I figured it was easiest to break this down into different sections. There’s also a TLDR (too long, didn’t read) at the end.
BACKGROUND
I’ve (M37) been with my girlfriend (F33) for 11 years (minus ~7 months apart after infidelity). We generally had a good, happy relationship. I’ve struggled with untreated depression for a long time, which caused most of the issues in our relationship.
BACKGROUND TO INFEDILITY
About 2 years ago, I went through the worst time of my life. My cousin was dying from cancer. Her health degraded for months until she essentially became unconscious. At this time my cousin’s husband asked me if I could help take care of her. She was in such bad shape, we didn’t think she’d make it through the night. I ended up staying there for 11 days. Taking care of her from 8pm-8am. There was family and friends coming and going at the house too. My cousin’s mother has a personality disorder, so she can be a very difficult person on a good day. There was constant drama happening during those 11 days with her and since I was the only person on her side of the family, I acted as the peacemaker when I was taking care of my cousin.
Between my cousin’s impending death and the insane drama caused by my aunt, it was the worst experience of my life. My cousin died in the middle of the night. And the next morning I came home. For the next week, I was completely spaced out. I remember just staring at the wall or putting something on the TV but being zoned out.
INFIDELITY
There were three days of funeral services. On the first day, I sat next to my cousin’s half sister. She was at the house for the 11 days too. I never met her until this all happened. Since we spent so much time together and she knew exactly what went on at the house, I felt a lot of comfort in talking with her. Things went from 0-60 extremely fast. I knew at this point she had a crush on me because one of the other people who was at the house joked about it. I started developing feelings for her. And it escalated into an emotional affair: text messages and emails.
I’ve been in therapy for a year and a half now and I know I was trying to escape from the pain of everything I had witnessed and losing my cousin. Messaging with her took that pain away. I obviously wasn’t thinking rationally at all.
I wasn’t living with my girlfriend, but she came by one night and she knew something was off. And that was my guilt bleeding through. Even though nothing physically happened, I knew this was just as bad in some ways.
GIRLFRIEND FINDS OUT
A couple days later she came to my apartment unannounced, which isn’t like her, and I wasn’t home. I was at my cousin’s husband’s house. My girlfriend was suspicious and went through my iPad. She found a couple of emails I had sent. She called me and cursed me out on the phone and hung up. I was in some kind of weird stunned state, like I checked out. When I got home, my apartment was trashed. iPad smashed, stuff torn up, milk and coffee creamer poured all over my bed and on the carpets. I didn’t even care because I was so out of it and I felt like I deserved it. My girlfriend has never raised her voice to me, so between the screaming at me and the destruction of my apartment, I was just terrified of how big this had become. And with the way I used to deal with thing, well I didn’t deal with it at all. I ran.
Later that morning, my girlfriend came by my apartment and asked me what happened. I told her the truth, but I was very shut down at the time so my responses were very short. She asked me if I still loved her and I said "of course." It was a very short talk. She left, saying she just wanted closure.
A few days later my girlfriend’s sister came to my apartment and was furious. She told me my girlfriend wasn’t sleeping or eating. She said her parents were beside themselves. For me at the time, it sealed it for me. I was emotionally checked out, but I understood intellectually that this was way more than I could deal with (on top of everything I went through a couple weeks before with my cousin), so I shut down and didn’t fight for her or anything. It was like seeing a glass break into a million pieces: there’s no way I could even begin to get them back together again.
AFTERMATH
For a few months, I started dating this woman. I quickly realized this wasn’t anything real. There was some mixture of trauma bonding and escapism, at least on my part after going through the traumatic events with my cousin. As soon as I ended that, I started experiencing a severe depression —the worst I’ve ever felt. It seemed to come from out of nowhere.
What I know now is since I ended my form of escape, I was left to deal with the grief of losing my cousin (which I didn’t deal with at all aside from the initial impact) and even more so, the grief of losing my girlfriend, the woman I loved.
Even though I had a history of depression, this was by far the worst I’ve ever felt. I had suicidal thoughts, which wasn’t common for me. I looked for a therapist and started getting treatment.
REACHING OUT
After a couple months, I started feeling better myself, but the guilt and shame I felt regarding my then ex-girlfriend was almost unbearable. I was forced to deal with this all head on. I felt especially bad about the way I left things. I wrote my ex a long email explaining everything in detail. My therapist told me it might not be a good idea if she already moved on, so I texted her sister and asked if she thought it would be ok if I emailed her. I knew she hated me, so if it wasn’t ok, she would have said so. She simply replied "send it." And so I did.
The email I sent was pretty jumbled. The main message I wanted to get across was expressing how sorry I was, explaining what I was going through before all of this happened, and communicating the shame and guilt I felt. Days and weeks went by without a response.
During this time, I thought about a lot of the things I wrote. I was also still in therapy and recovering, so I was becoming a lot more aware of what I wanted. So, after talking to over with my therapist, I decided to write one final email. This time expressing how I still loved her. I knew I did when I sent the first email, but my main priority with that was explaining and apologizing. In this email, I ended it with "I won’t contact you again after this because I don’t want to interfere with your life, but I knew I needed to tell you this or I’d regret it forever."
About a week later, I got a reply. My heart started pounding out of my chest. This was the first time I heard from her in nearly 6 months, since everything went down.
She basically said she didn’t know why she didn’t respond to the first email, but she thinks she wanted to hear what I said in the second email. She told me how horrible it was for her and how the pain affected her. She told me she wanted to hate me for a long time, but couldn’t. She told me she wanted to meet in person to talk.
FINDING OUR WAY BACK
I experienced so many emotions reading that email. I’ll never forget it. We met at a neutral location to talk a week later. We spent about 5 hours talking about everything. During the talk, I told her I wanted her back. She told me she didn’t think she could be in a relationship with me again. She said she doesn’t think she could just be friends because there was too much love still there. I told her I understood and respected her decision, but also said I wasn’t giving up on us and that I would fight for her until she told me not to. To my surprise, she kissed me before she left and told me I could text her if I wanted.
As strange as it sounds, I still feel like I didn’t deserve to text her (something about having a direct line to her like that felt wrong to me). She emailed me and told me she wanted to meet again, so a week later we met at the same spot. We talked for nearly 8 hours.
These meetings took place every week for about 6 weeks. Always lasting 5-8 hours. Things started feeling like we were back together. We went on dates and were intimate. It took more time for other things.
There was a lot of ups and downs. If something happened to remind her of the pain she felt, she would put up a wall and be distant for some days. So for awhile it was like taking 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, 3 steps forward…
It’s been just over a year since our first meet. We’re doing better than ever before. The relationship is solid and the love is strong. The primary issue with we is not necessarily between the two of us, it’s with her family.
PROBLEMS WITH HER FAMILY
My girlfriend lives at home. She’s essentially never left. She works 3 jobs (putting in a lot of hours for a professional certification) and doesn’t have to pay much rent, so she has the opportunity to save money.
When she was in pain, her whole family witnessed it. They were all aware of what happened and they took care of her.
The only person she initially told we were talking again, and then getting back together, was her sister. She’s very close with her sister. I was very close with her sister before all this. Initially, her sister was all about us getting back together. She said "it sounds like a love story from a movie or something." That faded after a few weeks to "are you really sure about this? Why not date someone else?" I completely understood where she was coming from.
After a month of us talking and essentially being back together, she became very against it. She said she doesn’t think she could be around me again. And basically whenever I got brought up, she would always say the same kinds of things: how could you forgive him, I can’t be around him, if you get married I don’t think I can be at your wedding, etc. It’s been very hard on my girlfriend. She doesn’t even bring the subject up unless her sister brings it up.
She didn’t tell her parents until about a month. Her father essentially said he just wants her to be happy. He wasn’t happy about any of this, but my girlfriend thought it went well overall. When she explained what I was going through when this happened (the turmoil from my cousin’s death), he said "hurt people hurt people." Her mom pretty much had the same reaction as her father.
So we’re back together, but not exactly back because there’s little family support. The dynamics with her family are unique. I’ve always known this, but I didn’t think much of it until my therapist and friends kept asking why they were so involved in all of this. And I get it. I can see what they mean, but I also know the other side and understand the way they are as a family.
My girlfriend’s best friend has really been the only person in favor of us being back together. Her take is, love like this doesn’t happen all the time, we were generally happy for a decade together, and I made one terrible mistake, so if I was showing remorse and change, she supported it.
Her best friend also mentioned what my therapist and friends had mentioned about her family. She thinks they’re too "enmeshed," which is what’s making this extra difficult.
It’s so strange from my perspective because I have all these emotions. Like with her sister, I still love her like my own sister, but it’s a weird feeling when someone you love hates you. And I don’t blame her for it. It’s also difficult for me because I see how it affects my girlfriend. Her sister says she just wants her to be happy, but it feels like there’s an asterisk after that (as long as it doesn’t involve me). My therapist’s take is she’s entitled to feel however she feels, but the problem is her continuously saying negative things about my girlfriend’s decision.
And I get it. It’s just weird because I know *I’m* the one who caused all of this. I put everyone is these positions, so I still feel like I have no ground to stand on sometimes. I’m very careful when I talk to my girlfriend about this stuff because I never want to come across as being manipulative, which she knows I’m not but I can’t help feeling that way.
CONCLUSION
I’m just so lost on what I should be doing in regards to her and her family. I don’t want to push my girlfriend, but sometimes I wonder if I’m not doing enough. Should I be pushing her to confront these things? Intellectually it makes sense, but it doesn’t feel right.
It would be so helpful to hear other people’s experience I’m regards to infidelity and specifically on the family dynamic side of it.
Even though I wrote a wall of text, obviously I left a ton of details out. If you need clarification on anything, let me know.
And thank you for reading this. It took me a week to put all this together, so it means a lot. I’m also glad I found this community where people are dealing with similar issues.
TL;DR: I cheated on my girlfriend of 10 years. I was going through the worst time of my life after the passing of my cousin. I had an opportunity for an emotional escape and I took it without thinking. It went on for a week and a half (moved very fast). Girlfriend was suspicious of how I was acting, went through my emails and saw it. She destroyed my apartment while enraged. Talked briefly after, but I was shut down. I felt like I broke something that could never be put back together and ran away from the problem, and then continued talking to the person I emotionally cheated on her with. After realizing this wasn’t anything real, I ended it. Spent a couple months in a deep depression. Started getting help with therapy. After some months, I reached out to my girlfriend. We spent a long time talking about everything and slowly made our way back to one another. We’re doing better than ever, but her family (particularly her sister) isn’t on the same page as her, which is causing a lot of pain (opening old wounds) and anxiety for my girlfriend (and it’s obviously not great for me). Looking for advice on how I should be handling all of this.
