How to trust again?

Felicia

I found porn saved to my boyfriend's phone. I didn't snoop, he opened his gallery next to me and I noticed it. We had a discussion about it later that night. I explained to him that after all of the changes my body had gone through during and post pregnancy (I was about 3 months post-partum), that it made me feel inadequate and even more unattractive than I had already been feeling for quite some time. Admittedly, I am insecure. He volunteered to stop watching porn, delete his Instagram account, delete all of the pornographic content in his phone, and leave the pornographic groups he was in on Facebook. I appreciated that he offered to do all those things in an attempt to repair the damage he had done. It was comforting. However, I still obsessed about it. Probably because it took me 2 months or so to get the whole story and the truth. Over those 2 months, occasionally I would bring it up and ask a question I hadn't previously thought to ask, and everytime I was lied too. Perhaps to protect my feelings, but it only angered me more. He'd been caught...I had confessed my heart ache...I sobbed uncontrollably begging him for honesty, and despite all that, he continously lied to me. That hurt more. To know someone I love, someone who supposedly loves me, could lie relentlessly to my face about something they'd done that had so clearly hurt me, even if it wasn't intentional. What really bothered me about him lying, was that while doing so, he'd accuse me of making assumptions, would call me crazy and paranoid but low and behold my gut feeling was never wrong. Before we moved into our new apartment, he again volunteered to rid his dvd collection of all the porn he had accumulated before he met me, while packing up our bedroom. So I was really disappointed when he admitted a week before move-in day that there were at least 2 boxes of dvds that contained porn in our storage unit. I asked him if I could unpack the dvd boxes because at this point, I couldn't and didn't trust that he'd be as meticulous as I, and a few of them would fall through the cracks only for me to stumble upon in the future. I just wanted every trace of it gone so I could put it to rest and move on. He agreed. There were several small stacks of adult films of girls ranging from 18-24 years old. This made sense. The video I saw in his gallery was of Alaina Dawson. A 22 year old girl who filmed videos back in 2015-2016 when she would have only been 18/19. My boyfriend is 39. So although, all these girls are well within legal age regulations, I was a little disgusted & realized he must just have a fetish for young girls. Which also made sense because I'm 26..and I've caught him checking out our co-workers..& of course, they have all been around my age range. Anyway...after getting rid of the collection, things settled down. I accepted what he claimed was finally the absolute truth and I made a promise to myself after that conversation to leave it there once and for all. I know he had been sick of me beating a dead horse in the face, long before I was, but I had also reached a point where I realized my dwelling was just sabotaging myself and I was hurting my own damn feelings. It's been 4 months since then. Things had been incredibly well between us. But a couple nights ago, we had a disagreement about something, in which I ended up confessing that I don't trust him. Putting the porn thing aside, I just question if he's being truthful about some things now. So I asked him if he was following any "sexual" groups on Facebook...not because I cared about the content, but because he had made a promise voluntarily to stay away from that & I wanted him to prove me wrong, in that, I could indeed trust him again now, like he tells me I can. And what do ya know? A friend sent him an invite to a pin-up group...much like the cosplay group on Instagram he followed conviently after I told him I had deleted my account, where he found the girl I saw in that video still in his gallery...where this whole thing began, which he had the ability to decline, but joined a month ago (& just to be clear, these groups of girls were dressed provocatively, or not all, and were in sexual positions/poses..they weren't just innocent groups of girls in costumes) I didn't want to be right, but I think that justified exactly why I still don't trust him again yet. I guess there's something to say about the fact that at least this time when I asked him about it, he was straight out with it. He doesn't know it yet, but I'm starting to forgive him as I'm explaining this. But...I don't know what he can do to make me trust him again. I don't want to do random check-ins and ask to see his phone...because it's really not about porn anymore...it's about the lies he told to hide it from me, cover it up, and manipulate me into questioning if my feelings were ever even valid. I've never been in this situation before. I've never had someone I was really close to, break my trust and have it effect me like this. I really need some perspective...