My Boyfriend Is Pretending To Be a Woman Online—What Should I Do?

By Lucy Notarantonio

Dear Newsweek, I currently live with my boyfriend of eight years, our son, and my two daughters from a previous marriage. During the summer of 2019, I started graduate school which took a great deal of my energy and time. Very shortly after starting school, my teenage daughters began to tell me that I needed to be paying more attention to what my boyfriend was doing on the Xbox as they saw some suspicious messages.

I blew it off but then started to notice that he was texting people online and staying up all night long on Xbox. Eventually, I started getting up early and checking his phone and discovered that he was practically living a whole other life.

Over the last three years, I have continued to check his phone and found that he has gained a small group of male friends online and convinced them that he is a single disabled mom. He has become very close with one in particular and at least at one point, they were exchanging sexually charged texts.

That appears to have waned a bit but they are close enough to regularly send each other gifts in the mail and are texting all the time. Every single time we sit down to eat or go somewhere, my boyfriend has to take a picture and send it to this guy. He is always very careful to keep himself and us out of content. If we speak while he tries to take a video of something, he gets upset and starts over.

I am completely bewildered by the lies he tells these individuals. Many of his stories while based on events that have happened are generally extremely twisted and dramatized.

Recently he told the guy that he is bisexual and that he has a woman living with him with two daughters. However, he tells this individual that I am awful and that he wants to “blow his brains out in front of me.” While I have never told him I know what he is doing—I have slipped and said that I know he is presenting himself as a woman on the Xbox.

He has been in therapy here and there for anger management due to past trauma, which makes it harder to confront him about all of this. I feel like this is a form of cheating, I fear that this is a sign of a severe mental illness and am contemplating leaving. How do I approach this or should I simply take my kids and run?

Dorothy, Unknown

https://www.newsweek.com/wsid-boyfriend-catfishing-woman-leading-double-life-1794273