I moved in with my boyfriend last year, after huge debate. We’ve both been married before and, while I felt we needed to move the relationship on, he found this quite difficult. We met soon after he had separated from his wife. I had been divorced for two years, and worried about whether he was ready for a relationship, but our feelings for each other were strong. Moving in together has been great and we are trying to start a family. However, I recently stumbled on some letters on his laptop that he sent to his ex during their divorce, asking her to give their relationship another go. He sent them 18 months into his relationship with me. I read them knowing I might not like what I found, but I don’t think ignorance is bliss, having had a bad experience with my ex, who cheated on me and ran up huge debts. I feel upset and betrayed. If she had agreed, I would have been dumped. It has stirred up feelings from my marriage of being second best again. Should I confront him or work through it alone? I want to have a relationship and a family, but does he?

You need to talk to him. Don’t think you can work through this alone. How can you? You have only half the information – and a half that is distorted by your own past experience and fears.

There are three things that make a good relationship: communication, communication and communication. There are skills involved in that. The most important is to listen dispassionately. We must try to keep our egos out of the picture, because it is our egos that will be shouting, “What about me? Poor me!” Our egos can’t hear clearly. They are deaf to everything but themselves. We have to allow the people we love to tell their side of the story, and not take it personally. I know it sounds mad. If it involves us, how can it not be personal? Well, the situation might involve us, but that does not mean that the feelings do.

Your boyfriend was obviously trying to disentangle himself from old emotions around his marriage. Those have absolutely nothing to do with you. His actions, had his former wife taken him up on his offer, would have involved you. But she didn’t. Nor do you know whether, if she had said yes, he would have gone back to her. You only imagine that he would. That is not necessarily the truth. It is only the truth because you see it that way.

We must accept that those we love have separate emotional lives that don’t always include us. We must also allow them to work through things in their own way. The more open we are – and that means taking our personal feelings of fear or betrayal out of the situation – the more they will work through those feelings with us. But if we are to do that successfully, we have to allow them to say what they actually feel and not what they think we might want to hear. The truth is sometimes brutal, but better that than a half-truth or a lie. People keep secrets for all sorts of reasons, but usually it is because they are afraid that they will not be understood or, worse, might be misinterpreted.

Perhaps you are misinterpreting your boyfriend’s past actions and feelings. Here are the facts. He chose, after long debate, to move in with you. Perhaps that debate involved him disentangling his emotions from a marriage that went wrong? He set himself free, then decided to move forwards with you. Now, you might think the only reason he did so was that his former wife turned him down, so you are second best. Well, how do you know? Did he say so, or are you making an assumption? It sounds as if he was trying to do the right thing. He refused to live with you until he had worked through his past and was prepared to fully commit. I know this was happening while he was involved in a relationship with you, but it was before your relationship involved definite promises. Had he written that letter last week, after he had committed to you and to starting a family, it would be a different thing entirely.

Perhaps he wrote the letter in a sudden moment of grief and longing to set the past right. That does not mean it is an emotion he still feels. If we all sat around worrying about what our partners might have felt in the past, we would drive ourselves mad. We all feel certain things at certain times, and might act on those feelings, only to bitterly regret them later when we realise that they were not authentic, but came from some place of hurt. Just because he felt a certain way when he wrote a letter, it does not mean he feels that way now.

So, talk to him. Allow him his feelings and his past, but keep your focus firmly on the present. How does he behave now? What do his present actions say? Do they tell you he is telling you the truth in this moment? Your feelings of being second best are your feelings – not his. Ask him to be ruthlessly honest. Does he still want to be with his former wife? If he does, then you have a problem. If he doesn’t, you have absolutely nothing to worry about except your own fears and imaginings. It is those, not an old letter, that might truly destroy your relationship.

If you have a relationship question for Sally Brampton, e-mail sally.brampton@sunday-times.co.uk. In case of publication, names will be withheld. We’re sorry, but Sally cannot answer letters personally

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