I Left My Girlfriend of 7 Years After Discovering Her Affair — But Leaving Her Daughter Behind Broke Me

I just need to get this off my chest because everything still feels unreal.

I recently ended a 7-year relationship after discovering my girlfriend had been cheating on me. The strange part is that I never actually caught her red-handed. At first, I only found conversations where she was flirting with other men. I honestly thought that was already the worst of it.

One day, I asked her if there was something she wanted to confess to me. I never told her exactly what I knew because I wanted to see if she would be honest. Maybe because she thought I already knew everything, she ended up confessing to an affair with one of her coworkers.

That was the moment my whole world collapsed.

She told me it had been going on for around three months. During those same months, I was drowning in overtime at work and going through one of the busiest and most stressful periods of my life. While I was working myself to exhaustion trying to keep us afloat financially, she was spending money on inns and hotels with another man — even though we were already struggling with our budget.

What hurts even more is how ironic everything was. She was the jealous type. She actually moved from her hometown to the city just so we could stay together and so she could “keep an eye on me” in case I talked to other girls. She had been living with me here for over a year.

After finding out, I told her we needed to leave our apartment because I couldn’t afford the rent alone anymore. That’s when she started crying, shaking, begging me not to leave. She kept saying:

“What about my dad? What about my daughter? They already love you. They’ll get hurt too if we break up.”

And that’s the part destroying me inside.

I genuinely loved her father, and I loved her daughter like she was my own. She’s only 6 years old, but for years I treated her as my child. But every time I looked at my ex, all I could see was betrayal.

My ex promised me she had already cut off contact with the coworker. She even said she would go back to her hometown with her father and start over.

But later, while I was logging out of her accounts from my phone, I saw a message she sent right after we separated that day:

“Baby, where are you? I need you right now.”

That completely destroyed whatever hope I had left.

I eventually went to her hometown to pick up the rest of my belongings. I talked to her father, and he told me she had asked him to convince me to stay because “seven years would be such a waste.”

Then I saw her daughter.

She looked at me and asked:

“Dada, when is mommy coming home?”

That broke me more than the cheating ever did.

I still left.

Now it’s been a few days, and even though I know what she did was wrong, part of me still wonders if I made the right decision.