1Bella1

Well we've been together a year, we'd been friends a while before that, we helped each other during the break ups of our previous relationships. He was with J, a girl who moved away to Australia, the one i found the video of. We've had a brilliant relationships, some hard times but worked through them and things have really paid of. I have been insecure in the past, but i've never been obsessive or jealous, i respect his space and that he's an individual aswell as my boyfriend. I pretty much have never loved any one as much as I love luke and while i believe he loves me to bits, i've always been conscious that maybe i felt a little more than him. I dont know why, call it an instinct. He's an open person, he's strong but not over-confident and he trusts me implicitly. I believe him when he says he loved me and would'nt be unfaithful to me. He is a loyal person, and as well as being his girlfriend he respects me as a friend too. I think because of that, he wouldnt betray me. This has just made me feel very inadequate in a way, and it re-enforces my own silly insecurities that i spend a great deal of my time trying to hide. I do feel that i need to talk to him about it, pruhaps better tonite than tomorrow, christmas is usually quite a stressful day.

Thanks for your replies, i really appreciate them, I wish i hadnt looked now because i seem to have ruined the next 24 hours for myself. I have to give hiim his presents and stuff tomorrow. I dont now whether i'll bring it up then. But i willl have to bring it up at some point, how do you think it would be best to do this?

K, random thing to post about, even weirder time to be posting since it's Xmas eve and all. My boyfriend left his phone at my house by accident..and being nosey i decided to look at the snaps and video's taken from the other night out with our friends. I honestly wasn't doing it out of suspicion or not trusting him. However I came accross an old video (over a year old) of his ex girlfriend, naked. I dont really know what to think, i know the video was old...i just dont know why its still on his phone as we've been together over a year. I do trust that he loves me but now i feel quite insecure, as he's never taken any naked snaps or vids of me. I dont know, it's made me feel quite upset but i suppose it's my own fault for being nosey. I don't want to say anything and ruin christmas, i just feel quite confused. Let me know what you think, am i being over-the-top? Should i just forget it?

Hi there everybody, I've never posted in forums before but I am really desperate for some constructive advice on an intimacy problem I have with my boyfriend. Ok, here goes... *I'm a 21 year old female, I have a fantastic relationship with my 22 year old boyfriend. We we're good friends before we got together some 8/9 months ago and we have an immensely close, loving, open and trusting relationship. He is one of my closest friends and I love him indescribably and I'm confident he feels the same. I'm a friendly easy going person, with an awesome group of girlfriends to support me however I do have some body image issues and a low self esteem. In the past four months our sex life and intimacy has done a nose-dive. We have just returned from a week's holiday which gave us the time to discuss the problem openly and in depth. It was very upsetting and draining for the both of us. We are keen to resolve the issue because we really want to make our relationship work and are willing to give it 110%. Ok, so the problems that have contributed to this are - *We started out on the wrong foot, the first time we slept together it was a drunken mess, we never got the opportunity to build up to it and/or make it special. It continued in this fashion. *The sex for the first 3 months was amazing, but it was /just/ sex. It was more of a physical thing. It was almost like a dirty joke between the two of us and he mentioned that we've never taken it seriously enough. *As feelings were introduced, i shied away. I became extremely body conscious although he didn't do anything to cause this. I found myself pointlessly comparing myself to other girls, dieting, flinching if he touched me, the thought of being naked in front of the man I love made me terrified. I hate that, I admit this is allof my fault and i feel very responsible and guilty for the part I played in this. It got to the point where we'd have sex maybe once on the weekend because it was just 'something to do'. *My boyfriend has his own confidence issues and for that reason never pushed it. He considers himself to be 'too polite' sometimes. *We left it untalked about although there was obviously something missing from our relationship and facing it really broke our hearts, or my heart at least. *Although my boyfriend thinks I am beautiful and wants very much to be with me and work through this, he finds it difficult to think of us as being 'sexy' together now and his desire for me has decreased significantly. Largely because it has become awkward and an 'issue'. This however, is a more one-sided feeling as I still want him as much as ever. Having talked out our problems we decided to take a week or so apart to think about things and then start again and work on our intimacy problem. Naturally the whole thing has made me feel very vulnerable and I dont think I feel ready to be with him again physically so we agreed to hold off and maybe try and start our physical relationship from scratch, this time taking a different attitude to it. Plus we are both resuming our studies at university and will have more active and diverse lives again so I am hoping this will help. I would really love to get some opinions and some advice about how to go about rebuilding a sexual/intimate relationship and restoring the passion between us. We are private and reserved people so we would prefer not to see a therapist or counsellor. Where possible we'd like to work this out between the two of us. Thankyou so much if you've taken the time to read through this and I'd appreciate your comments and advice.