He cheated on me for 3 months, but in the end, I’m the one who feels guilty
We’ll start from the very beginning. I met this guy online on a dating website, let’s call him John. We had a wonderful relationship for about six months, until I found out that for three of those six months, he had been cheating on me.
Since we didn’t live together and just spent the night at each other’s places very often (4–5 times a week), he always had excuses: he’d say he was staying at his sister’s place, going out drinking with friends, or being kept overnight at work. And I believed him. I believed him until a girl messaged me. The girl he had been cheating on me with. As it turned out, he wasn’t just sleeping with her for three months, he was actually dating her.
Even after that, I didn’t leave. I tried to, but I thought, “He loves me so much, he does everything for me, people make mistakes, maybe he just messed up once in his life.” We got back together for a month and even moved in together. But the moment we moved in, everything went to hell.
I wasn’t ready to live away from my parents. He barely helped around the house about 80% of the household responsibilities were on me, and I even helped him with part of his 20%. We technically lived on his money, but we mostly ate food our parents gave us. I paid for my own wants and needs, or my parents helped me, since I’m a student and only receive a small scholarship. So it wouldn’t be fair to say I lived entirely at his expense.
At one point, I got fed up and left him for a guy I had liked for a very long time, but things had never worked out between us. That relationship ended peacefully, and two months later, fate brought John and me back together. We started living together again.
Daily life was exactly the same. I was constantly anxious that he would cheat on me again.
Then came my birthday. He was away on a business trip. No gift, no flowers. When he came back, he gave me a cheap perfume. No flowers, no congratulations, just perfume. But I was happy even with that.
As time passed, I stopped feeling attracted to him. We only had sex when he wanted it, and I agreed mostly so he wouldn’t cheat on me again. Naturally, that hurt me.
Yesterday, I tried to talk to him about the fact that I no longer wanted intimacy with him and that I wanted us to try living separately for a while in hopes of saving our relationship.
He started yelling at me, saying that I didn’t love him, that I was only with him out of pity, that he would sit around like an idiot waiting for me to leave him. He called me stupid, said I was acting childish, that I was running away again instead of trying to solve our problems, that I was living in the past, and that I didn’t care how much he loved me.
I raised my voice back at him and brought up the time he had been dating another girl for three months. He got even angrier and eventually punched the wardrobe right next to my ear while I was standing in front of it.
At that moment, I packed my things and ran away in tears.
Was I really wrong in this situation, and did I destroy our relationship? I feel guilty about it. Even though I understand that I’m probably not the only one at fault, I still feel like I did something wrong.