Dear April,
I love my boyfriend, who I have been with for about a year now.
Our relationship has its ups and downs. The ups make it amazing, but the downs are all centered around one thing, my past. My past is bad, I slept with a lot of people I shouldn’t, whereas he has only slept with one long term girlfriend before me.
I realize how immoral my past life is, and told him I’ve learned from it, but it still upsets him. I need a way to get rid of it, to forget it ever happened. We’re getting pretty serious in our relationship but i feel like arguments about this are holding us back from moving in together, and i really want to move on to that level.
Is there a way i can take back all the bad things i did so that he will never think about it again?
Signed,
Erase my past, please
Dear Erase my past, please,
No, you can’t take back your past! In fact, the reality is the past has made you the person you are today and that is the woman he loves. I think the problem, however, isn’t your past. It’s his! He is uncomfortable with his having only had one lover in the past while you’ve had a lot more experience. Lots of men want to feel like they’ve had more sexual experience than the woman they’re with and your boyfriend is no exception. If he had more experience, he would understand that people bring pasts to the table and with some luck, they’ve worked through their mistakes, made sense of their choices, and have evolved to the point they’re at now. You have. He hasn’t.
If he keeps bringing up your past, try and gently ask him about his feelings. Don’t make him feel defensive or put him in a position where he feels the need to fight or complain. Instead, softly put the focus on him, so he can work through the reasons that he is so upset about your past. In other words, what is it about your past that makes him feel uncomfortable. Don’t make this be about you and don’t let him make this be about you. If you help him to see that this is not about you, he’ll have an opportunity to confront what’s really at hand for him — and to see that there is so much more to your relationship than what happened before the two of you even met.
