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Kelsey Swanson discussed the early moments of her relationship with rumored ex-boyfriend John Caprio after confirming their split on the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Rhode Island.
As she spoke of facing heartbreak due to the other women in her former boyfriend’s life, recalled learning of his additional relationships online, and admitted to being in “constant fear” about what she would hear about next, Kelsey considered whether he was cheating and looked back on the happy times of their courtship.
“I knew that was his reputation, and I was not the only one at the very beginning. I would hear things. I never asked, but he never told. But he never, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, he’s on the phone with some girl in front of me,'” Kelsey explained on the May 3 episode of the RHORI: After Show. “But at the beginning, and I wasn’t living with him at this point, I was staying in my lane. As a 20-something-year-old girl, 21, I’m gonna tell this 43-year-old what to do? Like, no. I was afraid to ask the questions.”
Because she didn’t want to bring up what she was hearing about her partner’s other women, Kelsey learned to accept her situation for what it was.
“I trained my brain so hard to just accept what it was, so that I wasn’t disappointed. I was always in constant fear and anxiety of what I was gonna find out next. It’s not a good feeling at all. It really sucks,” she shared.
According to Kesley, her ex “hid everything” from her.
“He would be like, ‘Oh, I’m going away,’ and then I’d find out there was also somebody else joining the trip. The first time he told me he was going on a trip, which he does every year, he’s like, ‘I’m not gonna have my phone,'” she revealed. “He was going on a cruise. At the time, it’s like, ‘the wifi, the phone…’ But he still made it a point to call me maybe once a day or like twice a day — enough for me to not question it.”
But amid that trip, Kelsey discovered on Facebook that her then-partner wasn’t alone.
“I remember we were in bed, and I started crying, and I said, ‘I see all of this stuff. Like, so-and-so said this. I see it online. What’s going on?’ And he shut me right down,” she explained. “He shut me down to the point of, like, ‘Don’t ask questions’ kind of thing.”
As for whether he was cheating, Kelsey wasn’t so sure.
“You can look at it from eight different perspectives, honestly. Is it cheating? No, yeah. Yeah. I was not okay with it. I love him, but that’s not something I signed up for. It just happened to form into that, and it took on a life of its own,” she explained. “I accepted it for what it was and tried to keep my emotions out of it, and it was hard sometimes.”
“I’m like, ‘Why won’t this man just pick me?’” she continued.
Still, there were plenty of “great things” about their romance.
“Every waking minute we spent together when he was in Rhode Island, every trip we went on, it’s like, he couldn’t take me enough places. He wanted to travel with me. He didn’t want to travel with anybody else. I was always the one traveling with him,” she revealed. “[But] eventually, you take your emotions out of it. And that’s why I said the relationship lacked the emotional aspect, because I was forced to not care. And, to me, you can only grow so much without the emotional side of it.”
Elsewhere on the RHORI: After Show, Rulla Pontarelli and Ashley Iaconetti weighed in, with Rulla suspecting that Kelsey broke things off because she “wanted something a little bit more serious and promising,” and Ashley mentioning that she “wanted to have kids one day.”
“At that point, it’s just a waste of time,” Ashley concluded.
The Real Housewives of Rhode Island season one airs Sundays at 9/8c on Bravo.