I really don’t know what to do. My girlfriend and I had some problems a while back. She was drinking secretly after her shift at work, sitting in a parking lot, lying that she was still at work. She would come home smelling like alcohol, acting tipsy. She worked a wine job, so she always made the excuse that she broke a bottle or did a tasting, essentially gaslighting me. Well, I found a couple of empty bottles in her car and confronted her about it. We had a long talk about trust and how it’s essential for me in a relationship, and we talked about her drinking problem. We eventually built our relationship back to a pretty good point. She quit her wine job and got a new one. We agreed to have Snap Maps on so that if I ever felt paranoid, I could check to see she was at work. I only really checked it a couple of times and then forgot about it because I was trying to rebuild trust with her.
Well, I was looking at Snapchat yesterday and realized her icon wasn’t at home with mine like it should have been.
I asked her about it yesterday, and her response gave me a lot of red flags. She tried to blame it on a glitch, then tried to blame Snapchat updating. But mine never turns off. The entire time, she was messing with her phone. Turns out she was deleting stuff. I told her to hand me the phone or leave, and she handed it to me and broke down.
She at first said they were just talking, then she came clean and said she went to his house and hung out. It then took another hour of convincing her to tell me the truth before I finally found out she had sex with him twice in one day while she said she was at work working a double shift. She was texting me about fish tacos and how excited she was to come eat them after work, while she was at his house, most likely still in his bed. Come to find out, the guy she’s been playing with on Xbox is THE SAME GUY. We play Xbox together, and she sits behind me with her own TV, sometimes we play with our own group of friends. So she was literally talking to the guy she fucked right behind my back.. literally. Acting like everything was normal, lying to my face, kissing me while having the guy she cheated with in her ear.
I went through the call logs and found she was talking to this guy at work for hours. The things they were saying and the “I love yous” when they barely know each other seem crazy to me. They didn’t even know each other for more than a month. The texts just gave off high-school vibes with all the hearts and the way they were talking.
We live together and have been together for 7 years, and we have 2 dogs and 2 cats. I thought we had planned a life together, and everything feels so fucked now I can barely think. We planned to get married in a year or two, it wasn’t something either of us really cared about rushing, but I guess I don’t know now. A piece of me wants to forgive her because I fear life without her, and I love her deeply, even with the pain she’s caused me. But at the same time, I feel like she humiliated me, and if I take her back, I’m disrespecting myself. What’s stopping her from doing it again in the future if she “got away with it”?
I love her so much, but I just don’t know what to do.
TL;DR Girlfriend cheated on me but wants me to forgive her. How can I move past this and should I?