A waste of 6 years
I apologize for the length of this post but I do want some background about us to be out there just as a guide to how we got here:
We met in college both after experiencing some pretty heavy trauma, covid happened and we stuck it out through that entire quarantine.. One school allowed us back we stayed in the dorms together for a semester or so before renting our first apartment.
These were some of the happiest days and moments of my life - I really felt like I'd found someone I could spend the rest of my life with. We eventually adopted a cat together and then three more would follow throughout the years..
We lived in several apartments together each new one was a step in a direction that I was hoping was progress.. we begin speaking about purchasing a home together.
What lied beneath and what people didn't always see is that I felt like a mother more than a girlfriend pretty much the entirety of our relationship.. I would beg and plead for him to clean up after himself, to care about the house, and to care for the animals the way that they needed to be cared for.. especially with one of the cats who needed special care.
I put all of that aside, and felt that I wasn't going to die on a hill over an empty water bottle on a nightstand.. Even though it was never about the water bottle, it was the principal.
This individual also had a really hard time keeping a job.. he jumped constantly and from those jumps would come very long strenuous gaps of employment.. which then meant the bills fell on to me a lot of the time and I did drain quite a bit of my savings account trying to keep us afloat.
Most recently we moved into housing provided by my job which was a blessing, and he started a job that he felt he could be passionate about.. I finally felt that maybe this is exactly what we needed to get us out of the rut that we had been in for so long... If we had money, maybe we could do more things, spend more time with each other.. try to get back to the happiest days..
But, that all came crashing down pretty quickly.. this person made a friend at work, and I was so excited for him. He didn't have a lot of people and his network, as he is not from this area. This person just happened to be a girl, and although I had not navigated a situation like this before I was willing to be open-minded.
The intensity of their relationship in the beginning alarmed me, the texting would begin right in the morning and would continue throughout the day until bedtime.. every time I looked over he was texting this friend. I did eventually bring it to his attention and told him it was a little uncomfortable, I thought he reciprocated this well I found out later that was not the case..
About a week ago, we got into an argument.. nothing like we have not gotten it before. But I was upset nonetheless. He comes to me in the middle of this argument and says that the friend asked to hang out and get groceries... I was uncomfortable with this, but I told him to go anyway. Because I just wanted him to experience friendship. (This later caused a point of contention because I could never get him to go to the grocery store with me, but he was willing to jump at the opportunity to go with this girl he's known for 1 week).
He leaves to go out at let's say 11:30 a.m.. I didn't hear from him again for 5 hours.. we did have life 360 and I did choose to look there to see where he was, and I found his dot to be sitting in a parking lot.
I tried to give myself the benefit of the doubt and said that the app was glitching, but every time I checked the time that the dot sat there it just got longer... A total of 4.5 hours.
He returned home later that night to tell me that he did not go to the grocery store with this girl but chose to sit in a car at a park with her.. he swore they talked about mental health.. I believed him...
The next day I still had a gut feeling of mine that I had not felt the entire relationship... And in that uncertainty I chose to look through his phone, which I had never done prior..
Within the text messages to this girl I found flirtatious, suggestive, inappropriate exchanges between the two of them.. it read like a budding first relationship.. further down I found photos of her in her underwear under the illusion of showing off a tattoo.. I then found text messages between them of him dragging me through the mud essentially.. and her coming to his aide..
I kicked him out last Sunday.. this has been the hardest thing I have ever gone through. I'm feeling emotions I didn't even know where possible.. most days I feel like I'm suffocating.. his relationship with this girl still continues, and she is engaged also..
I just don't know what to do with all the feelings that I'm feeling... If anybody has gone through anything similar to this and could share some tips on how to get better I would really appreciate it.. tysm..