Not sure what I'm looking for in any responses, but sometimes it's just good to write stuff down. Anyways...
Yesterday I discovered my girlfriend of nearly 4 years has pretty much cheated on me. Only found out from the girlfriend of the guy she cheated with, so that was nice.
I say pretty much cheated, because she sent him pictures and videos of herself one evening. The next evening she met up with him and gave him a hand job.
We recently went through an abortion which messed us both up a lot, but the timing wasn't right and we had everything against us (live 150 miles away from each other, temp contracts, no houses, no savings, never lived together etc). She took it really bad, and at the time felt like I was pressuring her into it. I had said it was what I would have preferred, but also said I'd stand by her whatever her decision. So she hated me and thought the relationship would end anyway as I became distant and closed down a bit.
She met up with this guy a few days later in what she's now calling the darkest days of her life. Said she felt like she had to sabotage the relationship and punish herself for allowing the abortion to go ahead. But mid way through the hand episode suddenly had a change of heart and stopped, hasn't spoken to the guy since.
She says she's never felt so disgusted at her own behaviour or ashamed of herself. And says she's never loved someone the way she loves me. We were getting ready to move to the same city, move in with each other, and I was going to propose to her. But now I'm so heartbroken and betrayed I don't know what to do. I know she's the love of my life, and she's never done anything like this before and I believe she never would again. We really went through a dark time and I'm pretty sure she was clinically depressed.
I don't know if I can ever forgive her or look at her the same way again, but I love her so much it kills me. Part of me can perhaps understand, I know I wasn't totally there for her when she needed me. I'm just so lost. Feeling like the life I have planned with her is fading away.
Sorry for the long post. Just needed to write that stuff down.
[TL;DR] Be pragmatic, give her a second chance if you really love each other.
[Wall Of Text Incoming]
Okay, so what happened here is that your girlfriend nearly got to the point of burning down her life. She's just had an abortion that she didn't have time to process and figure what she wanted. She probably did it for practical reasons, but mostly because she loves you and knows you're not both ready for a family together. You're not there, she's feeling isolated and that you're out the door soon anyway because of the abortion that she decided she maybe shouldn't have had. She says you pressured her, but that's really her being upset at herself for not telling you what she wanted.
So what she did was go off the rails. Destroy the relationship, burn everything down, because she's so unhappy, and she might as well **** everything up so she's got control of when that's going to happen, instead of letting it happen on someone else's schedule. The best way of destroying a relationship, future life together, and the current state of her life is infidelity, because there's rarely a going back from that. So she starts messaging a guy, gets lost in the fantasy, and it distracts her from her unhappiness and the feeling that you're pulling away and are getting ready to abandon her. It escalates into a meeting and some heavy petting, but she comes to her senses (if you believe her). When it comes to the moment, the point of no return, she realises that she doesn't want to lose you.
Understandably you feel upset and betrayed. She blames you as the cause of the problem, when really it's both your lack of communication about the abortion, the fact that you're not together, and the fact that she wanted to bail on the relationship in the worst way possible because she was too weak to deal with you face to face over her fear that you were leaving her soon.
So now it's down to you. Men have a tendency to want to know everything, to revel in the painful details in order to work through them. This will not help. You have to decide if you can stay with her, and work to get that trust back. If you want to stay and try to fix things, or if you want to walk away. It may take a long time, and it might not work out. It's possible you'll stay together, but be broken up and not know it for another six months before you finally decide to go your separate ways. However, if you really love this woman as much as you say, if you really want a future with her, then I suggest you give her a chance.
Don't propose (put that on the back burner), it won't fix anything, and the stress will just make things worse. See if you can see each other more often and regularly, maybe by moving closer to each other or even in together for a while. Try and spend time with each other where you are not thinking about what happened. You may find it's surprisingly easy to replace those bad memories and thoughts with the good ones you will get just by spending time together, if she really is the one for you. It will be hard at first. She will have to be understanding that she's hurt you badly. That look in your eyes that she's never seen before - she put that there and she has to understand she bears the responsibility for healing that, just as much as you have to try and help her recover from the aftermath of the abortion.
I'm not saying this will work. It takes a level of maturity and determination that you won't know you both have. If you can get though the next year, this can fade into a lifetime of memories that no longer hold any power over you. It will become just one of the few "downs" in your relationship that is swamped by the far larger number of "ups" in your life. If you both want to fix things and make your relationship work it can be done. This moment of madness that didn't even end up in sex can be a footnote, a blip in the road to a happy life. It's not an impossibility, if you both want it enough, and if you both make each other happy when you're together.
In every relationship, one or both of you will have multiple instances where you have to decide if you are going to stay and fix things, or leave and look for someone new. This is one of those times for you. Talk to your girlfriend. Tell her how much you love her, and how betrayed you feel. See if she says she wants to try and make things work, if she really does love you as much as she says. Then decide if you are going to stay and fix things for the possibility of the life you wanted with her and the happiness that you wanted to go with it. Alternately, decide if you are going to walk away and start the process of healing from a breakup. Instead of the both of you healing together from something bad that happened to the both of you when neither of you knew how to deal with it properly, you will have to go your separate ways.
Good luck with whatever you decide, but if you really love this woman that much, don't let your current feelings of hurt and betrayal blind you to what you could still build with her. Feelings like that fade over time, especially if there's someone who loves you helping them disappear. If you split up, a year down the line you won't feel this way. If you can get past that, then maybe you could stay together, and still won't feel the same hurt a year from now. The only difference is that you'll still have the woman you want to build a life with, and you will have helped each other get over this bad time and into something better.
It's also worth pointing out that this situation would probably not have happened if you both had your contraception sorted out. As a couple, take control over this aspect of your lives because unexpected pregnancies/abortions are not good for anyone involved. It will make things easier going forwards if this is one less thing to worry about. Otherwise you'll be juggling with dynamite.
Edit: I understand where people are coming from when they tell you to dump her. If anything like that happens again, that would certainly be a pattern of behaviour that couldn't and shouldn't be ignored. It does seem to me that she didn't mean to hurt you, she just meant to hurt herself. She made some mis-steps, and sometimes you have to do that to understand what it important to you. In the end, if you really love her that much, are you going to let a few inches of some guy's dick in her hand ruin the life you want with her? She didn't even **** him.
Can you not see a circumstance where you're in a bad place, feeling alone and about to be abandoned be the one you love, isolated, and you end up stupidly with your hand down some random woman's pants before realising what a self-destructive mistake you are about to make? Would you expect the woman you love and that loves you to bin you off for that, or would you beg to be given another chance to prove what she means to you?
If she really means that much to you, all I'm suggesting is that you consider giving her a second chance. Don't just dismiss her and throw away the life you want without thinking if you can work past this together. It's hard at first, but it's not impossible, and it gets easier as times goes on.
