(As the title asks..)
I need to vent. Thank you if you read it.
This is my story. (No Bel Air, I promise)
I feel like a shell. I broke up with my girlfriend of over a year last month. I found out that, over the course of our relationship, she has cheated on me with at least 3 other guys multiple times. 2 of them are married, and she didn't use protection (got her to admit). She didn't tell me about the cheating either, either out of fear or apathy. I got really suspicious one night and decided to take a look in her journal. I didn't want to do that, I had many chances to check her phone too but I refused out of principle. Unfortunately I was rewarded with the dreadful truth that same night.
I thought her and I were gonna be together for the long run. Early on we both agreed we would want marriage and kids. In fact, a week before I made the fateful discovery, we were embracing each other in bed and she says "I want to be with you forever". She probably couldn't see it, but I must've been glowing. I said "Me too." and tightened my embrace. We always enjoyed each other's company (at least I enjoyed hers). We always flooded each other with love and compliments. Seriously some of the best compliments from her. Two of my PG favorites were "You still give me that bubbly feeling that I got when we first met!" and "You're the best boyfriend ever!/You have restored my faith in the opposite sex!" (she had a bad history, and I did my best to make her see the truth in herself).
Her face always lit up when she saw me (and likewise), and we would both be content laying in bed staring into each other's eyes and cuddling. We would always have plenty cute lovey-dovey intimate moments, and then we dumped the cute and were total animals in the sheets. It was just the way I like it.
Naturally I flipped out a bit on her. Called her disgusting, pathetic, selfish, a liar, a hypocrite. Especially those last 3. She got upset when I told her I happened to watched porn, meanwhile she's cheating on me. We both made it clear during week one of our relationship: No Cheating. And I explicitly told her that if she ever wanted to see other men for whatever reason just to end it. Don't play games with me, don't fuck with me, don't make a fool out of me. Let's just both go our ways. But she decided to start cheating on me at month 3-4 of our relationship.
She barely mouthed one word answers to me, most of the time she was just curled up into a ball, crying, with her face buried in her pillows. I couldn't tell if she felt bad or felt bad that she got caught.
So here I am a couple weeks later. I want more answers but she has the nerve to ignore me. I just don't get it. I cannot comprehend how one would treat someone they claimed to love so badly. I mean, I understand addictions at least a little. I've suffered minorly and witnessed others suffer far more than myself. You do things you wouldn't normally do for bad reasons. But I've been wracking my brain with this, and I just cannot understand how you could claim to love somebody so fully and then .. have unprotected sex multiple times with different partners.. this is completely beyond me. Not understanding it is making me even more angry.
And how the hell could you not use protection? That's so pathetic!
Further adding to my confusion, in her journal she had a pros and cons list of where she was working at the time (where some of the cheating took place). Under both the pros AND the cons side, she listed "Affair with X". A friend of mine pointed out that, in the case of an neurotic and addict mindset, the "pro" might be obtaining that "fix". To me this is wishful thinking and she just liked having sex with the guy but felt guilty about it.
The last guy she cheated on me with she met during a hospital stay. In her journal she talks about how she thinks it's cute and romantic to be "fondling hands" and having to "hide it like they're in junior high". She even told me that they got in trouble for holding hands, but lied to me and said that it was the staffs mistake. Are romantic feelings part of sex addiction? Or was she bullshitting me even more?
I should mention that the only reason I found out about the sex addiction was because I brought it up as a possibility with a mutual friend of ours while discussing the breakup, and he said "..Well.. yeah. She didn't tell you? She was very embarrassed and ashamed to talk about it [in a mental health group*], shouldn't have kept it a secret in a loving relationship though".
That's enough for me tonight. I need the sweet release of sleep to stop feeling this depression.
*you're probably seeing a pattern