u/adhilomi

I’m 30F and my now ex-boyfriend is 41M. We were together for about a year and a half, and until recently I genuinely believed he was the person I was going to spend my life with.
I’m a doctor. I worked extremely hard to get where I am and I work very long hours, including night shifts. My ex also has a respectable, stable career, but throughout our relationship he repeatedly belittled my profession and my achievements. He sometimes made me feel as though what I had accomplished wasn’t that impressive, despite the fact that I work considerably more hours than he does.
I’m not saying this because I think my career makes me better than him. It doesn’t. But it hurt that the person who was supposed to be proud of me sometimes seemed to need to diminish something I had worked my entire adult life for.
The strange thing is that our first six months together were probably the happiest six months of my life.
He was loving and affectionate. He made me feel chosen. We talked about a future together, marriage, family and having a child. He told me he loved me. We eventually lived together.
And I believed him.
I wasn’t suspicious. I didn’t check his phone. I didn’t track his location. I didn’t investigate women on social media. I didn’t want a relationship in which I had to behave like a detective.
I loved him, and when the man I loved told me something, I chose to believe him.
Then things gradually started becoming strange.
He would sometimes disappear or become unavailable. There were periods when he would disappear for days. Sometimes I would be working a night shift and receive a message from him at 1 a.m. saying that he was leaving and didn’t know when he would be back.
One incident that I now see very differently happened around Easter.
He told me that his mother had been in an accident.
I believed him.
Later, I spoke to his mother and found out that no such accident had happened.
When I confronted him and asked him where he had actually been, his answer was simply:
“Out in the world.”
He never gave me a real explanation.
Even then, I did not start checking his phone, tracking him or investigating him.
I was confused and hurt, but I still wanted to trust the man I loved rather than become suspicious of everything he did.
Looking back now, knowing what I have since discovered about another woman, that incident feels completely different. I keep wondering where he actually was that Easter and why he needed to invent an accident involving his own mother to explain his absence.
As the relationship became increasingly unstable, so did I.
I have a very strong fear of abandonment, and I want to be completely transparent about my own behavior. Eventually I became extremely anxious.
I called him. I sent him messages. Sometimes repeatedly. I desperately wanted reassurance and explanations.
I am not proud of every reaction I had toward the end of this relationship.
But I also don’t believe I was simply “suffocating” a perfectly normal partner for no reason. I was reacting to someone I loved repeatedly disappearing, giving explanations that sometimes turned out not to be true, and making the relationship feel increasingly unstable.
Eventually I did calm down considerably.
At one point I actually asked him directly:
“What did I do wrong in this relationship?”
His answer was:
“Nothing.”
And this is where I am struggling to reconcile the man I thought I knew with what happened afterward.
About a month before he secretly moved out, we were texting about difficult things he had experienced in his life. I told him I believed him, understood him and that if he ever couldn’t sleep at 3 a.m. because he needed someone to talk to, I would always be there.
He replied:
“You are my miracle. Honestly.”
And then:
“You are everything a man could ever want.”
On another occasion he told me:
“You could have anyone. You are every man’s dream.”
These weren’t messages from the honeymoon phase at the beginning of the relationship.
He was saying these things about a month before he left.
Then he secretly moved out.
And eventually I started discovering things.
There is another woman.
I had actually seen her at his place, but initially I didn’t understand the extent of it. Later, I found more and more pieces that seemed to fit together.
She lives in another part of the country. She works in a profession that gives her a long summer break, which suddenly made some of his behavior during the summers make much more sense to me.
Then I discovered something that completely broke me.
Apparently, last summer he attended a wedding with this woman.
At the time, I had no idea.
There are other things as well — their interactions online, things I saw with my own eyes, and details I later connected. I now have reason to believe their relationship may have overlapped with ours for at least a year.
If that timeline is correct, then while I was sleeping next to him, loving him, helping him, planning a future with him and believing his explanations, there was another relationship happening in the background.
And I had no idea.
I also supported him financially when he was struggling.
He asked me for money several times. I gave it willingly because I loved him. When he needed help, my immediate reaction was to help him.
When he moved out and told me he was having financial difficulties, I even gave him a television because he said he didn’t have one where he was staying.
I wasn’t keeping score.
At the time, I genuinely did not want the money back. I wasn’t lending it to him as leverage or expecting something in return.
I loved him.
I thought you helped the person you planned to build a life with when they were struggling.
After discovering everything, however, that generosity started to feel humiliating.
I found myself thinking: I was helping this man financially while he may have been maintaining another relationship behind my back.
Toward the end, things became increasingly ugly between us.
There were arguments, but what ultimately pushed me to block him was the way he started speaking to me.
He insulted me. He called me degrading names. I reached a point where I couldn’t tolerate being spoken to like that anymore.
So I blocked him.
I want to be fair about my own behavior here.
By that point I was extremely emotionally dysregulated. I was hurt, angry, confused and desperate for answers. I wasn’t always calm. I called and messaged him when he disappeared, and after everything fell apart I also said things out of anger that I normally wouldn’t say.
But the block wasn’t some calculated attempt to punish or manipulate him.
At that moment, after being insulted and humiliated by someone I still loved, it was the only way I felt I could stop the interaction.
He subsequently blocked me as well.
And that effectively cut off any possibility of having a real conversation once I started putting together what had actually been happening with the other woman.
That is one of the things I struggle with now.
By the time I understood the extent of the apparent betrayal, I couldn’t even confront him properly or ask him to explain it.
I was left alone with all these pieces of information, trying to reconstruct a relationship I had believed was real.
I’m not pretending I handled the ending perfectly.
I didn’t.
But what is destroying me isn’t simply that he left me or that there is another woman.
It’s that I no longer know which parts of my own relationship were real.
I keep going backwards through memories.
Was he talking to her when he was lying beside me?
When he said he loved me, did he mean it?
When he told me I was his miracle and everything a man could ever want, was he already involved with her?
When we talked about marriage and having a child, did he actually believe in that future?
How can someone tell you that you are everything he has ever wanted while apparently maintaining another relationship?
And perhaps the worst part is that I still love him.
I don’t want the relationship back anymore. I don’t think I could ever trust him again after what I now know.
And yet some irrational part of me still wants him to contact me.
Not necessarily because I would take him back.
I think I want him to tell me that I mattered.
That what we had wasn’t completely fake.
That he understands what he did to me.
That somewhere inside him there is at least some regret for hurting someone who genuinely loved him.
I want to know that losing me hurts him too.
I know that may sound pathetic, but it’s where I am right now.
The truth is that I am completely devastated.
I am depressed. I feel empty. I cry constantly. Sometimes the emotional pain becomes so intense that I physically feel sick and nauseous. I go through my days and continue working because I have to, but internally I feel like something has been ripped out of me.
I don’t know how to recover from this.
And I keep questioning myself.
Maybe I really was too anxious.
Maybe I called too much when he disappeared.
Maybe my fear of abandonment made everything worse.
Maybe I should have handled certain situations differently.
But then I remember that when I directly asked him what I had done wrong in our relationship, he himself said:
“Nothing.”
And I remember that I wasn’t suspicious at the beginning.
I wasn’t checking his phone. I wasn’t tracking him. I wasn’t accusing him of cheating.
Even when things started not adding up, my instinct was still to believe him and give him the benefit of the doubt.
I trusted him because I loved him.
And now I feel almost punished for having done what I thought you were supposed to do in a relationship: trust the person you were building your life with.
Part of me keeps thinking that if I had investigated him earlier, maybe I would have discovered everything and saved myself all this pain.
But I don’t want that to be the lesson I take from this.
I don’t want this experience to turn me into a paranoid person who investigates every future partner.
I don’t want to check phones, locations and social media accounts.
I want to be able to believe someone when they look me in the eyes and tell me they love me.
But after this, I honestly don’t know how I will ever trust my own judgment again.
The first six months with this man were some of the most beautiful months of my life.
If you had asked me then whether this man was capable of doing what I now believe he did, I would have said absolutely not.
I would have trusted him with my life.
And maybe that is what scares me the most.
I have always had a fear of abandonment. But I still chose to trust him instead of becoming controlling or paranoid.
And then the exact thing I was most afraid of happened.
I was lied to, replaced and apparently betrayed for much longer than I ever imagined.
Right now, I genuinely cannot imagine going through something like this again.
So I suppose my questions are:
For people who have experienced long-term infidelity or discovered that their partner had been living some kind of double life, how did you reconcile the loving person you knew with the person who was capable of deceiving you?
Were the loving moments necessarily fake?
Does my behavior toward the end sound like I was genuinely suffocating him, or like someone becoming increasingly anxious in response to a relationship that had become profoundly unstable?
How do you stop blaming yourself for not discovering the truth sooner when the reason you didn’t discover it was that you trusted the person you loved?
And how do you ever trust someone again when the person who betrayed you was once the person you trusted most?
I don’t need people to tell me I’m perfect.
I know I’m not.
I know I made mistakes in how I reacted when everything started falling apart.
But I loved this man with everything I had, and right now I feel completely broken by what I discovered.
I just need some perspective from people who aren’t emotionally involved in this situation.