My(36F) boyfriend (36M) of 5yrs is talking to another female for the past 4 and half months. I feel lost.

After reading a few post on here I kinda of feel like my problems aren’t that important. But I feel lost and I am starting to feel like I’m over reacting. I need advice please 🙏🏽

Me and my s/o have actually know each other since middle school. We were distant friends but always kept in touch through our life, either through social media or phone call. It was always platonic. He encouraged me to move out of our home town and to grow. As adults we ended up both moving out of our small town and landed two cities next to each other and hour away. We eventually linked up and fell in love as adults. It was beautiful.

We have now been together for five years, going on six years in September. For the past two years, we have been going through the ups and downs of relationships. It started slow but gradually got worse and worse. I have two previous children, and we have one child together. I am in nursing school and he got a huge promotion at work. Through these two years of more downs than ups, I felt unseen and misunderstood by him. Anytime I brought up my feelings we would end up in an argument. I saw it clear as day that we were disconnected and needed counseling. He was very resistant to that. Well as time goes on, I gained resentment towards him for not being able to express my feelings and it turned into what seemed like I was always unhappy and honestly I was unsatisfied. I was begging for gentleness, calmness and understanding. We were disconnected and only sometimes had good days.

Towards the end of last year, my mental health was not the healthiest. With being in a fast paced nursing program, raising two teens, and a toddler who is on the spectrum, I was not doing well. I then was blaming myself that it was all my fault, my mental health was the cause of our downs. So as I started self care and regulating my emotions, things got better and less arguments. But, something was off. My intuition was not letting me chill. And I would try to talk to him about it all and we would just argue. I started to feel mentally ill. Paranoid and that it was all in my head.

But one day, I checked the phone logs on our account that I have had access to this whole time but never thought to check it. Because honestly our love was beautiful, safe and strong. But I saw that he had multiple conversations with a phone number that lasted for more than 30 minutes. My heart sank because just a few days prior we had an argument about communicating better with each other and he straight up told me “I don’t like to talk.”

When I initially confronted him, he was angry and said it was a familiar coworker. He held me and told me to trust him. I gave him that whole day to tell me the truth (but I looked up who the number belonged too and it didn’t match who he told me it was) and he finally told me it was a whole different coworker. What gets me is all the BS he gave me when I first found out. He had me believing he was trying to hook her up with his friend then he said it was only a few weeks, then two months. He was not telling the truth still after being caught.

I know that our relationship was going through it, but for two years I never gave up or turned to another male. I found out today that they have been talking for four months. Since he has been caught he says that it’s the stupidest thing that he has done and that he regrets it entirely. He swears it never got physical and they only talked because he felt heard. I know we were both hurting through our struggles. But what he found in her is what I was looking for in him this whole time. He is an amazing stepfather and dad to my children, but he never validated my emotions or tried to work with me through it. My biggest thing is loyalty, and I just feel like I can’t trust him. He also admitted to receiving a video from her of her shaking her ass at a concert. I just feel so dumb and heart broken. Do any relationships make it past something like this? Is it possible to trust him again? What could I have done better?

TL;DR: Our love was real and beautiful once, but my needs were not being met and we started arguing two years ago. I found out he was talking to another female for the past four and half months.