“part 4: his phone being taken & his mom reading our chats
about 1 to 2 weeks after he got discharged and went back home, he managed to call me. he told me he couldn't keep his phone with him because his mom had taken it away and refused to give it back.
when i asked why, he dropped a bomb on me: his mom had gone through our entire whatsapp chat history. i was just in total shock like what the actual f?* she already knew we were in a relationship—J had directly told her about us before (i was the only one who hadn't explicitly said it out loud to my mom yet, even though she knew). but even knowing that, his mom went line by line through our personal messages.
J told me that by reading the chats, she also figured out that the extra broken phone was mine. and based on just a few selected messages, she concluded that i wasn't "his type." she didn't use the exact word toxic, but she implied i was controlling and claimed that if he married me, i wouldn't even "let him hang out with his friends."
i asked J what on earth she read to come to that conclusion. he explained that she saw a chat from an old fight we had. J usually didn't do this, but whenever he got furious, his habit was to hang up the phone mid-argument and ignore me until he cooled down (usually coming back at night to apologize). i'm someone who hates leaving fights hanging—i need to resolve things immediately. so when he hung up on me that day, i kept calling back to clear the air, not knowing he was actually out sitting with his friends at that exact moment.
when he finally picked up, he got angry and said stuff like i was controlling. he even mentioned that one of his friends, after seeing all those missed calls from me, said i was toxic or something like that (honestly i don't remember the exact details, maybe because of past trauma half of my memories are just blurry/lost). then he hung up again. in a moment of pure rage and frustration after being hung up on like that, i texted him on whatsapp. i didn't use swear words against him, but out of extreme anger i wrote something like, "why did you just leave mid-fight to go with your friends?" and impulsively added something about him and his family.
his mom read those exact rage-texts out of context. she didn't care to understand what drove me to say that or what he had done right before. even though J tried to explain the situation to her, she shut him down and maintained her opinion. J told me this was one of the main reasons his mom restricted his phone, making it impossible for him to call me every day. on top of that, both of his hands were in arm slings/hanging bags because of those fractures and surgeries.
Take your time”