Ex GF (21F) cheated on me (22M) a day before our vacation, I broke up with her when I found out...15 hours after the breakup, she emails me a perfectly formatted 30,000-word manifesto... any reason to even entertain the concept of forgiveness with her?

Hey Reddit, I've had the craziest 3 weeks of my life.

TL;DR - Girlfriend of 7 months cheated on me one day before our vacation. Found out the night we got back...broke up with her the same night...she sent me a 30,000 word Chicago formatted manifesto documenting everything about the events and her feelings 12 hours later... is there really any reason to be friends with her, could she actually be sorry, or does she just sound insane? (below are quotes)

Longer version, my ex and I went to Burlington from Jan. 9th to Jan 13th and the day before we left she told me she was going out with a guy friend from high school. She was super sketchy about it when I asked if I could meet him since he's an actor and I work in film and tv, but I told myself I was probably just being weird and told myself I trusted her...

Fast forward to Sunday, she's already told me she wanted to go on a break and I said no because a 'break' is actually just a 'break up'. So I knew something was up and was getting sketched out, cause the days before were strange too.

Sunday night we're at a bar next to my apartment and she starts telling me about this fourteen-page document she wrote about our relationship and all the doubts she's been having. I was super glad! I told her that a lot of these things are problems or doubts that aren't too major and that we could totally work on together. I was totally happy to! She starts dumping even more on me....dark stuff (known each other for two years dating for 7 months)

So it's like 1 AM and we're both drunk sitting in the bar, and I ask "Hey, since we're being totally honest and communicating with each other, it made me feel kinda insecure when you went out alone with your guy friend from 10 to 2:30 AM. If you're asking for a break, I need to know, did something happen that night?" Her response, "Yes." She starts sobbing, I get up, say "You need to leave, and you know this means we can't be together." She keeps trying to explain herself and say it wasn't as bad as I think it is... so I ask "I need to know, how far did it go?" Her response "I asked him to pull over in front of my house and we started to talk about sexuality. We hooked up and did handstuff."....that was a lie...

So she begs to sleep on the floor next to me, and I approve because she's drunk and she can drive home in the morning after I leave for work. She leaves, and that's the last I heard from her...or so I thought...The very next day....she sends me a perfectly formatted, 30,000-word manifesto about all of this titled, "I'm the Worst". I'm talking footnotes, subheadings, and chapters. absolutely bonkers.... in the manifesto she admits to having sex.

so anyway, she's fucking insane. but this tiny...tiny fucking side of me wants to be friends with her eventually. I want to just write her off for the rest of my life, and I know I should...but there's this tiny part of me that still thinks she's a decent person that just fucked up.

Edit: I don't want to be in a relationship with her ever again, I just keep throwing the idea of her being a 'friend' in the far future considering she was one of the most impactful relationships in my life, for better and worse.

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Below are some key quotes from the manifesto:

- "I’d never done anything even remotely as awful as cheating before, and I’d never been in love before, so for the entirety of that conversation from the second I admitted it, I was simultaneously desperately wanting to right my immeasurable wrong, take the pain away from you and onto me, or keep you from having to shut down and go numb, while also being paralyzed by each crushing ounce of reality that hit me with every harsh truth you made me confront. I was so out of my depth and all the while being faced with more painful reckoning than I’ve ever felt in my life, and I couldn’t keep up enough to figure out what the right thing to do or say was in that situation."

- "I keep saying “I know” followed by the upsetting truths of the situation because I need you to know that I have pored over this, writing and thinking and sobbing until my neck cramped, for over twelve hours now, and understand as completely as I can as a person without access to your mind and feelings, how awful what I did was, how much it hurts, how it ruined what we had, how even though it was one big mistake, I made it worse by lying about it, how it’s going to change the course of my life going forward with where I live or work and my relationships, as well as my daily life for the next year at least."

- "I know it doesn’t change anything, but I got absolutely no pleasure from it. Things slowed down pretty quickly and he was a dick about everything which proved logic right-- that nothing was different and he was just as much of an asshole as I was for letting him even kiss me in the first place. I felt so stupid and disgusting and it felt so much worse than being rejected and unwanted and I started to realize what a fucking obvious, colossal fucking mistake I’d made. I was still drunk and not thinking straight but it was more deliberate than I ever wanted to admit to myself."

- "I’m pretty sure you did from what you said, but I might be wrong. It seemed like once your suspicion was confirmed that I cheated, regardless of the circumstances you’d decided that it was an automatic dealbreaker, that nothing could be salvaged, and that you wanted nothing to do with me indefinitely. I know that getting back together was totally out of the question as you said, and you said you wouldn’t be able to talk to me for a year or two, but I feel like that’s so extreme and it seemed like you decided that the second I told you something happened. "

- "No one deserves to be cheated on no matter what, but I am so regretful that everything happened to you because of your past, but also how amazing you are and how even though I feel like I never deserved you, you were wonderful to me. I can never express how sorry I am for not being what you deserved, and all the mistakes I made in our relationship."

- Thank you for telling me I deserve to love myself and be loved. I may honestly never get over you, partially because of what I did and how that will stay with me as a personal low of my life so far, but also because even if everything I’ve written here just makes you hate me and feel disgusted for ever trusting me at all or thinking I was any better than people who have fucked you over in the past, there’s nothing that could happen that would ever change how much I respect and admire you. I would never make the same mistakes I made again, but I just wish I hadn’t made them with you."

- "In the car before dropping me off at home X and I talked about sexuality and he sort of asked if we could talk about something else, and I asked why, and he said it was because it was making him think about how attracted to me he was. Instead of changing the subject, bringing up how that’s a shitty thing to say, or getting out of the car, I indulged my insecurity didn’t comply because part of me wanted to relish in the ego boost of having someone who I was never good enough for make a move. He brought up that I had a boyfriend, and I acknowledged it, but the “gtfo wtf are you doing this is literally the WRONG thing to do ABORT” sirens still didn’t get me to leave. I was confused by that cognitive dissonance because I thought I was happy and could never want to be with anyone else and I’d never want to violate OP's trust regardless of what I might enjoy physically, but somehow this didn’t come to mind and I still didn’t say no. I took the passive, cowardly, selfish route and let him kiss me and didn’t stop him, and then things kept going and we had sex briefly. "

- "There was a chance that I had to choose to turn away an amazing guy and a potentially fulfilling, long-term relationship that just seemed to fit so beautifully, because of problems that I have with myself. So after so much pining and hating myself and convincing myself I’d never be wanted or loved, I finally had everything I wanted and had the option to keep it, but might have to turn it down for my own good and ultimately for the good of my boyfriend as well. Even though it would’ve been for the right reasons, I didn’t want to accept that I might have to give up everything I ever wanted. The prospect of having to make that decision filled me with dread, which was kind of what happened in the car from Vermont to New York, where I just broke down and could barely think or speak. But basically, subconsciously before taking a closer look retrospectively, I happened to unexpectedly encounter a choice where I could selfishly, shortsightedly satisfy my past self by doing something objectively wrong given the circumstances of my present self, which would free me from the decision altogether by self-destructing and automatically, unequivocally ending the relationship. I didn’t think any of it through much at all at the time since I didn’t have a clear idea of why part of me would allow it to happen anyway. "

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(Edited for formatting)

Submitted January 28, 2019 at 07:22PM by GlassFinish9 http://bit.ly/2DF7Cmx