Last year, I found out my boyfriend of two years had been cheating on me with multiple girls. Our relationship was flawed. We fought and even thought I didn't suspect his cheating, I knew something was wrong and was considering a breakup. When I found out, I was still shocked and mortified. The worst was when I found out he had slept with the mother of his child multiple times. We stopped seeing each other but he continued to reach out to me. He'd send flowers, write long notes, and went to counseling. I knew he was messed up from a bad childhood and since he was in counseling, I finally cracked after a year and started to reconsider giving him a second chance. We've been in a relationship for about 5 months now.

We are so close. I've never felt more in-sync with a person. When we are together, for the most part I feel like I am a better person. I love him very deeply. I felt things were going in the right direction. We stopped fighting, he treated me like I've always dreamt a man would treat me. I began to forgive and trust him.

The only problem was in me wanting to integrate him back into my social life and integrating me back into his child's life (I'm still hesitant and want to make sure it's a stable enough situation for that). My friends knew about him cheating on me and how poorly he treated me before. They were not supportive of me seeing him again. It was stressful for me to merge my boyfriend and my friends back together but I finally got the courage to do so.

I decided this week that I'd invite him to my birthday. Things were going good for the majority of the night. Everyone was being pleasant and he was making an effort to talk to everyone. At the end of the night after I had too much to drink, I noticed he was very drunk as well and he was continuing to drink. I knew he was a little annoyed that I had spent most of the night talking to my friends and didn't talk to him very much (this was unintentional, I was just drunk and trying to talk to everyone who came). To my embarrassment, he separated himself from the party after arguing with my best friend and roommate. He then stormed off into my bedroom and went to sleep. I continued to talk to my friends, and about an hour later I was tired and wanted to go to sleep. I went into my room where he was sleeping, turned on the lights to put on my PJs, and got into bed. He began to complain about how rude I was to him and how rude it was that I just turned on the lights while he was trying to sleep. I was very annoyed and said he would just should shut the f up and deal with it because I've dealt with so much and that he embarrassed me by being mopey and argumentative.

He then called me a stupid c*nt. I was drunk and extremely hurt, everything came flooding back. Suddenly I was sharing a bed with someone who cheated on me and was calling me a c*nt on my birthday and not a guy I loved. I know this is terribly wrong, but i slapped him and tried to push him out of bed. This is when it escalated to him saying things like how my parents will never love me (I have a bad relationship with them), and me saying things like how I'm disgusted with his inability to control his dick, etc. We also began to argue about me not being in his child's life. It was a mess. It became physical again and he ended up choking me on my bed and breaking my phone by slamming it on the floor. He then ran out of my apartment, leaving doors wide open and going home. I was terrified, intoxicated and disgusted with himself and myself. I started having an anxiety attack and went to my roommate for help, explaining to her what happened.

I'm so embarrassed and ashamed of what happened. I wish I could take the entire night back. I went to go talk to him about it today and he cried, said he would quit drinking and that he loves me. Everything was going so well. I finally felt like we were moving in the right direction and that we were healing. I'm heartbroken. He was being so supportive and so incredible up until that night. He says we can overcome one bad night, but I'm so embarrassed. It was such an important night to me and it was ruined.

My emotions are getting the best of me, and I need advice on how to think this one through. Should I suffer the heartache and leave him even though everything was moving forward, or should I try to get over a bad night in addition to all of the other things I'm trying to repair with him? I feel so alone and so confused.