My (23M) boyfriend (24M) cheated on me in the worst ways early in our relationship but is completely changed now. I don’t know if I’m stupid for staying or stupid for leaving.

TLDR: My boyfriend cheated on me multiple times early in our relationship but has been a genuinely loving partner for the last year. I love him but I don’t know if I can live with the past. I think about meeting a new person who just loves me for who I am and not because they’ve wronged me.

I (23M) have been with my boyfriend (24M) for 3 years.

I found him after a breakup. I was in a long term relationship (4+ years) with a girl that stopped working. She cheated on me with her best friend when things started to get a little difficult due to the distance and eventually left me for him. At that time I considered myself bicurious.

Four months later, I found out that I was cheated on so I stopped chasing her and started swiping on dating apps and within 2 days I met this guy. We talked for hours and I instantly felt a connection.

Because of my bicurious nature I have always been underconfident. I always felt like women would find me slightly gay and I had no idea that my feelings for men could be beyond sexual.

I started falling for this guy very naively and we made things physical on the first date itself because of my curiosity. I deleted all the apps just 2 days into talking to him.

Weeks later he opened up about liking a guy right before me and said it didn’t work out. Another week later he told me he wasn’t over that guy. He would give me mixed signals. He would say he wanted to focus on me but also wanted to get done with his past. He would cry to me about seeing that guy in college and missing him and I would try to help him, thinking how nice it would be to be loved like that and be missed like that.

Sometimes I would even sinisterly think about leaving him once he fell for me just to hurt him the same way but the truth is I was madly in love and kept giving myself reasons to stay.

Later on I started noticing inconsistencies in his stories but I ignored them because I was too stupidly in love. He would talk to me all day, flirt with me and drop hints, and in my head I was already almost married to him. All I wanted was to be loved.

I would force him to meet because he would never initiate meeting even though we talked constantly. We would have sex even though as I had no experience with gay sex before this relationship.

Around the same time he met a girl who had a huge crush on him. I felt insecure but in my head I kept thinking he must be gay because he had slept with 6-7 men before but never with a girl and had never dated one.

They soon became best friends even though she clearly wanted more. Everything between us seemed normal except he wouldn’t pick my calls when he was with her because he was closeted. I would cry and panic and started having terrible panic attacks to the point where I couldn’t move.

This went on for months.

He would get jealous if I hung out with the only other person I was out to (a guy I met at the gym who was into me). I had told him about my relationship as he tried to kiss me. That same guy eventually discovered my boyfriend on a dating app.

I checked my boyfriend’s phone (we had made things official by then) and found out he had been active on dating apps the entire time, swiping on women to show off to his guy friends and sexting men secretly.

I was furious.

I made him tell all his friends he was out to that he was out to about everything he had been doing. That’s when I found out none of them even knew I existed, let alone that we were dating.

I also discovered that the guy he had been crying about in the beginning was actually someone he had started talking to at the same time as me and had just gotten dumped by. So when he was crying to me, it wasn’t about someone from months ago, it was happening in real time.

And still I stayed. I convinced myself that if I was helping him become a better person then eventually I would reap the benefits.

I also forced him to cut off the girl he had become best friends with after finding something objectionable in their chats. He promised he would do it in a month because he was moving out of the city and didn’t want common friends to get suspicious.

Instead he tried to make us friends.

She knew about the entire situation and somehow we actually became really close. I started feeling stupid for doubting him and even more stupid when I realized he was avoiding her for my sanity while I was becoming friends with her.

Then he came clean again.

He told me he had been cheating on me with her the entire time. He said that right after moving on from the other guy they had started sleeping together and he had usually initiated it.

I was so depressed I spent a week barely eating, just crying.

I read their chats and saw that he had told her I was a creep who disturbed him everyday just to keep her from suspecting anything. I also realized he had been sleeping with her almost every night, which is why he was always tired and not because of college like he told me.

I made him come clean to his friends again. She moved on easily as they lived in different cities now.

For a long time I thought she had been my friend, but later I realized she had been subtly taking digs at me the entire time and had basically been telling me about my boyfriend cheating in ways I was too naive to understand.

I felt terrible as I helped this guy fill a thousand job applications, prepare for interviews with me and help him deal with rejections all this while.

Despite everything, I STILL STAYED.

I convinced myself that this had to be the final straw and things would finally change.

He moved to another city and became friends with another gay guy. This time he openly told him that he had a boyfriend. But he still flirted with him. Months later the guy confessed he liked him and my boyfriend cut him off and told me immediately.

Even then I felt betrayed again.

I tried to take revenge and tried to hook up with a guy who was into me. But I felt disgusted the entire time because all I could think about was my boyfriend. He was the only guy I had ever loved or had sex with.

So again… I stayed.

But this time something actually changed.

For the past year he has genuinely been a different person. He makes effort, shows up for me, is thoughtful, sends gifts, prioritizes me everywhere and constantly reminds me how sorry he is. In the past year he hasn’t done a single thing to disappoint me, not even something small.

I can genuinely see love in his eyes now. He talks about building a future together and actively works towards it.

But he also has a lot of personal issues. He works extremely hard to support his family because they depend on his money. Because of this I feel like he’s slowly losing interest in things for himself. He seems happy making me happy but doesn’t seem to want anything for himself anymore. That gives me a major ick because my father was the same way. He had zero desires of his own and only lived to fulfill everyone else’s.

Another thing is that even though he is extremely nice now, I still get mental reminders of all the things he did and what he was capable of. Sometimes I feel deeply in love with him. Other times I feel like it’s too much darkness to carry if we want to build a life together.

I also couldn’t tell any of my friends about his cheating so I’ve never been able to vent about any of this.

In the beginning I was also very insecure about my looks and felt like I had somehow pulled a really attractive guy. Part of me thought that since he had already cheated and seen what it cost him, maybe he would never do it again and that would somehow make the relationship safe in the long run.

Both of my relationships so far have ended with me getting cheated on.

Over time I have slowly gotten over some of my insecurities and sometimes I think maybe I could find someone better.

Sometimes I also feel like him cheating on me with a girl was karma because I was attracted to men while dating my ex girlfriend who I never came out to.

I know a lot of people will probably say I should have left the first time he cheated and honestly I understand that perspective. But I didn’t leave as I believe in finding your “one” and just figuring life out with them no matter what. I was happy to have dated just two people. And, now I’m in a situation where he genuinely seems like a completely different person and has been consistent for a year.

So now I don’t know what to do.

He is a changed man who loves me deeply now. He takes care of me, prioritizes me and treats me well.

But I also feel like I have enough reasons to leave him. I also like thinking about finding another guy or dating more women and exploring myself more.

How do I know what the right thing to do is, when I also feel really nice being with him?