u/Emostian_

I don’t know if I’m overreacting or if my feelings are actually valid, but I really need outside opinions because I honestly feel lost right now.
I’ve been with my girlfriend for 2 years. We’ve had problems before, mostly related to intimacy and me feeling emotionally frustrated in the relationship. A lot of times I felt like I was “begging” for connection — not just sexually, but emotionally and affection-wise too. Still, we kept trying because we genuinely love each other.
Recently we had a very serious conversation because I had already been carrying a lot emotionally for a long time. During that talk, she confessed something that completely destroyed me emotionally: she told me that for the past few weeks she’s been having a crisis regarding her sexuality. She clarified that she’s not lesbian, that she loves me, and that nothing has happened with anyone, but there’s a girl in her class that she finds really attractive and it awakened this curiosity about a side of herself she has never explored before.
She insists she’s not in love with this girl, that they barely even know each other, and that she only wanted to be honest with me. She also says she has never cheated on me and still loves me deeply. And honestly, I believe her when she says nothing happened.
But after hearing all this, I feel like something inside me broke. I can’t stop thinking:
“What if eventually she wants to experience that?”
“What if I never feel emotionally safe again?”
“What if I spend the whole relationship comparing myself or overthinking everything?”
And another thing that makes this harder is that she still has more than a year left at university, meaning she’ll probably keep seeing this girl almost every day, while I already graduated. So even if we stay together, I feel like I’d constantly live with anxiety in the back of my mind.
The worst part is that she handled everything respectfully. She didn’t insult me, manipulate me, or try to gaslight me. She accepted giving me space and understood how deeply this affected me. So I feel terrible because I don’t want to paint her as a bad person either.
But at the same time, I feel emotionally shattered. I feel like I lost my peace of mind, and I honestly don’t know if a relationship can survive once that sense of emotional security is broken.
I asked for distance because I genuinely don’t know what to do anymore.
Has anyone gone through something similar? Can relationships recover from this, or once peace of mind is gone, is it almost impossible to rebuild?