u/Due_Avocado_4937

I'm a PA student at a well-regarded program, currently in clinical year with 4 rotations left. Overall I love this path, but something has been sitting heavy with me and I wanted to see if anyone else has worked through it.

PA school is 2 years without residency, while, MD/DO is 4 years of med school plus 3+ years of residency. That's a massive gap in training time. I think I could make peace with it if new grad PAs went into, say, a required 1-year residency before practicing — that would at least feel proportionate. But as it stands, our education just doesn't feel comparable to an MD's, and yet in a lot of settings (family med especially) a brand new PA is doing essentially the same job as a physician (in most fields) who trained for 7+ years. We have a supervising physician on paper, sure, but in practice that supervision can be pretty loose depending on the state and the practice. How is that gap allowed to exist?

I want to be clear this isn't me second-guessing my career choice. For context: I was premed my entire life until college. I'm a woman from a pretty family-oriented culture, and I knew early on that my career would come second to my family and to raising kids someday. Choosing the MD route felt like gambling with time with my future children — the years of med school plus residency just didn't line up with the timeline I wanted for my personal life. PA felt like the responsible choice for me.

But now that I'm in clinical rotations and seeing what the actual day-to-day scope looks like, the mismatch between "2 years of training" and "functionally practicing like a physician" is messing with my head a bit. Anyone else go through this crisis in clinical year? Did it get better once you were actually practicing and had more reps under your belt? Would genuinely love to hear from PAs a few years out.

My fiancé (29M)and I (26F) have been together since high school (12 years) and were each other’s only sexual partners. About a year ago, I confessed that I cheated on him once in high school early in our relationship. I never told him because I was ashamed, terrified to lose him, and honestly compartmentalized it for years. He felt deeply betrayed not only by the cheating but by the years of concealment, which I completely understand.

For context, during the first few years of our relationship he struggled with insecurity because I would seek attention on Instagram - nothing super crazy just like hearting compliments, responding to texts, etc. I never physically cheated besides that one incident in high school, but I know my behavior contributed to trust issues early on. Around 5 years into our relationship, we had a major conversation about our future and I fully committed to him and the life we wanted together(I was 20 at the time). From that point forward, I genuinely never seeked outside attention again and truly saw him as my future husband.

Anyways, after I told him about the cheating incident last year, he started getting depressed about it but also very close to a girl he knew. Over 6 months time they became emotionally attached, and he eventually kissed her a few weeks before abruptly ending our relationship.

After a few weeks apart, we decided to reconcile, but it’s been extremely rough for months trying to get back to where we once were. I spent that time taking accountability, trying to rebuild trust, trying to forgive myself, and trying to stabilize a relationship that felt shattered. We had endless conversations about honesty, betrayal, integrity, and deception. He often took the moral high ground and made it clear that my lie destroyed his sense of safety and reality.

I just found out yesterday that while we were broken up for a few weeks, he slept with the same girl. What’s really messing me up is not just the sex itself, but the emotional dynamic surrounding all of this. I directly asked him multiple times if anything happened between them physically and he denied it every time until now. He said he doesn’t love her and it was just a way to get back at me for what I did. But he lied to my face and deceived me - just like I did him but the difference is he did it while we were having endless conversations on trust, honesty and rebuilding our relationship. 

Now I feel physically sick, heartbroken, angry because he lied to me, let someone in our sacred space, and did it all while taking the moral high ground while I absorbed blame for the fall of our relationship. At the same time, I know I caused real damage too and I’m not trying to paint myself as innocent.

I genuinely can’t tell anymore whether this relationship is deeply damaged but salvageable, or whether we’ve crossed too many lines and hurt each other too much to ever feel safe and peaceful together again.

Has anyone actually recovered from something like this where both people deeply hurt each other? Or is this usually the point where a relationship is fundamentally broken?