Hello everyone. I hope you’re all having a good day. I’m not.
I (22M) have been with my beautiful girlfriend (22F) for 7 years. We are high school sweethearts. In my country, high school lasts 4 years, and we met and started dating in the second year. I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. I still remember it like yesterday.
Our relationship has always been good. We never had any major problems. Then, in my last year of high school, I changed schools for a better education. At my new school, I did the usual things: made friends, met new people, hung out, etc. One of those people became a very close female friend.
At that time, we were genuinely best friends. We got along extremely well. I swear I’m telling the truth when I say I never intended anything romantic. I was madly in love with my girlfriend, just like I still am now. I even introduced this girl to my girlfriend, and we all hung out together with friends.
But after a certain point, I started thinking that maybe I had feelings for this new girl. I never stopped loving my girlfriend, not even for a second, but I thought I might also have developed feelings for the new girl. I’m still not fully sure what those feelings really were.
This destroyed me mentally. I was in so much pain that I eventually told the new girl about the situation. I said something like, “I think I might have feelings for you.” She told me she didn’t feel the same way. After that, I remember falling into a deep depression for about a month. I did nothing. I felt terrible. I felt like I had lost both my best friend and, emotionally, my girlfriend because of my own actions.
Then all I could think about was how badly I had betrayed my girlfriend, even just by having those thoughts. I told my mom everything, and she said I was being way too hard on myself, which is something I usually do. She told me that these kinds of feelings can happen sometimes and that it didn’t mean I didn’t love my girlfriend.
Still, I couldn’t accept it. I hated myself for it.
Eventually, I convinced myself that maybe I had misunderstood my feelings completely. Maybe I never truly liked the other girl romantically and had just become emotionally confused. That idea helped me recover from the depression. I’m not the kind of person who lies to himself, so I genuinely tried to understand the situation honestly.
At the end of the school year, the other girl admitted that she actually had feelings for me too, but by then I rejected her immediately. Aside from that one conversation, we barely spoke for the rest of the year. After graduation, our friend group met a few times, and then we all slowly stopped seeing each other.
The real problem is this: all of this happened 6 years ago, and I still can’t let it go.
Over these 6 years, I’ve occasionally fallen back into depression because I keep questioning everything:
Did I really have feelings for her?
Did I betray my girlfriend?
Did I make the wrong choice?
Am I a terrible person?
Am I living a lie?
What scares me most is that these thoughts have slowly damaged my emotions. If you’ve ever truly been in love, you know that euphoric feeling when you see your partner or kiss them. Every time I start doubting myself again, those feelings seem to fade more and more. Sometimes they feel almost close to zero, and that terrifies me.
I’ve never told anyone about this except my mother once, 6 years ago. I also feel like I can’t cry anymore. I haven’t cried in 6 years, and maybe keeping all these emotions buried inside is making me emotionally numb. I honestly don’t know.
I don’t want my love for my girlfriend to disappear. We are planning to get married, and I genuinely love her more than anything. But I don’t know how to deal with this anymore.
I’ve never heard anyone talk about a situation like mine before, which makes me feel very alone. I still obsess over whether my 16-year-old self made the right choices. Part of me keeps trying to escape the guilt by believing those feelings for the other girl were never real, just confusion or an illusion. But another part of me thinks: “What if they were real? Does that make me a horrible person? Do I even deserve my girlfriend’s love?”
She doesn’t know about any of this.
After 6 years, I still can’t move past it.
Could you please give me some advice or perspective?