I once was married to a woman who did exactly this, and in the end I got fed up with it, separated from her, started divorce proceedings, and then an affair with another woman.

I don't believe though, that it is uncontrollable. Suppose you knew, ma'am, that he would beat you each time you accused him of infidelity. Would you still do it knowing that you would end up in the hospital? I don't think so. I think you do it because you want to put him on the defensive, establish control, manipulate him for expensive gifts, marriage, whatever it is that you want out of the relationship.

The second beef that I have with you, ma'am is your use of the work "cheating". It sounds like you believe you own him, that you have contractual rights to his dick. You don't. He is only with you because he wants to be. If he wants to be with someone else, it will not be because he wants to "cheat" you of your rightful dues, but because he is happier with someone else.

If he is screwing someone else there is absolutely nothing you can do about it other than end the relationship, unless he wants you to. Understand?

This relationship is already over, because if you falsely accuse someone of something even one time, that damage can never be repaired.

Start over fresh, and never do this again. Carry a dish rag and stuff it in your mouth when you feel the urge.

Groundlessly, repeatedly, obsessively accusing someone of cheating is abusive. So is monopolizing their free time so that every spare moment is spent with you or on the phone with you. "Go see a therapist" is putting it too mildly. Go see a therapist and put this guy out of his misery until you learn how to treat another human being humanely is more like it. Break up with that poor man, do the hard work necessary to learn how to fairly and kindly treat others, then, and only then, should you start dating again.

The letter writer says she can't control accusing her boyfriend, but she can. To date, she simply hasn't had enough negative reinforcement. Right now the process of dealing with her fear of abandonment by projecting a fantasy of infidelity on her boyfriend, then giving free reign to her impulsvieness and spewing the projection at him in the form of an accusation, is too rewarding. He reassures her, she feels briefly in control again, and the cycle continues.

She may not uncover exactly what is driving this behavior for awhile - that may take months with a therapist. But there is something immediate she can do about the behavior itself, regardless of whether she understands the underlying source.

She should sit down with her boyfriend and apologize for her behavior to date. Tell him that she does, in fact, trust him, and knows that the accusations she has been peppering him with are a problem of hers, not his, and that she knows she needs to deal with this problem before she drives him away. Thank him for his patience to date, and then enlist is help by telling him what steps she will take to cease and desist with the accusations:

1. When she feels insecurity and an accusation coming on, she will make the accusations only in writing - say in a journal. She will spend exactly 10 minutes outlining her fears. No more. Then she will spend the next 10 minutes writing about how she trusts him and knows he will not hurt her, and how the facts (where he's been, how he's been acting) do not support her suspicions.

2. She will make, and keep, the promise to not act on (that is, speak to him about) her whacked out ideas about his cheating for 24 hours. This is not an emergency, a matter of life and death; it is a matter that can wait for 24 hours. Then, if she still feels like it, and she's done her journal exercise, she can go to step 3.

3. Tell a trusted friend what she wants to accuse her boyfriend of. Give it another 24 hours, with another journal entry - 10 minutes of why she still feels he is 'guilty', 10 minutes why the friend's input supports the boyfriend's innocence.

4. And if she STILL feels compelled to accuse him, get him to agree that he will not speak with her or contact her for 48 hours after the accusation - only after this 48 hour period passes will he speak with her.

When she is faced with consequences - having to defend the accusations to herself, to her friend, nurse them over a cooling off period and face actual abandonment for her OWN behavior, she may gain some control of it.

And in the meantime, she should see a therapist. It seems to me she is deliberately pushing her bf away - the best way to deal with fear of abandonment, after all, is to leave them before they can leave you....and if you can create a 'crime' for them, then it's not even your fault.

Just a couple of days ago, a male obsessed with the LW's "impurity" earned the nearly unanimous consensus of CT readers: "Dump this a-hole pronto."

Now we hear from an equally psycho LW who, although she rationally "knows" her boyfriend is faithful, can't keep herself from abusing and berating him over imagined "infidelity.

I suggest that we get the boyfriend of LW 1 and this mad female LW 2 together.

They deserve each other.

The rest of humanity--those of us who have managed to salvage relatively normal interpersonal and relational skills from our own invariably imperfect upbringings--will be better off without either of them in the dating pool.

Let them BOTH rot with each other in tortured misery.

Nobody who can see their own folly is "incapable" of fixing it. They're simply unwilling to do so.

I don't know. She may be onto something inside herself that she should listen to. I've been this way with many guys in the past, although I haven't told them about my fears. I realized that that kind of constant accusations would hurt them and/or drive them away, and so I mainly kept it to myself and my girlfriends and my therapist. Then it just stewed inside and made me miserable, but it didn't stop my constant thoughts that they were cheating. This was especially true of the last guy, even though I really thought we had a great relationship. I couldn't understand where all the distrust was coming from, either.

Then that guy broke up with me and I was devastated, and then I started dating the guy who is now my husband. The thing is, I've never once had that feeling with him. I never distrust him, and I feel very confident of his love and devotion to me. This is very unusual for me. So I really feel that maybe there was something to all those not-quite-perfect guys in the past who set off my internal distrust-o-meter. Maybe they weren't even cheating, but maybe it was just other problems that were inherent in the relationships that caused my gut to shout DANGER, DANGER!

So I agree with everyone else's advice about keeping it to yourself, but that might not stop the feelings. Maybe you should listen to them. Just a thought.