Reddit Stories - I OVERHEARD my PARTNER TELLING her friend that I will never excel as

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

#redditstories #askreddit #aita #relationships #communication #overheard #partner #excelSummary: I overheard my partner telling her friend that I will never excel as. It left me feeling hurt and demotivated, questioning my abilities and our relationship. How do I address this without causing conflict?Tags: redditstories, askreddit, reddit, aita, tifu, relationships, communication, overheard, partner, excel, hurt, demotivated, abilities, conflict, communicationissues, selfesteem, personalgrowth, emotionalintelligence, trustissues, relationshipgoalsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/reddit-stories--6237355/support.

I hope you enjoy this story. I overheard my partner telling her friend that I will never excel as a lover like her former partner did, because he was naturally endowed and I am struggling to move on from what I overheard. Now our relationship is broken. It was quite by accident that I heard this. We had a group of our friends over and as the night went on we all kind of busted out into little groups. Some of us were in one room playing Texas Holdham and a couple of others were watching the Lord of the Rue. ring marathon. I thought she was watching the movies, but she and one of her close friends were

actually sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and talking. Our group had run out of soda, so I got up to go to the kitchen to get drinks and a couple of snacks. As I'm rounding the corner I hear my fiancé talking and before I completely come in the room I hear her clearly say Jason is great, but he will never be the lover that Bill was. She then followed it up with it's not really fair to Jason though, Bill was just really gifted down there. At first I thought about just walking back into the card game and pretending like we didn't have any extra soda or food, but I decided to kind of make a noise and go in. Her friend caught eye of me rounding the corner and I could see her make a face to my fiancé letting her know I was there. Of course she has

no idea I hurt her and she just stops talking to her and asks me how I'm doing and if I'm having fun. I was tempted to say something like I'm having as much fun as someone who is not gifted down there can, but I didn't. I just said yes and proceeded to get my stuff and go back and finish the night. I just acted like nothing was wrong the rest of the night and went to bed. Needless to say it fucked me up. I mean fuck me up bad. I've never been jealous or what you would call insecure about myself until that moment. I couldn't sleep that night and I went through a myriad of emotions while laying there. At first I was angry.

Then I was humiliated. Then I was depressed. Then I was angry again. Look, I realized that the male ego seems stupid to women and even guys who are totally self-assured. I would have agreed with most of this prior to that night, but once it has been damaged it is a bitch. I tried to hide any form of emotion about it or ever let her know, but as the days went on I just kept getting worse and worse. I was avoiding her at all costs and while she was suspicious she didn't really say anything. That is until she attempted to be intimate with me a few days later and I flat out rejected her.

It wasn't by a conscious decision on my part, by the way. I had made the decision on my own to just try and get over it and move on. But in the moment instead of being sexually aroused I felt deeply inadequate and ashamed. Nothing was happening no matter how much either of us tried. She asked me what was wrong and I just told her I must have been stressed from work but she would not believe that or let it go. So much to my humiliation there I laid, naked in bed, unable to get an erection. I came clean and told her what I heard.

Well, this did not go over well at all. At first she tried to tell me I did not hear her correctly. But I just repeated to her verbatim what she had told her friend. Well, once she couldn't deny it, she then tried to apologize. and to her credit she tried to listen to my feelings on the matter, which once again I am sure was more of a big turn-off for her because I was a wreck emotionally. She tried to tell me how much of a better person I was and how I satisfied her and she wanted nobody else. But all I could hear was Charlie Brown's teacher noise.

It's been almost a month and I have zero desire to be with her sexually. None. She is now getting frustrated about this as well, but no matter what I have tried I just cannot get past this. It's not like she said we were both good lovers or anything like that. She clearly said he was far superior and my guess is that being gifted down there means he was significantly larger than me as well. Well I know I can do all kinds of things with my hands, tongue and whatever else. But no matter what I do I can't grow in size. Obviously she refuses to talk about that with me saying that no matter what she says it will only make things worse because even if she says something positive about me, I won't believe her. She's most likely right. Some backstory here.

He dumped her. It was not a mutual breakup. He flat out dumped her and broke her heart. I know this because early on in our relationship she told me this. She said she wasn't ready to be serious about anybody because her previous ex left her and emotionally broke her. So this is not a case of me even being able to say well she's with me because she wants to be. If he hadn't dumped her, she would never have left him. Now I have no idea if after all of these years she would leave me for him if he would come back, but I don't think she would. I just don't know what to do here. I can feel myself checking out of the relationship.

I know this is petty as shit, but hearing a person you love tell someone else they prefer to have segs with someone else is just devastating to me. Her telling me all of my other good qualities has only made it worse because she is saying things that I think appeal to her. her and maybe other women but being told I am a good provider and will make a great husband makes me feel like shit. Like what would happen if I lost my good paying job or better yet what if I were to get injured and couldn't make anything more than state assistance? Would she be there to support and help me? Basically what I feel like right now is a really good friend who she just allowed to have sex with. I know in my head that this is not correct but in my heart that is what I feel. I'm sorry for the length here and I don't even know what I am asking here. I am totally

lost and if this continues I just think I'm going to break our engagement. Edit 1. Holy God. I made this post last night and answered a couple of questions and then went to bed and got up today and went Christmas shopping hoping to make me forget my troubles and didn't even log in until just now. I have not even started to read the, at this point, 7.7,000 comments on this post. I don't know what anyone has said yet but thank you all for commenting either way. I am now going to begin the massive undertaking of looking at the comments. Also, thank you for the gold and silver kind internet strangers. Edit 2, Dear God. I read all the way down to the bottom of the page thinking I had gotten through most of everything and then at the bottom it said load

the 5.5k more posts. I'm stopping for the night, well morning actually. I was going to respond to people individually but there is just no way. I haven't even started reading the direct messages to me yet nor have I opened any of the 20 chat screens. There are issues I want out there because there are a couple of things that are being said that are not accurate. One, she was to use the Barney Gumble phrase using sweet, sweet drunk talk. In other words, her and her friend were drunk while talking. Nope, neither of us drink. We don't even have it in the house. Two, that I am I am upset she told her friend. Well, this is an odd thing, before I posted this honestly I wasn't that upset about this part. I was then and am still far more upset that this is how she

feels. However, now reading a lot of the post I have become somewhat aggravated that she did share this with her friend. I would never say anything about her to anyone that would put her in a lesser light. Three, that I am an insecure man-child who should just man-up and learn to do better. well i'm certain the first part is true being insecure and all but the last part is just out of my control no matter what i do i will only ever be seven inches long we have talked about this by the way when she was trying to build me up she said that i was already great with everything but the one thing i can't control okay so i gave myself about a half inch to feel better for no i'm not going to do anything rash. It's already been a month so it's not like this happened last week.

But yes, I have to decide what I'm going to do here before long. It's not fair to either of us as I am just coasting through this and no longer committed. Five, she is sorry that I heard it. She said she is sorry she said it, but at the end of the day she would not be sorry if I didn't catch her saying it. It is what it is. But yes, I do believe she is regretting it because she has basically been a mess since I first told her. Me not wanting to be with her is bothering her a lot according to her. I don't know how much of that I believe, but right now I guess I don't know why she would lie. It really has wrecked hell on our Christmas spirit this year I know that. Edit 3. Engineer for those who keep asking what I do for a living. She is a paralegal.

Edit 4. People have been asking about the relationship with the ex and how I know she was heartbroken. We met about nine months after they separated. I know that ultimately he wanted to be with someone else, although she has claimed he never cheated. He just ended things so he could be with another woman. She approached me at a local workshop and we started dating. On our fourth date when things started to get physical, she broke down crying about the ex. It was certainly weird to hold someone while they cried about someone else, but I did it. We sporadically dated for a couple more months in which time I never tried to cross any boundaries physically because it was obvious she wasn't over him so while we just went out of dates I tried to keep myself of the mind that we were just friends because I didn't want to commit either. After close to two months she drags me from my car to her apartment and begins to tell me how much she has appreciated my patience with her and how she felt stupid about dragging me along for so long. Obviously that was our first night together.

Within three months of that she is telling me that she loves me. So yes, she was still hung up on her ex for fact when we got together. I had thought slash hoped she was over him before this happened. Update 1, the main thread has over 8.3K posts and is a couple of day old now, but I wanted to try and respond to some general thoughts. It is absolutely impossible for me respond to everyone or even most people and at this point putting up edits I think is counterproductive because the thread is a few days old now so I doubt people are going back to reread the op. I don't want to make an update there yet because I'm not really updating anything. Nothing has happened yet, per se, however, I have a few things to get off of my chest. So this seems like the best place to do that

before I update my op. I have had so many people post on the original thread and twice as many people send me PMs telling me to hit the weight room and get in shape and transform myself into some form of weightlifting God. I am sure that these people are all filled with the best of intentions. Well, not all of them because I have also had several people call me all forms of names while telling me to hit the weights. Here is the problem for those people. They are using a stereotype about engineers and think that I fit that stereotype.

I was a state finalist in wrestling in high school and got a partial scholarship to a Division 2 school for wrestling. I competed both my freshman and sophomore years. However, due to throwing a goddamn baseball, I tore my rotator cuff and while my recovery had me well on my way back, my physical therapy prohibited me from being ready for my junior year. I did not go back for my senior year as my workload and girlfriend were too much to also dedicate the time for wrestling.

Wrestling was very physically demanding and time-consuming. Now I freely admit that not training to compete did not leave me in even one-eighth the shape I was in at my prime, I have stayed in shape. To this day, I still lift and do cardio at my local gym. I've been getting my ass kicked lately by my friend. Hi, I'm Darren Marler. Host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important tool in my podcast belt. Spreaker is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to record, host, and distribute your show everywhere from Apple Podcasts to Spotify. But the real game changer for me was Spreeker's monetization. Spreaker offers dynamic ad insertion. That means you can automatically insert ads into your episodes, no editing required.

And with Spreeker's programmatic ads, they'll bring the ads to you, and you get paid for every download. This turned my podcasting hobby into a full-time career. Spreaker also has a premium subscription model where your most dedicated listeners can pay for bonus content or early access, adding another revenue stream to what you're already doing. And the best part, Spreaker grows with you. Whether you're just starting out or running a full-blown podcast network, Spreeker's powerful tools scale effortlessly as your show grows. So if you're ready to podcast like a pro and get paid while doing it,

check out Spreaker.com. That's S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R dot com. Who is doing a mite I work out. I've been trying to keep up with him but freely admit I have a lot of legwork to do. Now this leads me to want to focus on a couple of other things. You will notice I said girlfriend. Contrary to what some of you have said or implied I was not some in cell or neck beard prior to meeting my fiancé. I have had several girlfriends and yes,

even a couple of NSA relationships. So that is why this bothered me more than it probably should have. In other words prior to this while I may not have been the world's most confident guy I never felt like it was an issue. I've never ever ever had another woman say something like this in earshot of me about me. I mean did they say it when I couldn't hear? I have no idea but till the moment she said that I never had any self-doubt or lack of confidence. Now does me having this mental breakdown over this make me a man-child, weak or straight-up pussy as I've been called. I don't know, maybe. Hell probably. But bluntly speaking, I've never had anything like this happened to me before. Every breakup I've ever gone through was for the most part mature.

I had a very childish breakup in high school, but does that even count? Also to all of the geniuses that keep telling me to learn a new technique or practice or just plain get better at sakes. That's not the issue here, guys. She didn't say that I could work on the issue at hand. She straight up told her friend that I would never be able to measure up, so to speak, because of a physical attribute that I can do nothing about. I could become an Oriental Lickmaster and at the end of the day I am never going to be able to finish her by jack hammering with what I can only imagine must be a nine inches dong.

Should that matter? Well, it fucking doesn't matter if it should matter, it obviously does to her or she would not have said it. I don't know of any single way we can unring this bell. Which then brings me to the biggest thing I want to get off of my chest. There are several poster, both men and women and ironically gay males over 30 who have a subreddit that I guess I am a topic on, who have said it's just sex. Well, those words do not exist in my vocabulary for someone I love. I admit that I had a couple of NSA partners in grad school but even with them I developed feelings and had to part because I could not just do that. I don't do ONS and since my mid-20s have only

participated SEGs via a relationship. I found out that I am just not capable of having SEGs and just having SEGs. I get it, there are many of you who don't feel that way. Great for you, I don't feel that way and I am not going to fight myself to make myself feel that way. I need to be my fiancé's best ever? Well, why the hell should I not want that? If you would have asked me before that night I would have thought I was. But now that I know I'm not. Well, no, I'm not really okay with the fact that I can never measure up. I mean if I could work on something or improve something or take more time or something, sure. But to hear her say I can never be as good. Yay, sorry that is a little more than my ego can take. Call me where

whatever name you want, but it is what it is. But some of the really most disgusting stuff that was said to me is that I should be happy that she is with me and allows me to have sags with her so she must want me. Allows me to have sags with her. I cannot describe in enough words how that offends me. Maybe I've lived in a Disney fantasy world for me, but I always wanted to be with someone who wanted to be with me. Not someone who allows me out of some form of obligation. So does that make me a sissy, as a few of you have PM'd me? I don't care if it does. I refuse to be a person who begs for segs, period. If whoever I'm with does not want to be with me as much as I want to be with her then fuck it. I'll just pay an escort and

probably save myself money in the long run. Look I don't know for 100% sure what I'm going to do yet. I have a very strong feeling what I'm going to do but I haven't done anything yet. If this is the wrong forum, just let me know. Anyway, I'll try and do my best to respond to posts here. Update 2. It all came to a head last night. She just came out and asked me if I did not love her anymore, and all that I could tell her was that a very large part of me still did,

but that what she said had really made it so that another part of me just didn't anymore. This started a larger conversation that I won't bore you with, but ultimately it came down to me saying that I would have heard that he was just better at something or more attentive to something or was able to do something that I would have felt like I could have worked on it. I would have listened to anything she wanted worked on any technique or anything else that she would have shared with me. But to know that I was never going to measure up simply because of a physical issue was not something I thought I could get over any time soon or if I ever could for that matter. I was even honest and said that if it was

just a ONS she had or some random guy who was just huge I might be able to get past that. But knowing that it was a guy who she was still madly in love with when I met her and only after time did she ever start to come around than it was just more than I could handle. She kept trying to tell me how much better I was at everything else and that I should not throw away a lifetime over one aspect. I told her that that one aspect sadly was just a high for me, not all things are equal and that honestly it is a mental failing on my part that it is but whether it is genetics or a learned trait or whatever that yes I needed to be my spouse's best and she has already made it clear that I can never be. I tried my best to be gentle. I tried to take all of the

blame of stating that I knew that my attitude was probably not healthy, but it was who I am. By the way, I'm typing this as though this were a clean conversation, it wasn't, there was lots of crying, by both of us. This is not a happy ending or even a satisfying one. I am beyond fucked up in the head over the entire situation. Everybody's Christmas is ruined. We had big family gatherings that we both were attending together and now we have to somehow break it to our families what has happened. This alone is causing me massive stress because my parents loved her and what in the hell am I going to say is the reason why we are not together.

She didn't cheat and if I say that I felt like she was still hung up on her ex, she will obviously deny it and she will tell them the truth. It's fucked up no matter how this goes down. In the end I feel like a massive failure. I feel like a failure as a man because of not living up to comparison and I feel like a failure because I wasn't able to just man up and either get over it. She has begged me to go to couples counseling and initially I said no because at the end of the day what does it change? We can talk about every single thing and I can try and look at things from a different way and at the end of the day the woman who I wanted to marry just told one of our friends that no matter what I do I will never be as good as her ex. I just cannot see five years from now ever being okay with this.

But because she legitimately seems heartbroken, I agreed to go, but that does not mean I will keep going. Today I moved out a lot of my stuff and am staying with a coworker for a few days until I can get a place for myself. She has been with her sister all day. I feel like shit. Thank you to everyone who took the time to type out a response. I honestly have tried to read everything even if I didn't reply to very many. The bitch of all of this is that I still love her. There is so much of me right now that wants to pick up the phone and call her and beg her to come back.

Edit 1. Well, once again I posted this and then went away for a while. I went with my friend to see Mortal Engines and then to dinner and then we've been talking for a long while so I started reading a while ago. It is going to take me forever to read and once again, I don't think responding individually will ever happen because of the large number of posts and private messages. But, thank all of you for reading and responding. Edit 2, I guess I do want to share one thing I spoke with her about. When we were having our very long conversation I presented her with a scenario for her to compare.

I know her well enough to know that comparing body parts or sexual prowess isn't going to impact her the same way it would me. So I put the scenario to her like this. I said, what if you walked in and overheard me talking with my friend Tim and you heard this? Jill is great, but she will never understand me and comfort me the way Tiffany did, but it's not Jill's fault. Tiffany is just the smartest most compassionate person I've ever known and Jill just isn't as smart. Then if she would confront me about saying those things about her that my response to her would have been. I love you for all of your other qualities.

Nobody makes a sandwich like you do and I think long term you won't gauge me for my money at first. She tried to say that this was a totally different issue, but once we talked more about it, she finally agreed it is because of the way we both approach and value sex. She ultimately admitted that this would really hurt her feelings, but she would not break up with me over it. I then responded that even in my make-believe scenario, which by the way I would never say to anyone out loud about anyone I loved, she could improve her level of education and learn to be more compassionate. Edit 3. If anyone even reads this I want to add one last thing. People have been telling me what a whiny bitch I am, that's one of the more kind

things they've said, because I can't get over someone else in the world having a bigger dick than me. Not going to lie and say I'm thrilled with it, but I'm not dumb enough to think I have a giant magic wand or anything. I had grown up believing what I now know to be a lie that women don't care about size. Some don't, but obviously some do and my ex is one of those that obviously did. But even with that ultimately I might have been able to get over it if it was just said as a matter of fact. But hearing that no matter what I did, how much I loved her or any other thing that I was never going to be as good as what has bothered me since. Yes, size is obviously a big part of it, but if I hadn't heard that I would never be the lover I think I might

have been okay. Well, not okay but at least not relationship killing. Yes, I overvalue Sags. I get that. Yes, it is very important to me and well, frankly, I want to be wanted as much as I want to want someone, if that makes any sense. Yes, I know whoever I date in the future will most likely have had someone who is either bigger, better, or whatever. But I would really hope that they would not be still hung up on it a few years later. Update 3, I wasn't going to post anymore, but I am still getting daily direct messages wanting to know how things are going. I do appreciate the kind words and concerns. But just so anyone who cares can know, it is over.

I went to counseling with her on three different occasions and honestly I tried to have an open mind about it, but at the end of the day the obstacle was just too much to overcome. I even gave her an opportunity to walk back her statement or amend it or well-do whatever she wanted to with it. But instead she doubled down in a way. I think by that time she was very frustrated as well. Neither of us are really happy about this. It has been an absolute nightmare for me trying to avoid telling people slash family why we are no longer together. Of course I tried the old it's none of your business to some of them but that failed spectacularly

and since I refused to tell they decided she cheated on me and started spreading that around. I've had to do a lot of damage control over that. I've decided to continue with therapy on a personal level because honestly this entire thing has really messed with my head and I have no self-esteem left at all. I've only seen her once since we separated and it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. She is now, justifiably so, in the angry stage. She is furious with me and has called me everything that you can imagine and then even made up some words.