There is something deeply painful about discovering conversations between the person you love, your best friend, your trusted confidant, and someone else. Conversations that carry an intimacy, an undertone and an emotional or sexual meaning that you cannot simply unread.

And perhaps what hurts almost as much as the conversations themselves is the insistence that they weren’t what they appeared to be.

I find myself caught between two conflicting realities. The words I have read, the feelings they stirred in me, the sense that something private and intimate was being shared outside our relationship. And then there is your explanation: that they weren’t sexual, that they didn’t mean what I believe they meant.

I struggle with that contradiction.

I wonder how something can feel so unmistakable to the person reading it, yet be so readily dismissed by the person who wrote it.

Perhaps this is cognitive dissonance. Perhaps acknowledging the sexual nature of those conversations would mean acknowledging something uncomfortable about your own choices, something that doesn’t sit easily alongside the person you believe yourself to be. Maybe it is easier to redefine what happened than to sit with what it means.

But while that conflict might be happening inside you, another is happening inside me.

I am trying to hold on to the person I love, my closest companion, while making sense of the behaviour that has hurt me. I want to believe your explanations, because believing them would be easier than living with what I suspect to be true. Yet I cannot simply dismiss what I have seen to make the situation more comfortable for either of us.

I find myself grieving something I cannot quite put into words. Not just the conversations, but the loss of certainty. The loss of feeling that I understood the boundaries of our relationship and the intimacy we shared. The sadness of wondering whether something I considered precious was being treated more casually elsewhere.

I don’t want to make you into a villain. I don’t want to believe that everything between us was a lie. I don’t even need you to be perfect.

But I do need you to be able to look at what happened honestly, without having to make it smaller to make it easier to live with.

Because I am already carrying the hurt of what I discovered. I don’t want to have to carry the additional burden of questioning whether I am entitled to feel hurt by it.

I want us to be able to stand in the same reality, even if it is an uncomfortable one.

I miss the simplicity of trusting what I was told. And perhaps that is the deepest sadness of all: that I am still here, loving you, wanting to understand you, while trying to reconcile the person I love with something I never imagined I would have to face.

I cannot make those two realities fit together on my own.