Apologies in advance for this being a bit of a long read. I’m sure it seems rather rambling at times but this is the first time I’ve actually sat down & thought about everything that has happened from start to finish, so it’s a bit of a stream of consciousness style.
My girlfriend & I have recently split up after 6 and a half years & I am completely devastated. This was the woman who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with & up until a couple of weeks ago she constantly told me she felt the same, now it’s all just fallen apart & I’m struggling to understand why.
We‘ve had ups & downs like anyone else but generally things were going great until I lost my job a little over a year ago. She had just spent 18 months herself trying to find a job since completing her master’s degree so it really felt as if something was conspiring against us. We had been living together for just over 3 years at this point & when she got her dream job it felt like the last piece in the puzzle. We had discussed marriage & our future lives together a lot, & although she sometimes felt I was less than enthusiastic about it unbeknownst to her I had spent the months previous planning exactly where & when I was going to propose. I had even found what I thought would be the perfect engagement ring & had been saving like crazy to get the money for it.
After 5 months of unemployment I found a job doing the same kind of work I had been in previously, the only catch being it was back in my hometown (around 3 hours from where we lived). At the time it was the only opportunity to continue doing the work that I was trained to do so it felt as if there wasn’t much choice in me having to accept the position. In hindsight this is probably the worst decision that I have ever made. Compared to where we lived my hometown is a very small place & although my parents are still there any contacts/friends I had growing up have long since gone in the 11 years since I last lived there. It wasn’t just the fact that she was not going to be with me, my whole life was based around where we lived together & I couldn’t give that up.
From the off we both agreed that this was only going to be temporary and I would be doing everything possible to find another job back where she was & move back down there as soon as possible. On top of this I was adamant that I would be travelling down to see her & my friends every weekend instead of us splitting the commute. Doing it this way I could stop even the slightest possibility of me developing links to my midweek location, which would push me even harder to get back down there. It literally became a case of turning up for work 9-5, going to my parents house to sleep & then travelling back down to see her every weekend. By leaving work as soon as possible on a Friday I could get there at a reasonable hour & not have to leave until late on a Sunday. 2 days a week wasn’t ideal but it was better than nothing at all.
For a while it worked & despite the odd weekend where I was tired due to the travelling & not the most receptive person we both still knew that it was only going to be a temporary thing. Unfortunately she couldn’t afford to pay solo rent on the flat we had so had to move back into a room in shared accommodation, but we just saw this as another reason (if it were needed) for me to hurry up and get back down there.
As time dragged on I got more frustrated at being unable to keep my promise & get back down there with her. The post recession job opportunities weren’t materialising & for whatever reason the other big thing that I had promised both myself & her I would do (get a driving licence) was being pushed to one side. I spent my evenings stewing in utter boredom just counting the minutes until our daily phone calls & the hours until I could get down to see her on a Friday evening. Things continued in this vein for me for a few more months until a couple of weeks ago everything changed.
She had just been forced to move house again due to her previous flat being sold and had organised a birthday/housewarming party to celebrate her moving in with new people. Obviously I was there & at one stage she asked me to set up the music for the party on her laptop. While doing this I took the opportunity to check my emails but when I brought the page up it went straight to her inbox as she hadn’t logged out. Without even thinking I went to log out but for whatever reason glanced down the inbox list as I did, & saw a confirmation message for a gift which had been bought by her. Nobody that she knows (other than herself) had a birthday or any other kind of celebration around that time so it kind of stopped me in my tracks and got me curious. This is something that I had never even thought about doing before but here I was with the opportunity to read her emails and a mystery gift being bought for someone. I opened it up to see that it was a driving test DVD (irony!) that she had bought for a guy who lived just around the corner from her old house. An extra delivery note had been added by her telling this guy that she hoped it would help and to get in touch if he needed any more help with things. After racking my brains for a couple of hours trying to work out who the hell he could be I remembered her mentioning months back - when she moved house the first time - about a guy from work who turned out to be living across the street. She had never mentioned him since, but I just knew this had to be the same person.
She had said that there was a good chance that most of her work friends would be coming along to the party so I hoped that would include him so I could get a chance to see who this guy was. As it turned out nobody from her work came to the party but I still couldn’t shake the thought of what I’d seen. I guess I could’ve asked her about it straight away at this point but for some reason I didn’t want to, mostly because I figured she would be angry about me invading her privacy by reading her emails.
For the next week it seemed as though I was the one doing all the running. Whereas previously it was a toss-up as to which one of us would call first in the evening it was always me who called her, and the conversation didn’t seem to flow. Something wasn’t right. We had a friend’s wedding to attend the following weekend at which she took ill meaning she didn’t spend a lot of time socialising. I did my best to make sure she was ok and tried not to think any more of it but even the next day when she had improved she was still very quiet and distant. That evening when we got back to her house she showed me some sexy underwear she said she had bought herself (and me) for her birthday the previous week, but had been unable to show me at the weekend because of how ill she was. She had even taken a few pictures of herself modelling it which she said she would send to me by email as ‘compensation’. Obviously I said yes, but as she was doing this I got a glimpse of her typing in the password to her email account. Why I decided to continue looking I don’t know but after watching her log in I saw a couple of emails at the top of the page between her and a guy with the same name as the one she had bought the present for. Rather than say anything I instead made a split second decision to remember the password I had just seen her type in & have a look for myself at a later date.
(Continued on next post)