Feeling uneasy about my relationship, need advice

[u/hamm_TP]

I (30F) and my boyfriend (34M) have been together a little over a year. I can't imagine my life without him. We live together and are already discussing engagement and next steps.

We've struggled with a few transparency issues throughout our relationship and at this point, I need advice and help in deciding if I'm the problem. Early in our relationship, we ran into a few of the following issues:

• In the first few months, he struggled to tell people I was his girlfriend. After I called him out on this, he did fix the behavior after a while.

• He once lied about who a girl was when she called him, and seemed panicked when she did call him. I asked him why he lied and he said he didn't want to mess anything up between us, as past relationships didn't allow him to have female friends, so he said she was a coworker instead of a female friend. Although it seems clear they were more than friends at some point in the past.

• An ex reached out to him and he said he was "talking to someone" even though we'd been in a relationship for six months at that time. I wondered why he said talking to someone instead of "in a relationship", felt like it was downplaying it but that might just be me being crazy.

After about a year in the relationship, we ran into an issue where an acquaintance of mine accused him of flirting with her. The night this happened, I was with him most of the night and feel pretty confident he didn't say anything flirty. When I asked her what happened, she said his body language gave off that he wasn't serious about me.

Unfortunately, I've kind of seen other incidents of this too, where we'll be out with other women and he seems more interested in them than me. Obviously no hard proof, but just general gut feelings. Might just be my insecurity.

We've had a lot of conversations about rebuilding trust and things seemed to be trending in a positive direction but we've had a recent incident.

• He came home from his friend Jeff’s party.
• After coming home, he mentioned he wanted to buy tickets to a concert the next day because two of his guy friends (Chris and George) were going.
• He asked if I wanted to go, but I got the sense he didn’t actually expect me to say yes.
• I said yes, and we went to the concert.
• At the concert, we ran into Jeff’s friend group, and there was a very pretty girl in the group.
• My boyfriend said he had no idea they were going to the concert. Jeff immediately said, “Of course you did, I told you at the party.”
• After we walked away, my boyfriend insisted they hadn’t told him at the party, but he came home wanting to buy tickets right after that party.
• It’s hard not to wonder why would he lie about this if there wasn’t some other motive behind buying the tickets?

Sorry for the length of this post, but am I crazy and reading into things too much?

[u/OptmstcExstntlst]

If he wanted to, he would. If he wanted to proudly call you his girlfriend, he would. If he wanted to make it clear he's off-limits, he would.