Dear Prudence,
I am six years into a lovely and gratifying relationship—we are both women in our early 30s and live with our dog. She is kind, madly supportive of me and smart. However, I am increasingly getting frustrated with one thing: She often asks if I am cheating on her. Maybe two or three times a month, she reads into some innocuous thing I am doing like washing the bedsheets or having a photo taken with a friend of a friend at a hockey game (something she has no interest in) and asks if I am cheating. When I say no, she then pushes it a bit more and tells me how awful I would be if I were lying.
But … I’m not! I have never broken her trust and she (I guess?) knows that. She has also not been cheated on in previous relationships (though I have).
We have spoken about it both in general and in the moment (in which I am increasingly struggling to keep my cool), and she just says she is looking for reassurance and says she will stop, which she does not. Intellectually, I know that she just values this relationship and is worried about losing it, but it is driving me kind of insane! It makes me feel observed and judged all the time, and like she thinks I am a bad person. I feel like I am so touchy about it, I don’t have a sense of scale any more—do I have a right to be so annoyed? Should I try to talk about it again? How can I communicate this properly?
—Monogamous in Montreal