TL;DR: GF had a (quasi?) affair with a married man before we dated, and I can't seem to get over it.
I've been seeing gf for about two years. Going in, I knew we had fairly different personalities; she had something of a wild streak, but I found that charming. Early on, she admitted to me that she had a relationship with a guy with a wife and kids before we met. She said that they dated off and on for more than a year and that there was some making out, but that things never went further than that. I didn't like it, but I was really into her and I rationalized it as a past mistake.
For the first year, things were going really well. Eventually we met each others' families and started talking about the future. But around that time, I found out that she was still texting with the guy in question. She didn't hide it; I actually found out because she asked if I would mind if she went out with him for drinks. From her perspective, she felt that she was emotionally over him, and had reverted back to the friendship they shared before the quasi-affair, so there was nothing wrong with staying in contact.
I was livid. I didn't want to give her an ultimatum, but I made it clear that the friendship made me uncomfortable. She agreed not to meet up with him, but said that she didn't want to give up a friendship with someone that she had known for years, and had many friends in common with.
Over the next couple of months, we talked it over a few times. I felt that we looked at this, and many things, differently, and I really wanted to understand where she was coming from, even if I couldn't ultimately accept it. She was adamant that she didn't want her partner to choose her friends, though, and refused to give him up completely. Finally, I couldn't take it. I got angry, and told her that I thought she was wrong, selfish, immature. It seemed to get through to her, and she finally cut off all contact with the guy.
For me, though, those months of back and forth really took a toll. I had really wanted that decision to come from her, not from me. I had been jealous of the guy, of course (who wants someone like that hovering around your relationship?), but more than that, it just changed how I saw her. The fact that she thought going out alone with a guy like that was okay, that she could say she respected a guy who chose to cheat on his wife and put his family in danger, and tried to justify that to me, left me questioning her morals and values. I found myself becoming unfairly critical of her about unrelated things, and still harboring anger about the married guy.
Maybe breaking up would have been the right decision then, but I cared about her. We had just been on the cusp of committing to a future together before all this started, and I didn't want to give that up. I suggested that we try couples therapy. We went for a couple of months and talked through the issue. She was communicative and apologetic. She said that she regretted how she acted, that I had been right. She even went so far as to admit the possibility that she was still harboring some feelings for him at the time. We also talked about the fact that my family was broken up by an affair, leaving me with a pretty harsh reaction to it. It felt like things were getting better.
A few months have passed. We're not unhappy on a daily basis. But often, I still find myself ruminating about whether or not she's a moral person. And I can't seem to get back to the way I felt about her right before I found out that had still been in contact with the guy, that she didn't consider their relationship the moral mistake that I did.
I don't really want to break up, but she's waiting for a proposal. I know that I can't commit to marrying someone when I have this sort of nagging doubt about their morals, when I find myself sort of unconsciously feeling contempt for them sometimes. I think she thinks that we're over the issue, and bringing it up again would probably hurt her. But we're not that young, and I don't want to lead her on.
I don't know what to do. I don't want to punish her for a mistake that she's apologized for, but even though I can rationalize her actions, I can't control my emotional response to them. I've tried to work through it by talking with her, through therapy, and by waiting it out, but after months of this, that doubt is still there.
Am I a moralizing jerk? Should I continue to work on it and give it more time? Or should I accept that my core values aren't going to change, and that this is an unbridgeable gap between us?
Submitted April 30, 2019 at 02:21AM by throughaweigh234 http://bit.ly/2XSYrq3
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