Me [20m] with my girlfriend [19f] 1 year, issues with her cheating;text

Hello, this is a situation I never thought I'd find myself in. All my life I've told myself that if I was ever cheated on in any way, the relationship would be over immediately. Well now I've been cheated on and I'm very confused.

Girlfriend and I met due to an error at our college apartment building placing us together instead of with our chosen roommates. So we've been living together since the start. Relationship was pretty awesome until recently. We got along pretty well, we were sexually compatible, and we rarely fought.

I started the relationship as a pretty protective guy. I wouldn't say overprotective, but it was difficult for me not to feel worried when she'd go out late at night without me. I knew I had nothing to fear, but the issue was exacerbated by her having a very flirty personality combined with a her having groups of friends that were mostly all guys. Over time I got over this with her reassurance that nothing was going on and she'd never do anything to hurt me.

Around 2 and a half months ago she'd started hanging out with a coworker from the bar she works at after work. She started smoking weed with him after work a lot. I was pretty uncomfortable with a one on one situation, but I trusted her. Anyways, time went on and she started coming home later and later and she'd be drunk half the time. It got to the point where I asked what was going on and she assured me nothing was happening between them. I accepted it. I thought I was just being overprotective, so I just tried to not let the situation bother me even though I was still suspicious.

Around this time I don't know what happened to me, but I quit my job, went to school the bare minimum of time, quit going to the gym, and just became a couch potato. I lost most of my sex drive, I stopped caring about her pleasure when we did have sex, and I just stopped really paying attention to her. I basically just became a recluse out of the blue and I do not know why.

This bothered her and she came to me about it multiple times, telling me she could deal with me becoming a shut in, but she couldn't deal with me not paying attention to her. This would make me try for a few days after she talked to me, but then I'd go right back to the routine. This happened a few times, 4 if i had to put a number on it. I'm still kind of in this funk.

A few days ago she was showering as I was picking out what to watch on netflix on her phone and she got a text from this guy she'd been hanging out with. The text said something along the lines of her being extremely hot and how he couldn't stop thinking about her. My heart sank, I messed up and did something I promised myself I'd never do to anyone; I looked through her conversation with him. I quickly swipe through the conversation to see the context and I see that they'd been sexting. I close the phone so I could talk to her about it instead of having her come out and see me snooping on her phone.

She comes out of the shower and I can't stop my rage from making me say, "How long have you been fucking that asshole?" She says she's never fucked him. I admit that I broke her trust and looked through her conversation with him. She breaks down crying and saying sorry saying she messed up, but they'd only been sexting around week. I'm furious and tell her to just get the fuck out of my room.

Now I love this girl. I know I'm young but I've had a 2 year relationship from 17-19 and I never felt the love in that relationship the love I've felt from this one. We've gotten along great until my sudden loss of love for life. We've been extremely honest with each other, and I feel like we've been mature in the way we voice our problems with and wants we have from each other.

This love for her was enough to make me want to try to talk through it with her. So I go down to her room and we hash it out like grown ups, or so I thought. She explains she needed attention from somewhere, as I stopped caring and kind of became a ghost. She agrees that cheating was awful and not the answer and regrets what she had done. I realize I've been a total dirtbag for awhile and promise to get better for real if she promises that we have complete and total honesty from here on out. We agree to stay together with the understanding that I'm going to need to ask her a lot of questions and work on trusting her again.

Over the course of the next few days we get better. I am actually showing her love and I begin to venture out of the house to hang out with friends I hadn't seen in months, I start going to the gym again, and I generally just start caring about life again. It's weird but I kind of feel like I had been 40 feet underwater for the best few months, and I had finally surfaced. Anyways I am asking her questions to better understand everything. She tells me nothing physical ever happened between them. She only sent three pictures, and only in one of them you could see nipples, nothing else. She didn't actually feel anything for the guy, she just needed admiration and someone to want her. She knows that she should have come to me before doing it. I accept all this as I partly feel I'm to blame and what I've done is also extremely unfair, I also felt like this was all complete honesty.

This morning I wake up feeling awful. I can't get the thought of her with this other guy out of my head. I wake her up and explain what I'm feeling. We talk for awhile more about what made her do it, and she comes clean and tells me they had actually been sexting for more like 3 weeks. I freak out and demand to see the pictures and conversation. She is very hesitant. I tell her that her being hesitant makes me feel like she is trying to hid something from me. Eventually she shows me the pictures. Four pictures were sent. In two you could see her full frontally, completely naked, third was just her breasts, and the fourth absolutely killed me. She was posing with her ass out, with a thong and one of my shirts on from work, a shirt I had given her awhile ago. I felt completely betrayed. I felt everything she had told me under this guise of complete honesty was a lie. I tell her to go and please to never speak to me again. She runs off crying to her friends house.

Same thing happens as before. I love this girl so much that I'm confused and want to work through it. I feel like I'm betraying myself but I ask her to come home a few hours later anyways. She comes home apologizing. I ask her what happened to complete honesty, she tells me she wants it, and she needs to come clean. She tells me she has actually kissed this guy 3 times, and she hadn't told me about it or the pictures yet because it she needed time to be prepared for all of the questions I was going to ask her about this. She says she lied after promising complete honesty because I pushed her for answers to questions she didn't know how to answer yet. She tells me she needs to spend time away to think if she wants to be in a relationship with me because she thinks I'll never be able to trust her again. I agree and she left about an hour ago to go stay with some friends.

Now here I am. Sitting alone feeling like I'm slipping back under the waves. I don't want to go back to being a zombie again. I want to stay with this girl. I want to believe and trust everything she says, but I don't know if I can. I'm also worried that I'm trying to keep this broken ship afloat due to it being easy and convenient. I'm also worried that our great sex life is too big a factor for me right now, as I'm scared that I won't be able to find another girl that is okay with the particular kink that my current girlfriend loves. I'm just extremely confused about this whole thing. I've always told myself that no one deserves second chances for cheating and lies regarding cheating, let alone third chances. I love her. I really do.

So I guess my question is what do I do? How to I ever trust this girl again?

TLDR; I become a living zombies, girlfriend hangs out with coworker, says nothing is going on, stuff turns out to be going on, she lies a few times, comes clean, and now I ask what am I supposed to do?

Also sorry for any mistakes with grammar and tenses. I'm just upset, confused and really don't have the energy to proofread.