(This might be a bit long so please bear with me)
Hello, 6 months ago I (23F) moved to Japan and met my current boyfriend (23M). We were in the same class at language school and had the same birthday (year, date and month) so we decided to get lunch together and we hit it off so well we have seen each other every day since that date.
We moved pretty quickly despite there being a language barrier. He's Chinese and I'm American, and I didn't speak any Chinese and his English was relatively bad. Now I've been learning Chinese, he's been learning English, and between that and our shared learning of Japanese we communicate fine.
For the first couple of months we were literally conjoined at the hip. It was basically love at first sight. I moved in to his apartment about a week after we met, and after four months of dating we bought our own apartment. It was perfect, I mean perfect. He was always attentive and loving, I provided him with more love than I thought was possible. He said I was the perfect girlfriend. We would always get food together and go on dates, play sports together, we were rarely apart for more than 5 hours at a time. We always held hands in public and all of our classmates knew we were dating and said they could see the love in our eyes. Everywhere we went it was like a romance movie and we both agreed we wanted to have a future together in Japan and get married.
All that to say, we did have our issues. I have depression and am very sensitive, and he can be quite mean at times. He would often call me names such as "Pig" "Bitch" and "Stupid" especially when we were playing a video game I was bad at, despite me consistently asking him to stop. I put up with it because the good far outweighed the bad, and I wasn't without my faults either.
But about a month after we moved to the new apartment I noticed he was more distant. He was constantly on his phone and wouldn't listen to me as much, and was physically and emotionally more detached. Whenever I would bring it up to him he would put his phone away and cuddle with me and reassure me everything was fine, but I could still feel something was off. During this whole period he had a girl he played a video game with basically every day, for 2-5 hours at a time, sometimes really late into the night. When they spoke everything was in Chinese and I didn't understand a word, but I gave him permission to play with her because I didn't want to control him and restrict his fun.
Well, one day while he was cuddling next to me I saw him text "宝贝" on his phone, which is one kanji I do know which translates to "baby". After this I couldn't take it anymore and went through his iPad WeChat messages (shitty, I know :(() and it turns out he had been sexting the girl and roleplaying with her. He said things such as "this is why I love you so much every day" "In the game let's get married" and "I can't wait to satisfy you in the future". I was distraught, I literally couldn't think. I had suspected something like this but not to this scale.
I confronted him about it, showing him the texts and he completely shut down. I was crying and asking him how could he do this, how could he say he loved me and still tell another girl this. I told him I wasted so much money on him (I payed everything for the move, including our new apartment money and the money for him to move out of his apartment because he didn't have a job at the time) and he said to give him a chance to explain.
First he admitted that this was absolutely shitty and his fault, and if I wanted to leave him because of this I had absolutely every right to do so (something he of course didn't need to tell me). But he said all these messages were just him and the girl joking, he had no feelings for her, and that he didn't intend to actually act on any of it. He promised to go through the messages with me, and I stated I wanted to text the girl and ask if it was true.
Part of what he said was true, most of it was just joking and the girl rarely participated back. If he made a sex joke she would say something like "滚" which basically means "get out of here" or "leave". I fully suspect now he didn't love the girl, but this behavior was still unacceptable and made me feel like he had no respect for our relationship.
He asked me to give him another chance and I said I needed to think about it. I'd never met another man like him, certainly never loved another person more than him, so after a day or so I said I would give him another chance. On some conditions. The first is that he had to go through all of his current messaging apps with any woman and let me read them, and also if in the future I ever asked to see his phone he would let me. He agreed. Because of the first rule I saw he had been in contact with his ex the whole time we were together, and even had plans to have her come out to Japan and meet him again over winter break. (I did know about this girlfriend before, but I didn't know they were still talking. I also knew he had plans to have a friend come out to Japan but he'd told me it was a man. Now I knew the truth :(() but that was over 4 months ago, and they hadn't been in contact since and she currently has a boyfriend, so I let it go.
He said he really does only love me, and only wants his future to be with me. He deeply regretted what he did and said that he will do anything to make it up to me.
That was two months ago. He still plays games with the girl he was sexting, but has ceased all the dirty talk. Partly because now she knows he has a girlfriend, which is something he kept from her before. He has changed a lot. I no longer suspect him of doing something like this, and haven't had any reason to go through his phone since that one time.
That being said, I still have my doubts. We have other pitfalls in our relationship that are too much to get into here, and I've considered breaking up with him multiple times since this incident.
I just need to know did I make a mistake giving him another chance? And if I did, what should I do? I love him more than anything but I've never been so hurt by a person before, and I want to break up with him but I'm afraid I'll never love anyone more than him. I wish I had broken up with him then but to use this incident to break up with him now would be shitty of me, especially given how much he's trying to change.
Did I make the wrong call?