages until he got back and told her that they were breaking up. 

[If I'm following along here, it sounds like this is when he actually stopped sleeping with her. Not a month earlier like he'd told me. He'd also eventually tell me that when they were sleeping together, they'd have slept together on average around twice a week.]

He me told me that she'd started bringing up the OnlyFans incident whenever they got into arguments about chores as a sort of gotcha. And then she'd ask him to let her check if he'd deleted them over and over again, after he'd shown her he already deleted them. 

Eventually, he sent me a screenshot of her accusing him of harassing a friend of hers. I asked him what she was talking about and he said that the only thing he could think of was that she said that once she suggested one of her friends for a threesome but when he talked to that friend, she’d seemed really offended by the suggestion and he apologized and backed off. 

Then she posted about feeling at risk for domestic violence. I told him to just stay with me for a while until he figured out a next step. I lived in a one bedroom, and while it was spacious for me, it was pretty cramped for the two of us, so we started to talk about finding a bigger place together since he had the employment letter and the credit, and I was making decent money professionally. But when he told her that he was going to move out, she ended up moving out instead. 

After that, things started to get even worse. She described him seemingly dropping whatever filter he’d been using and began to make hurtful jokes about her. The same kinds of jokes he’d stopped making when they were together because she’d already told him they were hurtful. That’s when she decided to move out. 

At the time, I’d been contemplating making a move to become a friend’s roommate in a slightly more accessible house. But I needed to sign a year long lease and we’d been talking about potentially moving in together when his lease would be up in about seven or eight months. I got worried that if I wasn’t ready then, I might end up in another situation where the possibility would be taken off the table for another year if he ended up signing a lease with someone else. 

So that’s how we ended up living together. Once I moved in, I discovered that The Meta had been subtweeting about things I’d been posting even though I’d blocked her before she ever moved out. It got to a point where she literally copied something I tweeted and reposted it herself. But I tried not to respond until after she’d posted a thread of her account of their relationship, and when there were so many gaps in comparison to what I was told, I allowed myself a petty vague post—which she screenshot and posted to the thread, leaving my name, handle and profile picture included. 

Then a few days later, she posted about being anxious about him having those nudes and posted a screenshot of her bringing it up during an argument about chores. It seemed to line up with the stories he'd told me so I believed him but I still asked him about it again anyways. 

He told me that he had a separate folder on his phone that he kept with nudes and he'd already shown her that he deleted them but she still kept asking to see it. He also had nudes from us in there so that's why he got upset that she kept asking. I asked if she saw my nudes and he said no, so I asked how he showed her he deleted them. He said that he'd been careful not to let her see anything else which is why she didn't trust it. He'd taken a screenshot of the folder that he'd kept them in. But he said she seemed to just want to see what else was in the folder. 

[When we'd be talking later, well after everything had seemingly blown over, he made an offhand comment about how the only thing he missed about having an Android was being able to put his photos in folders. I told him I thought he could and he looked at me like I said something ridiculous. It makes me wonder if this wasn't his first time at that particular rodeo.]

I felt sick. The idea that she'd been trying to see the photos of us having sex by accusing him of keeping them after she asked him to delete them was so manipulative and malicious. After that, I let go of the possibility that she was reacting to things I wasn’t aware of and saw her as someone who was attacking anyone who ended up with the man she wanted if she wasn’t going to have him. I know. I was a little brainwashed at that point. 

But I'd also been aware that it wasn't impossible that he was lying. But he'd had to be lying about so many things over nearly a year for that to be true, which would've made our whole relationship a lie and I didn't want to believe that. But I also told him that if I ever found out that he'd made a flying monkey and an accomplice in traumatizing someone else out of me then I would get justice for the both of us.