Almost three years ago, I posted in this thread about how I went on a third date with a woman and we talked about having kids and she and I were on the same page that it was really important to both of us. More dates went well, and we entered into a relationship, moving in together in February 2020. A few weeks ago, that relationship came to an end.
She was very smart, pretty funny, fairly responsible, and comfortable to live with. There were a couple things I didn't like about her - such as her hesitancy to spend time with the rest of my family and poor habit of mixing alcohol with her medication that she absolutely should not be mixing alcohol with, but these were things that I could look past because aside from those issues, everything was really good. Both of us experienced insane career growth during the pandemic and were making more money than either of us ever thought we would see in our lives. At this point, my goal of having and raising children in a place that had enough space for all of us seemed like it was fast approaching. I brought up the subject of kids again with the girlfriend but she seemed less enthused about having kids now than she did when we first met. She still wanted them, but she just wasn't ready yet, which seemed reasonable to me; we were both still young and waiting a few more years wouldn't result in any significant health risks or anything. But what she did want was a new cat.
She already had a cat from before we started dating, but with the money we were making and the bigger apartment we had moved into, she wanted another one. I was hesitant to agree, because I knew the stereotype of "millennial couple adopts three cats and never has any actual children," but as part of our discussion, she promised me we'd have one child for every cat. That sounded good to me, so we got the second cat in December 2020. But still, she wanted a third cat.
I was definitely worried that the stereotype was going to become my life, so I told her that as a compromise, she should foster a cat instead of adopting a new one. This worked for a little while, but in spring of 2021 she became a "foster failure" by adopting the cat she was fostering. We never really talked about it, she just went and adopted it and I didn't really know until I asked one day when prospective families were going to come by to meet him and she told me that she had adopted him, but that was really going to be the last one. I was irritated at first but eventually I cooled off, and we became a millenial couple with three cats and no children, though she promised me "one kid for every cat" so I was hoping that someday, I'd get to have the family that I wanted and she said she wanted.
"Two weeks to flatten the curve" became "two years to flatten the curve" and we were making even more money and looking to move into a bigger place. I suggested we look for a house in the suburbs that would be good to raise our kids and for the first time, she told me that she was no longer sure she wanted kids. She was happy with her current "family," she didn't want to ruin her body, some "Republicans want to control me" bullshit - all things she never spoke up about before. On top of this, she started drinking more, and about twice a week she would get drunk, beligerant, and pass out in some random part of the apartment. I tried to confront her about her drinking and she completely locked up - she sat motionless for about 30 minutes, eyes boring into the wall behind me, not answering a single one of my questions or even acknowleding that I was even there (some sort of psychological dissociation to avoid confrontation, I think). Not being able to make any progress on that front, I came to the conclusion that it was time for us to split up, to which my surprise, she was in agreement with. In the beginning of June 2022, I had started looking for a new place to live, but we were still living together in the meantime.
June 15, 2022. She had gotten drunk and passed out on a Wednesday night - part of her weekly routine. As usual, when I found her, I put her on her side, put her glasses away so the cats wouldn't chew on them, and put her phone on the charger so the battery wouldn't die overnight. Interestingly, however, I noticed she was on a call with someone. I hang it up, and the phone screen changes to show a text message with a half-naked man in it, the same man she was just on a call with. Curiosity got the better of me and I discovered this is a man that she had become intimate with recently. I thought it was pretty coarse of her to already be sexting some dude after we were together for almost three years and just broken up, but the messages didn't start at June 2022. I was able to scroll up to the month before. And the month before that. And the month before that. I just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling until I came to their first messages. This bitch had been cheating on me for a year and three months.
I screenshotted the worst of the messages and used her phone to send them to mine. I was livid, I wanted a confrontation, but she was catatonic and I wasn't going to get one. I went to the couch and laid awake every second of that night until the sun rose, wondering how or why this could happen to me. Eventually she woke up, and she came to see me, asking why I was on the couch. I told her it was because I found out she was cheating on me, to which she denied, and when I went to go look at the messages for proof, she had deleted them from the conversation I used to send them to my phone so I couldn't shove them in her face (I did save them to my PC though, so I still have them). She kept denying until I wouldn't relent, then she said it was "fake" and "didn't count," basically anything she could do to try to gaslight me into thinking I imagined it, and when I finally started quoting word-for-word some of the messages she had exchanged with this dude, she went into her dissociation state again and I couldn't get another word out of her. That day, I packed up everything I possibly could and left to stay in a spare room on a property my friend owns, (unfortunately my friend is not there as he lives in another country) where I've been since.
Nights are very, very difficult. During the day I keep myself busy because I've taken a second remote job (I'm doing that whole "overemployed" thing), but when it's time for bed I get an extreme feeling of dread. It makes it very difficult to go to sleep, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and the lonliness is suffocating. I'm working on buying a condo closer to where my friends live so I can have them close by, and that process is going pretty well, but currently I don't feel like I'm healing. Every night, it's just this lonliness that makes me feel like I'm simultaneously in a huge dark warehouse and a trash compactor.
I could post the messages I saved, but the absence of empathy or any form of self-awareness in them makes them more grotesque than the actual smut they contain. Here are some high (low?) lights, though:
January 2022, my birthday: We had plans to spend the day with my family, but I went without her because she was "sick." In reality, she spent the entire day sexting this guy. The whole day. There were hours upon hours of messages from this day.
February 2022: She told the guy that she resented living with me but was only putting up with it because I made the rent cheap.
April 2021: In the beginning of her messages with this guy, she talked about how her last boyfriend (the guy before me) was terrible, how he didn't want a family, and how she was the happiest she's ever been in her life. Hours later, on that same day, she texts him how badly she wants him to fuck her.
