I (25M) was planning to propose to my girlfriend (26F), but she admitted after a night out that she cheated on me and is begging for forgiveness. How do I go about this?
I’ve known my girlfriend since we were in kindergarden. She’s helped me through thick and thin. Through my periods of hardship, when my parents were being toxic, when I lost my grandparents, through it all. She’s genuinely my hero. She’s also so warmhearted, caring, selfless, and the best person I know.
About a month ago, I told her parents and mine that I wanted to marry her and we agreed to rent out the place where I confessed my love for her where I would propose to her. It is still rented for 29th August.
It was all so perfect, until yesterday, my girlfriend said that she’s going to a karaoke event with her female friends. At 2 AM today, she returned, clearly drunk, and collapsed in bed. This morning, she woke up in tears and apologized profusely.
After she’d calmed down, she explained that she was drunk and decided to sleep with another man at the party after the karaoke and regretted it afterwards a lot.
When I asked why she’d do this, she said that she was so drunk that she completely blanked on the fact that she was in a relationship with me.
That sounded to me like she would sleep with other men if she wasn’t with me, so I asked if she was unhappy in bed, but she reassured me that that’s not the case and couldn’t ask for anything more from me and regrets everything she did.
I had so many more questions that I wanted to ask, but my heart completely broke and I began crying. She hugged me and said that she would do anything to get my trust back and constantly asked not to break up over this. I said that I need some time to think and went into a separate room.
I have now been sitting in this room heartbroken for many hours now and don’t know what to do. She said that she’d do anything to get my trust back, so I have hope that there’s something I can change to ensure that she never cheats on me again, like always going with her when she goes outside, but that feels really controlling and disgusting to me. Is there any way to not break up and still have trust again that she will never cheat on me again?
If I do break up though, I don’t think I can ever love anyone like her again. Please try to understand and comprehend that I’ve known her since not long after I was even born.
We were often in the same class, doing the same school work together, playing together, eating together, doing everything together. I spent many years trying to confess my love. We’ve spent many years living, loving, smiling together. She feels like a part of me by now.
How can I just throw that part away and pretend I’ll be fine? I’m saying this because I know it’s common on this subreddit to basically just say “move on”, but I really don’t think that’s possible for me.
So I’m really looking for responses that suggest how we can stay together with rules to ensure that this never happens again.
I would also like to hear suggestions about whether I tell mine and/or her parents of the incident? I’ll have to tell them to cancel the event, so I probably will have to tell them what happened, but I could excuse the cancellation as me “not feeling quite ready yet” or something.
I’m mainly considering this because I don’t want her parents to be mad/yell at her or be cold towards her, because, as I explained before, she’s always been my hero, and I don’t want someone who’s helped me so much get hurt, especially because I’ve experienced how much that hurts.