Having confusing feelings about my (20F) boyfriend (22M) of 2 years, what do I do?

I'm going to make a longggg post to get this off my chest. And I will start from the beginning.

I grew up as a very nervous kid, youngest of 4 with my identical twin sister, with parents who acted more like mutually exclusive co workers than two people in a relationship together. Towards when I was around 10 years old all I can remember is horrible yelling from my dad to my mum, and my mum shutting down and walking away. Doors slamming and stomping etc.
I'm very grateful there was never more than verbal fights between them but I also must validate how uncomfortable it is to have witnessed that growing up. I know I'm very privileged and please understand that I don't take that for granted for a second. Honestly it has been hard not to play the victim of my parents divorce, but I think I need to wallow in my self-pity for just a bit tonight to help validate myself and move forward.

When I was in my last year of highschool 2.5 years ago they both said that they were working on issues in their relationship and may or may not stay together, but that I didn't need to worry and that they would both be there for me any time.

It was around this time that I started dating people and met my boyfriend on a dating app. I'll call him Max. The connection was instant, it was romantic, electric, and energising, and so so raw. I'd never truly felt connected to someone the way I felt and feel with him. Like we share the same soul and love.

6 months later (a month or so after I finished highschool), my relationship with Max was very official and I was even helping him to move out from his uni (college) accomadation to his own apartment and pretty much moving with him to live with him part time – this is very normal in my city since its sooo expensive to self sustain. But at the same time my parents told me, specifically my mum, that she had decided to get a divorce. I suspected she had an affair because my dad seemed to blame her and make harmful jokes and criticisms of everything she did, which seemed like something a bitter and betrayed person would do. But I also knew some of their relationship history from before each other, and I thought it seemed a bit strange that my mum would do betray like that since she is such an intelligent and disciplined person who sacrifices herself for others all the time.

Of course this brought up lots of change which was scary but mostly I felt relief to know that the marriage was definitively over. My parents took turns moving in and out of the house for a year, meanwhile myself and all of my siblings coincidentally fell out with our dad over his maltreatment and misguided comments about our mum. He eventually moved out to live with his mum (my grandma) an hour away, while my mum has stayed at the family home with us kids, however my twin moved out since she found the divorce triggering and her and I fell out during this time as well.

Basically I felt that Max was the only place I felt at home. And safe. Over the next year my relationship with my twin and dad slowly repaired. But then, of course, the safety with Max started to feel less comforting and more restricting. It had nothing to do with Max, and more with my need to seek safety in myself after all the change I had been through. I broke up with Max since I was triggered by how committed he was to me, and this was totally the wrong thing to do. He is an extremely empathetic and compassionate person when I take time to express how I feel. I asked him if we could get back together in a week. He was far too forgiving. With some serious conversations and two way communication, new expectations set up and a new level of vulnerability from both of us, he accepted me back into his life and his heart. To be completely clear I have taken complete ownership of this terrible mistake and Max is very well aware of how much I know I fucked up, and he has made it clear to me that he knows that I will not make this mistake again. The trust in me rebuilt over time.

Alas, the saga continues. While I repaired my relationship with my boyfriend, I also continued to wonder what exactly had happened between my mum and dad.

One day in the middle of last year, around this time, my parents asked my siblings and I to meet them at the house for late lunch/dinner so they could make an announcement.

My mum and dad sat at opposite ends of the table and my mum read out an email that in summary said my dad had an online and sexual affair on and off for 5 years with the women who worked in the coffee shop at his building. The affair had taken place when I was age 10-15 years old (at the time they told us I was 19). Me and my brother started laughing hysterically and uncontrollably, my twin sister started to scream and cry, my mum walked away from the table and shut the door to her bedroom. My dad watched us all have our reactions and attempted to comfort my sister who would not go near him, and within 5 minutes my mum came back from her room and told him to leave the house and get out. Our oldest brother couldn't make it to lunch and was told this news by my mum and dad over the phone later that day but apparently he hung up as soon as they said the announcement.

Of course Max, my friends, some of my siblings, and luckily my therapist was there for me. But no one I know has had this happen ij their immediate family as far as they know.

It's been over a year since they told us. I have maintained a distanced but civil relationship with my dad and an enthusiastic and nurturing relationship with my mum, who over time I have realised was both my dad AND my mum growing up, as my dad's physical absence really hasn't made me feel any more estranged from him than I already felt as a kid and teenager. I was and am well educated and quite well-versed in my more holistic less 'condemning/blaming/disgust/blame driven' understanding of affairs from a psychology perspective – I admire Esther Perel who is a contemporary relationships therapist and I read heapsof literature already about infidelity – why people do it etc- and also attend uni for a degree in psychology.

My history however keeps me unendingly anxious about how people feel, the potential dishonesty, deceit and lies my partner could tell, and this makes me constantly hypervigilant about my relationship.

Recently my parents have decided to sell the family home and as it was already on my mind to move in with Max and it was also something he wanted and invited me to do. I decided to move in with him. We now share a room in a two bedroom apartment with our housemate who is also his guy best friend Felix, and is very nice and easy to live with so far – it has been 1 month.

My problem is that a few things have come up for me.

Max has recently made friends with a girl – Pamela – who is a co-worker of his close female friend in his inner circle of friends from highschool, I will call her Samantha.

Max has told me months ago that Samantha complained several times to Max and his friend group that Pamela had been pushy and uncomfortably flirtatious with Samantha and made a very clear proposition to have a threesome/foursome with Samantha and her boyfriend at the time, Jake. On one hand, I have met Samantha and she seems to have trouble confronting people/ letting people down, and Max has told me the same. We hypothesised that Samantha felt uncomfortable because she wanted to say no to the idea proposed by Pamela in the first place, but didn't communicate this clearly, and Pamela may have seen this more as an open-ended possibility and continued to pursue Samantha rather than seeing her lack of confrontation as a rejection, since they are not close friends.

However, Max recently met Pamela at a group outing with Samantha and their friend group (I was not there) and came home to tell me he made a friends with Pamela and she seemed to be very interested in him. Apparently Pamela followed him around all night engaging him with conversation and being flirty. Max assures me that whenever he feels a girl is coming onto him he will bring up me, his girlfriend, in the conversation so the other person is clear from the beginning of getting to know each other that there is no possibility of more than platonic friendship.

Yet, he still prefers to be friends with women and I understand that. As a girl, he is the only young man I feel truly safe around, he is so friendly, approachable and non-threatening and knows how to hold a conversation with women beyond his own family and me. Its honestly so refreshing in this world and I get that he attracts female friends who feel they can trust his intentions and just chat with him. He's very attractive, tall, always smells good and dressed nicely so no wonder people like to talk to him.

A few days later Max ran into Pamela in the street and he decided to message her. He recently had planned a birthday party and all of his shitty guy friends cancelled on him with lame excuses and he said he felt lonely and isolated, and on the hunt for new and fulfilling friendships outside his friend group. Weirdly Pamela has the same birthday and they bonded over having friends who clearly didn't make an effort to celebrate their birthdays.

Since I moved in, Max has been relatively reserved and doesn't share much if at all about his friendship with Pamela, just a few random things here and there. He mentioned to me that Pamela had sent him something somewhat flirtatious and he told me that the way he replied was very clearly a shut down and pivot, non-flirty response. He told me he also reached out to another female coworker Gemma, who had also previously been flirtatious but they seemed to have more of a coworker banter and she is 5 years older so I felt that their friendship was perhaps less threatening?

However, today Max told me that he was texting Pamela about me and how amazing I am, and that she replied saying that 'Maybe your gf will like me better' in a suggestive way.

When I saw this message about this conversation from Max, I immediately went onto instagram to send a follow request to Pamela so that she knows that I know that she is talking pdivately with Max.

She accepted and sent a follow request back within seconds, liked my most recent post and sent a message saying she was about to follow me too when she received my request. I replied with a friendly hey and 'max told me he was talking to you about me!' And she replied 'hehe yeah! you're so pretty and you are all Max's' with a crying face emoji. I don't know how to interpret this message. On one hand, some people are just cute and flirty. On the other hand, we know Pamela is into having sex with couples because of Samantha, and I felt that this message was at once flirtatious, bold and possessive? As if she knows me already.

This instantly brought me to panic. Because of my parents – as much as I suspected infidelity I was also shocked to my core that my dad could lie and betray for 10 years- I constantly think Max is cheating on me or thinking about it. I also can't help but wonder why he wants to be friends with someone who he knows wants to flirt with him, but at the same time I'm aware that its my problem if I don't trust that he's cautious and well aware of how to navigate this and set a boundary if it needs to be there. He does make an effort to assure me sometimes but most of the time if stuff like this comes up he likes to poke at me, making me jealous. Honestly I'm not sure if he just likes playing with my feelings because it makes him feel good that I'm possessive, or if he just thinks I'm cute for being jealous. I also am not 100% sure if he understands how anxious I get over this stuff – it literally keeps me up at night. Again, my constant suspicions of his intentions behind his words and actions towards me are exhausting.

But on top of this, he has also been drinking alcohol a lot more – safe amounts, but more than he used to- and wanting to smoke weed more, and talking less and less about what is actually going on in his life despite us now spending every morning and every evening together. Of course I anticipated this, but it has lately been zero communication, then when we are about to sleep we kiss, Max asks to have sex, I say no because I'm exhausted, and we go to sleep.
The only thing he has voiced is that he wants to go out and have fun and drink/smoke like other 22 year olds.

From what I have communicated to him and the way he has assured me in the past, he is aware of how insecure I can be because of my parent's situation, but he also knows how little I want to control him and his decision making. He knows how deeply I want to trust him but that it is hard for me. Mind you, he saw his parents have a fight like mine maybe once ever in his entire life- they are the kind of parents that make out and hold hands and whisper sweet nothings in front of their kids, never go anywhere without each other and I have seen this with my own eyes many times over the last 2 years with Max.

But recently since I moved in I felt a sudden shift in our communication.
More specifically this came up because I got my drivers license recently and was driving with Max in the car in Max's car. He kept criticising my driving and I am already an extremely anxious driver. At first I tried to communicate that he wasn't helping in a kind and light hearted way. At that point I was feeling fense but okay enough and I didn't want to be too direct in case I was overthinking. But then he raised his voice while I was driving on the way back home as I made a small but okay mistake. I got so frustrated I started uncontrollably crying and panicking, I pulled over and told him to drive. I cried like a baby all the way home, and Max was trying his best to apologise and help calm me down. Eventually I explained to him that the trouble isn't that he was critizising my driving, but it was more that he was totally unaware that I already am this harsh critic of myself. And I told him that I feel isolated because lately he hasn't been asking me how I feel about things, like driving, despite knowing how anxious I am – and often pointing this out to me at the most random times like 'you're getting anxious right now because you can't pick what you want for dinner' when really I'm just taking a second to weigh up if I'm feeling like sweet or salty food- like its not that deep.

I've communicated recently that I don't appreciate the way he assumes that I'm anxious like this because it makes me feel like he's putting me in a box of how I feel that I can't get out of, and that I would prefer if he started with 'How do you feel about dinner tonight?' Instead of asking me what I want to eat and making an assumption that I'm anxious when I'm just thinking calmly. Feels like he's a goldfish brain about this since I have to tell him so often sometimes I feel like a parent teaching a two year old not to stand on the table.

I raised my observations on our recent lack of communication with each other and how I felt disconnected to him in what I think was a very balanced and healthy way despite being so shaken up from the drive. I told him that I feel like I don't know what he's actually up to and thinking the way I did before, and that I also noticed he no longer asks me properly or makes time to talk with me about how my day was. He has been with me two years but it felt like I was reminding him of the anxiety and isolation I have been feeling for the last two and a half years like it was the first time I'd ever told him. I have always been transparent about these feelings since we met, at least I feel that I have. The way he responded was both kind and also dismissive, like 'I'm sorry I should ask you how you feel about driving' but it doesn't really show that he uderstands this instance in the bigger picture of who I am and how I feel. Am I asking too much?

I can't help but find myself wondering if he's acting out on this new friendship with Pamela to escape his relationship with me that is frankly quite stable and mundane. When I'm feeling good (most of the time!!) I can be lost in my own world of life and ideas in my head, I enjoy lots of time by myself, and I'm a lot less emotionally and physically needy of Max. I don't like drinking much, I don't have a fun friendgroup – I'm extremely studious, I have a job with a lot of responsibilities, I don't smoke and although I'm open to partying, I haven't found anyone I would actually have fun partying with. Especially since my friends are also just as focused on studies as myself and as I like to joke, I'm a 'day time friend'. Take me to the beach with a long book and I'm the most joyous person in the world. I'm sure I will have a going out phase when I run into the right people and an opportunity, but so far I just don't really care that much on what I might be missing out on, at least not the way Max seems to feel he is.

Yet, I adore Max so much. I haven't been very explixlcit on his good qualites but trust me he is for more than the most part, a man written by a woman. All he asks of me is my committment to him and trust in him. I am committed, but I can't say I trust him and I'm not sure I will be able to for a few more years once I'm more accepting and optimistic and healing properly from my parents marriage. Max is beyond anyone I have ever connected with and I don't plan on moving away from him or breaking up whatsoever.

Also, on the note of the Pamela situation, of course I am curious how this will play out. And I'm not totally opposed to getting to know her with Max and seeing what the vibes about after having an open communication about her and what is hypothetically going on with Max. Not sure I'm interested in women or a threesome if that's what she is trying to do here haha. But I guess I wanted to focus on the initial panic I experienced from the situation, despite how small it was, and how I feel it connects to my past hurt.

My question is, how am I meant to continue with this relationship the way that I want to when one of the needs I communicate most often is so easily dismissed/forgotten. And also, how do I deal with this girl Pamela who may or may not be trying to get with my boyfriend? And how do I navigate this if I feel uncomfortable about why my boyfriend is so interested in friendships with other women who are romantically interested in him? At a certain point, do I just have to accept that the thing my boyfriend defines me with and knows the most about me is the one thing I must seek validation for in other ways – not other partners, I mean in therapies, in myself, friendships etc.

Any wisdom to share or anyone out there who feels similarly?