i met my boyfriend while i was living and working as a teacher in sri lanka in august and sept this year. he was a boarder at the house i was staying at with a family.
we were just friends for about a month, well, "just friends" according to western culture anyway. things radically changed when we officially got together. he asked me if i'd like to marry him, and i said yes.
i know i know......things work differently on the other side of the world. i'm willing to adapt to it because i love him and know he loves me. we planned that we'd marry only after i finish uni though, so... 4+ yrs from now.
the family we were staying with were for the most part against our whole affair. i got really close to all the family members, and it made the whole thing really difficult.
"auntie"- the mother of the host family- was especially harsh, and we tried very hard to keep the affair a secret because of her suspicion...actually we only told one person, her sister-in-law, because we knew she approved.
auntie and her husband put the ban on us talking to each other inside the house, which made the situation even more difficult. things like this are just not talked about in sri lanka. relationships are taboo. and girls don't generally go out alone, even during daytime, etc...
my boyfriend said auntie (and the others) were jealous. i didn't believe him at first, but now i do, simply because no one ever gave me any concrete reason why i should stay away from him. i think they were partly jealous and partly just trying to avoid that i get hurt. i think my boyfriend is easy to misunderstand, to them, i guess because the elder generation is even more conservative than the younger. i didn't realise at the time, but the way we talked to each other all the time and flirted in public might have been inappropriate.
one day after an incident where i had been late to meet auntie because of staying home with him, she (and her brother) told me 'he has many girlfriends'. auntie said she had pictures to prove it, but the ones she showed me were from the play he was in (which he had told me about, and he had already shown me the pictures before this). so i thought she was lying.
i'm back in my country now and recently got a letter from a friend who is also a friend of my boyfriend's. he wrote that he had found out about our affair and he advises me to not go through with it. he wrote that my boyfriend has 'two girlfriends'.
i trust this friend; i don't think he has any reason to be lying. i wrote to my boyfriend confronting him, but haven't gotten a reply yet (the post takes a while). i'm veryvery confused though...why would he ask me to marry him if he has other attachments? we planned things....like that he'll come live with me here soon for a while, and that shows he's willing to give up whatever he's got back in sri lanka, right? so i assume it's not that serious- maybe ex(es). i can see how auntie etc could misunderstand that. usually, in s.l., a girlfriend-boyfriend relationship strictly leads to marriage, so basically holding someone's hand means you're bound to them for life. so maybe he's broken that rule, and that's why they don't trust him. but in that case, i don't understand this letter from my friend, who's known him for two/three years and should know what's going on. why would he lie to me?
or am i just stupid to trust my boyfriend so blindly? i just don't know what to believe anymore. he has another friend, a very sensible guy, who supported our affair and told me that my boyfriend is a very good person. so, people are telling me very different things. i want to just make up my own mind about how good a person i think he is, and whether or not i trust him, but on the other hand...i don't want to stubbornly ignore my friend's and the others' advice and then get hurt!
to add to this i feel like i'm torn between the family and my boyfriend, and i feel really guilty for causing this mess...unaware, of course, but still. he's now moved out of the house, even (they pretty much kicked him out- they always blamed him, not me). so that's another sacrifice he's made for me, i must be more than just another girlfriend to him, right?
maybe i just need a bit of reassurance...or if you have any opinions or similar experiences you would like to share with me...i'd be very grateful
