i noticed a butt in the ashtray that wasn't a brand either of us smoked. that's not necessarily suspicious, 'cause she was certainly allowed to have friends and stuff. but i didn't know of any friends of hers at the time who would be coming over to see her when i was at work. so i just asked something like 'who smokes marlboros?' or whatever brand it was. she got kind of panicky and struggled to come up with an excuse. i forget what she said. i didn't say anything else about it.

so that was suspicious.

but i actually found out when i came home from work maybe two weeks later and she wasn't there and like an hour later she called me and told me that she was at a hotel with a guy from work and that she'd been having sex with two guys from her work, and that she didn't want to be in a relationship with me anymore.

i handled it by drinking heavily that night.

she came back. she had nowhere else to go. we had moved to a random state that neither of us had even been to before, and with us both working we weren't having any problems paying the rent and bills; we were getting by just fine. but with only my job to pay for the apartment and everything else it wouldn't have worked out so well. we had maybe 5 months left on our lease. her job paid even less than mine, and she didn't have a car. if we broke the lease and moved away then we would have ended up going back to our parents, and that wouldn't be a good thing at all.

so we weren't in a loving relationship any more, but we stayed in the apartment together, and handled that by fighting and arguing a lot. but by the time the lease was up we were more comfortable with each other and were friends, but not lovers.

we were still in the same predicament, tho - together we could manage to live independently from our families, but separately we couldn't. so we ended up staying together and moving again to another state. we got an apartment for a year and by then were good friends and companions, but any romantic love we had had was gone. i referred to her as my 'life partner' rather than girlfriend.

then we got pretty good jobs together at a place across town, and signed another year lease. we lived together happily, we worked night shift so usually it was just the two of us working, and we worked great as a team, but still the romance never came back.

by the time that lease was up, we both had the skills and experience to get decent paying jobs and survive financially without each other. our arrangement had gone on for too long; i told her we had to move on and have separate lives. she didn't want to, because she was so used to a loveless relationship with a friend. but our situation had gone on for too long, and we both needed something different. so we finally broke up.

tl;dr: she told me she cheated on me, we broke up, the love was gone, but we handled it by staying together another 2 years.