TL/DR: caught my boyfriend cheating. Can’t find it in myself to forgive him but I need a ride to my black jack dealing classes for 3 months
23f dating 28m. I recently found out my partner of 5 months has been on this very app cross dressing and exchanging pictures with men online. We have had a rocky relationship thus far. We’ve had arguments over women in his phone, drama with our friend group, stuff that I can’t bring up here but you get the picture. Initially our best friends hooked us up with one another and I think deep down we both went along with it because we were lonely. I have grown to love our day to day life and for a while we were doing well. I met his family, stayed over at his house for weeks on end, and we expressed desires of having a future life together that involved kids and marriage, the whole nine yards. Until on the way home from a trip I watch him enter his passcode. Something in my chest sank because I knew this had the potential to ruin our relationship
I checked it, found out he had done it as early as the second week I stayed at his house. And had went on to do it 2 times after that. The most recent time being a day before this trip. I was floored. I knew he had wandering eyes but I never thought my heteronormative boyfriend who wouldn’t even so much as let me touch his butt was secretly bisexual and had been indulging in one of the worst porn addictions I had ever seen. It was like I didn’t even know him. I called my friend and immediately had me gtfo at 3 in the morning after crying in his living room with this shock to my system.
He asked to meet up to talk about the situation and we did. We decided he needs help. he already took some steps in the right direction deactivating his account and now giving me full access to his phone and his location, admitting what went wrong in his thought process. I sugested researching porn addictions and how to help. He seems very remorseful and choosing a healthy route of change but I can’t get over it. I just don’t understand how someone can love you and hurt you in this way.
At this point I’m certain that if the following weren’t true, I would make the concrete decision to leave. However, my tribe has been working hard for 20 years to be able to build our casino and finally it’s about to be here. My grandpa lugged us out to every tribal meeting for those 20 years just so we would remain active enough members to one day, hopefully, reap the awards of this. But he’s old now, and I’m afraid he’ll never see that come to fruition. They’re offering paid training with a guaranteed job as a dealer in the casino. The only issue is, my family is extremely poor. Dirt poor. And these classes are a good 40-45 minutes from me. I don’t have a car, or a job, I can’t ask my family or my friends for rides, I don’t know if the buses have reasonable times to this place. My boyfriend travels for work and often in that very direction.
So now there is this moral grapple I can’t seem to get ahold of. I feel embarrassed and unlovable from the cheating. I don’t have much faith that he won’t do it again but he is trying. I just never thought of myself as someone who would forgive cheating. But there’s this other side of my that thinks well if he’s going to lie to my face, make me believe he loves me, just so he can have a warm body to lay next to at night then why shouldn’t I make him believe I want to work on a relationship when I just need him so I can finally work towards more stable financially.