Cheated on by First Love (Long)

[lorien]

Hey everyone, this is my first post; I joined this site so that I could hopefully get some advice on how to cope with my current situation. I'm sorry this is so long, but any kind words or advice would be hugely appreciated.

 

So, to start from the beginning... I'm currently 17 and a first-year in university. My now ex-boyfriend and I started going out in grade 12; he had had other girlfriends before, but he was my first ever boyfriend. I wasn't even sure if I liked him at first... he asked me to go to a school dance with him and I thought that he was really nice so I said yes. After that things started getting more serious... he never officially asked me out, we just sort of had a mutual understanding that we were together. It might be that I was simply a young, naive girl, but I came to love him, and he told me that he loved me too. He would send me cute emails and he was always understanding if I told him that I wasn't comfortable with anything. I know that doesn't sound like anything too serious, but I can't even begin to describe the feelings that I developed for this guy. We talked about what we would do together in the future, and I truly believed that we would be together forever.

 

So all that was going fine for a little over 9 months, then university started. We are going to the same university, but he is in engineering so he had a different frosh than me. During that time, it really felt like we were growing apart. He stopped sending me cute texts and emails, and I was always the one making an effort to start conversations. Then less than two weeks in to the start of school, he told me one night that he had cheated on me at a party the night before with this fourth-year girl who he had introduced me to the week before. Of course I couldn't imagine what life would be like without him, so I was willing to forgive him, but then he broke up with me saying that he is a terrible person and that I deserve better. Of course I appreciated his honesty and the fact that he seemed to be doing this because he really cared about me. He seemed sincerely sorry at the time; he even broke down crying, and I still wanted to stay friends because he was my first love so of course I didn't want to push him out of my life.

 

That was a little over a month ago. However, I found out that he is now really good friends with the girl who he cheated on me with, and he doesn't see why I'm upset about this since they're 'just friends.' Am I right in thinking that if he really cared about me he would understand why them being friends is only making it harder for me to get over him, and that he wouldn't want to be friends with the person who helped ruin our relationship? As well, please tell me I am not the only one who is disgusted by the fact that a fourth-year girl would make out with a first-year who she's know for less than two weeks and who she knew had a girlfriend.

 

I just really don't know how to deal with this... I deleted him off of facebook yesterday since I can't resist the urge to check on what he's doing and seeing her posts on his wall tears my heart out. I also saved all of our emails and prom pictures to a memory stick so that I could delete them off my computer (so I wouldn`t keep looking at them), and hid stuff that reminded me of him in the back of my closet. I know they say that all of this is supposed to help, but I also really don`t want to push him out of my life even though he deserves it... but I also know that I can`t be friends with him as long as he is friends with her.

 

Can anyone relate to this or does anyone have any advice on how to cope with this kind of situation? Looking back I feel like his honesty and his hopes that I would get over him and feel better were only so that he could stop feeling guilty about what he did, not because he really cared about me...

Edited October 26, 2011 by lorien