Girlfriend with other guy when broke up

[elij]

My girlfriend broke up with me after about 5 months together because she said I was overly jealous. She finally had enough when I accused her of wanting to be with one of her male friends. I suspected that because in an earlier time, when we she threatened to break up with me over another matter, she said she was considering going with this male friend for the weekend somewhere to get away and "forget me." I also thought that she was definitely too nice to the dude, who I did not know much about. All that said, I believe now that I was completely out of line -- I was wrong. Still, she broke up with me. From the time she broke up with me, however, I felt the loss and had tremendous regret. I declared over and over my love and regrets and apologies. It had negligble effect. Finally, a few days or so after breaking up and attempting a reconciliation, she told me she was not sure if she still loved me and wanted time alone to think. That night, I mentioned to a friend we had broke up and he came to my house unannounced with a colleague from her work. This colleague told me she had reason to believe my girlfriend was having an affair with someone else from their work (not the same person I accused her of liking). She said that it was in the rumor mill at their workplace. Anyhow, I flipped out, called her up, she came over, and a huge quarrel erupted amongst us all -- that experience soured my girlfriend far greater still. She insisted that she had never had any such affair with anyone. But because of the nastiness of the accusation, and my role in bringing that accusation to light, she became incredibly angry toward me and threatened to go out with the guy to "just show everyone they were right." She also became extremely angry at me because she said I did not defend her when my friend berated and insulted her for the unproved "cheating." The whole thing seemed to drive away any possibility of her getting back with me. Still, I persisted in trying to get back with her in the ensuing weeks, seeing her practically every day and in fact we continued -albeit less frequently - to have sexual relations during that time. 3-4 weeks or so later, we got back together after an incredibly painful time for me. Now, a month later after we got back together the guy who she had threatened to go out with calls me and tells me that, in fact, he was with my girlfriend. After confronting my girlfriend, she confessed and said that she went out with him about 4 times but that they only kissed and that it was "nothing." This guy, however, says he is in love with her. I have not broken with my girlfriend over this, and am trying to put this behind me. While its true we were broken up, and therefore this was not technically cheating, if in fact that relation was during the dates that my girlfriend says it was, it still bothers me that 1) she lied to me about it all this time, and 2) she had gone out with that guy while we were in fact in the process of reconciliation which did include periodic sexual relations. Now, she promises that she will not lie to me anymore and that I can trust her, but...What do you folks think about this?

[xpaperxcutx]

So why are you still with her? There is clearly a huge trust issue here, with her cheating, your jealousy. There was no resolution to your fighting with her about her supposed "affair" and because you put it aside, it's now came back to bite you in the a**.

a) you could have either confront her on it or have a deepseated conversation to get the truth out in the opening

or b) don't confront her and continue letting this haunt you

 

Either way, I don't see it in your favor. Confronting her might bring about another argument, which you clearly want to avoid. But your suspicions might lead to sleepless nights thinking whether you gf cheated or not. Personally I say have a talk with her. If she has nothing to hide, then she will be more than willing to tell you the truth. It's her avoiding the issue that's gonna be hardhitting.

[elij]

hello paperxcutz, thanks for the reply.

i have confronted her on it, we talked about it for many hours when it first arose. though, i still suspect she is not telling me the entire story. now, she goes beserk if i try to bring up the topic again. she says if it is going to keep bothering me then maybe we should break. perhaps she is right about that. i don't want to break, i love her a lot. she seems fairly committed to the relationship now, we have recovered lost ground in recent weeks.

all that said, i wonder if i am being a fool by accepting what seems to me was likely cheating. she pointed out, however, when we talked it over, that we were broken up and she further adds that at the time she did not think she would get back together with me.

i am struggling with the image of her doing this to me. asking myself how this nightmare happened. i feel as if i have been insulted by this, and can't understand how she would do this to me. on the other hand, she is with me now, she came back to me, and she is treating me good again. we seem to be on a good road again -- so, i am trying to put it behind me.

i am a fool to put this behind me?

[xpaperxcutx]

hello paperxcutz, thanks for the reply.

i have confronted her on it, we talked about it for many hours when it first arose. though, i still suspect she is not telling me the entire story. now, she goes beserk if i try to bring up the topic again. she says if it is going to keep bothering me then maybe we should break. perhaps she is right about that. i don't want to break, i love her a lot. she seems fairly committed to the relationship now, we have recovered lost ground in recent weeks.

all that said, i wonder if i am being a fool by accepting what seems to me was likely cheating. she pointed out, however, when we talked it over, that we were broken up and she further adds that at the time she did not think she would get back together with me.

i am struggling with the image of her doing this to me. asking myself how this nightmare happened. i feel as if i have been insulted by this, and can't understand how she would do this to me. on the other hand, she is with me now, she came back to me, and she is treating me good again. we seem to be on a good road again -- so, i am trying to put it behind me.

i am a fool to put this behind me?

 

Okay, so she kissed the guy when you guys were broken up? So then it really does not constitute cheating then. When a couple breaks up, it literally means they have no obligation to the previous person they were with. I dont see why you should be so hung up over it. Just at least be glad it was just a kiss and not something more. She does sound very sincere, so I suggest you not bring this topic up again, and put it behind you. It seems there's no problem and you should not let it be something that might casue a rift between you two.

[elij]

Good advice.

Still, I have fairly good reasons to suspect she may have been with the guy a few times as well during the beginning of our "official" return together. No idea what happened between them, but it makes me uncomfortable all the way around. We also have friends in common: I am somewhat ashamed and embarrassed by what has happened.

I want to confront her at least one more time, but am afraid she will explode if when I bring up the topic. I suppose she knows that, if she did cheat, and it was more than a kiss, and then she does tell me, we'd have to break right there. In some ways, I don't want to know. She says she will be faithful to me, and that when we were together she never lied to me and won't lie to me now (the lying afterwards was to cover up this relation). But if I accept this all to easily will she lose respect for me? I guess I should let it go, but this is pretty hard to deal with. So far, am trying to put it behind me.

[elij]

hello, update, just found out yesterday that the day before my girlfriend broke with me the guy she went out with afterwards while we were "broken up" tried to or did kiss her in a disco while at the same time persistently asking her to go out with him. this is likely, id guess, a big factor in her leaving me -- though she denies it.

i was also told yesterday by someone who works with her that when i was away for five days on work that she had a few parties in my house and in one of these this colleague of hers said she saw my girlfriend in bed with the guy. my girlfriend denies it and says that there was only one party and at this party nothing happened and that as well many people were there and can verify nothing happened...

she denies that she ever cheated on me when we were together. i want to give her the benefit of the doubt on that...

she also still maintains that they only ever kissed, though she admitted to me last night that they were alone together once, she slept one night in the house of this guys parents, and they fooled around in bed id gater, but she said she rejected the guy when he attemtped to have sex with her. hard to believe? she says she said my name during that and he got mad and then they argued and then stopped. but my girlfriend does have an imaginative way of lying sometimes, too, i believe. though, she says she has no reason to lie to me now and we are clear, i made it clear to her, that the lying needs to stop.

in any case, i think its all quite possible she did cheat on me, and that she may have had sex with him, though she still keeps denying it.

i now feel tremendous shame because many people we know where we live know that this happened. they are saying that she cheated me, left me for this guy -- even though my girlfriend denies up and down to me that this is not what happened.

it hurts me to think that she liked this guy more than me at the time.

and, all that time, we also were having sex and going out while in a reconciliation period.

i guess what id like to know from people is, should i try to move forward with her -- i love her -- or am i being a fool and losing my self-respect if i do that?? i feel shame now when i see people we know -- if i stay with her how do i overcome that shame?? i want to stay with her, because i still love her, but is that right?

[BalancenLuv20]

When I broke up with my ex there were many periods afterwards where I was really skeptical of how "faithful" she had been during the relationship...a big reason i dumped her were these messages she sent this guy on myspace that said "i love you." She said he was a really close guy friend and it meant nothing, but I told her that was absolute crap and totally unacceptable...after the breakup i started to find pics of her and this guy on myspace together with her leaning on him and in one, he was staring into her eyes while she leaned on him...provactive pictures in my mind and these were dated back when we were together and i wrote her a nasty email telling her all the pics i had uncovered and I had proof that she had lied to me about her faithfulness...

 

she replied and told me that this was bs and wanted me out of her life for good...A few weeks later I called her and apologized and told her i wanted to meet to clear up the air..we did and she said these pics didn't mean anything and that she never cheated on me... but she confessed that she hooked up with him while we were on a break towards the end of our r-ship which hurt like hell and only made me more suspicious she had feelings for him and was involved with him while we were dating...she constantly tried to downplay this guy's role in her life while we were dating and even afterwards when we were in contact... "o he's just a friend" to "o i only have a small crush on him" to "o we're together now, but it's nothing too serious" to one day about a month later seeing a comment she wrote on his myspace page stating that she loves him to death and that he's her one in 6 billion...this all within only a couple months of each other...

 

my point is all of this caused me to overanalyze her possible unfaithful ways and it caused me immense amounts of pain over a long period of time...my point is you are going to beat yourself to a bloody pulse if you keep analyzing this situation...if you cannot trust her than the healthiest thing you can do in all honesty in this situation is just end it with her...in my case i obviously had some major issues letting go and moving on and it is important that if you do come to this kind of decision you don't regret it like I did...good luck

[elij]

thanks for the comments, balancenluv20.

your tale sounds like something i could have done with my girlfriend. our breakup, i believe, has helped me put my jealous behaviour under control. the problem now is moreso what else has happened with her.

have since discovered, after a serious grill session with my girlfriend last night, that on new years eve, she decided to break with me and then immediately afterward hooked up with the guy who she went out with when we were broken up. that, to me, appears to be linked. i suspect their relation likely began in the last week or two december, when we were still together, but she denies that. tho, she admitted to me last night that the guy "tried" to kiss her when she had a party at my home when i was away...tried..

she also admitted to me last night that she had sex with the guy one night, and that they went out at least 6 times together, and after we officially got back together in late january, she kissed him goodbye, a serious long kiss according to another account, in a bus terminal when the guy went off on a work trip elsewhere.

i also have good reasons to highly suspect she may have hooked with him on at least two occasions after we got back together though she vehemently denies it.

all that said, my girlfriend says she loves me, wants to try to make things work, wants to learn from the past, says she never intended to stay with this other guy, says she only wants to be with me, in other words, she got back together with me for the right reasons i believe and if we could somehow remove this experience with the other guy i am 100 percent sure we would be very happy.

still, i am completely destroyed by what she has in done, her in part leaving me for another man. "in part," because it was also a consequence of our deteriorating relations over my jealousy.

i can't get out of my head imaginary images of her kissing and having sex with this guy. it is killing me. i am also somewhat ashamed -- people we know i believe must think i am crazy and a fool to take her back after what she has done. and, i believe she is still not telling me the whole story. at the same time, i really know abd believe that if i we could put this behind me then we would be super happy.

what you folks think?

[Trojan John]

I think that you are doing yourself a huge disservice is you don't kick her a$$ to the curb. Red flag after red flag pops up and you ignore them. Save what's left of your testicles and RUN, don't walk the hell away.

 

Seriously though, ask yourself what makes her a good gf vs. what makes her a bad gf. Look at it objectively.

[elij]

Update: I have not kicked her to the curb. Instead, am trying to give her a second chance. She seems sincere in her feelings for me, which also are likely stronger than they were when we were together before.

 

That said, I still believe she has not told me the whole truth about what happened and when with the other guy. I want to ask her again about what went on, but I know she just wants to forget what happened and move forward. For me, though, the length and depth of her relation with this other guy bothers me greatly. Its very difficult to love her the same way after all this. I constantly think about what she may have been doing with him during our break and in what appears to be a few encounters at the beginning of our return together. I know that she has completely cut ties with the guy. Still, its hard for me to get a grip on her actually allowing another man to be with her in such a way and so soon.

 

Should I attempt to find out more about exactly what happened in her relation with this guy? Should I forgive someone who, in part, left me for someone else and had some intimate relations with that person during our break and at least once or twice after our return (though she denies it)? The second question in part stems from my belief that, if she had genuinely loved me before, she would never had been with this guy so soon. She says she wanted to be with him, but that she later regretted the relation. But it just hurts incredibly so that she did what she did. Is there a limit on what one should forgive when getting back together? In any case, I want to give her a second chance though rationally I know that what she did to me was pretty horrible. But as someone said above, we were broken up, she had the decency to break with me immediately once she started up with that guy -- though it still is a rude slap to me and us that she did this regardless of whether or not we were having problems over my jealousy in the days prior. I guess only time will tell, but I'd appreciate your thoughts on this "second chance."