u/CatthulhuSpawn — reddlx

I (20F) and my boyfriend (20M) have been together for over 4 years. It was my first ever long-term relationship, and it was his first ever real relationship. We began becoming intimate about 1.5 years in, and it was both of our first times.

My partner had a lot of important traits/beliefs that we’re important to me, such as not substance/alcohol use, no desire to have children, genuine love and compassion, willingness to learn and improve, and he allowed me to take the lead in many aspects of our relationship. Personality-wise, we complimented each other very well. He did a great job supporting me through many difficult times, as I struggle with ADHD, anxiety, OCD, and depression.

About a year into our relationship, we hit a particularly difficult patch in our relationship where we broke up off-and-on. During this time, he developed feelings for another woman, and confessed to her. Thankfully, she did not reciprocate, and stopped talking to him shortly after, because she learned that he was in a relationship. While this was extremely damaging to my confidence and stability in the relationship, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Since then, I have worked extremely hard to build myself back up, identify common triggers, and utilize self soothing and mindfulness techniques for when I am especially upset. I am very proud of the progress I have made, and I thought we had built a very solid and healthy foundation. I had no reason to believe otherwise; fights were uncommon, and we communicated maturely to find solutions to problems. I was genuinely proud of the progress we had made, and while I was still nervous about infidelity issues, I built myself back up to trust him.

Fast forward to yesterday, when I get an instagram message from a girl who has claimed to have been in a relationship with him for 4-5 months. She explained that she had a dream about him, and felt like something was wrong. She found his instagram account through an older account that he didn’t have her blocked on, and saw that my name was in his bio. She sent my screenshots of messages of him calling her beautiful and saying that he loved her. They also met up once, and she gave him oral sex. I thanked her for telling me all of this, and reassured her that I was not mad at her, and I was just grateful she told me about this.

I immediately called my boyfriend, and he admitted to everything. I was in such shock and horror, and k still don’t think it has fully settled in that it happened. I feel like I was talking to a whole other person; like the man I previously knew and loved was gone.

I initially blocked him, but this morning, I unblocked him and began to talk to him again. I wanted to understand more about what happened so I could get as many questions answered as I could. He explained to me that they originally started out talking as friends, but they developed romantic feelings several months later. The only reason that they stopped being together was because she blocked him. Knowing the fact that they still probably would’ve been together broke me. He said that he thought that meant that they were “past the issue”, and he admitted he never planned to tell me about it.

He tried to convince me to let him “earn back my trust through self improvement”, and would not take no for an answer. He refused to accept that we couldn’t be together, which made me feel like he just did not care about my feelings and my needs. I eventually gave in and called him for a bit. We talked a lot about the relationship, and how he felt like he could not tell me anything because I get upset. While I do definitely agree that I get upset easily when being informed of hurtful things, I believe that is not at all an excuse to cheat and not tell your partner.

His final proposal was to take a several month-long break, where we focused on ourselves. This goes back to the fact that he thought he could get back my trust back if he improved enough. I initially agreed for both of us to make a list on improvements that we wanted to make, both for the relationship, but also for our general personal satisfaction and well-being. I suggested couples therapy, and he was open to that as well.

Afterwards, I felt like things were going a bit better, so I called him. However, I got this terrible feeling inside me, like my soul was rotting just by talking to him. I kept telling myself that I am basically enabling him by eventually going back into a relationship with him. He said that he could just send me a good morning paragraph each day, but I knew that I would not be strong enough to just read the messages and not respond. Everytime I thought about us rebuilding, I thought about how miserable I would be, how I would constantly be fighting internal battles and never fully trusting what he says to me. I ended up hanging up our call, and blocking him. Since then, he has tried to create a new messaging account and email me.

In all honesty, I don’t think I will ever be able to find as someone as complimentary to me as him. He was basically all the traits I wanted in a partner, and even future husband. I feel like most Gen Z relationships have sort of infidelity due to normalized pornography, hook-up culture, and harmful relationship rhetoric on social media. Combining that with the fact that I am conventionally unattractive (most due to my weight), have semi-high standards, have difficultly connecting easily with most people, and do not want children, I feel like I could be single or be put into failed relationships for the rest of my life.

Because of this, I wanted to post to this subreddit and ask for advice. Is this situation fixable? If so, is it even worth fixing? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.