I met a girl toward the end of 11th grade who I found attractive. I told her how I felt and asked her out. She said she wasn't ready to date. I offered to wait, and became friends with her over the summer. During that time we got close, eventually made out one night, and started dating. Pretty typical stuff, I think. We were together for four and a half years. Nearly my entire time in college. She was two years younger than me. I had initially planned to move on with my life when I finished high school, but we agreed to stay together and share whatever free time we possibly could. I failed out of college in my first year due to extreme anxiety and my inability to admit or address it.
I opted to apply to a private school across the country to chase a dream I couldn't have chased at a typical university. This meant living at a great distance from my girlfriend. This broke her heart, but she still wanted to stay with me. She had some odd quirks after I left: she no longer wanted to talk about anything sexual, and her communication with me in general slowed significantly. She had always been weird about sex since she was never educated about it. She couldn't name the parts of her sex organs, claimed to have never masturbated, and never once orgasmed from anything I did with her. Trust me, I poured my life energy into getting her to enjoy herself in bed but she was so self-conscious about being seen enjoying sex that nothing worked on her. At least, that's what I thought. She finally went to college during my second year of living at a distance. Even though I was far away, I put a great deal of effort doing whatever I could for her. Helping her make class choices, tutoring her on difficult subjects, revising her papers... whatever she needed. On Halloween of that year, she didn't reply to my texts for the longest period of time ever. I knew she had been hanging out with some douchey looking guys, and I knew for sure something was up. I was incredibly stressed from then until the end of our relationship. I knew she was lying to me about something, maybe more than one thing, but whenever I tried to explain to her how I felt she accused me of interfering with her life too much because I was so insecure. Still, she wanted to continue being my girlfriend. My life became absolute torture as I wanted to continue loving her and needed to continue feeling loved even though I was certain she had cheated on me.
It finally fell apart in January of this year. She told me she liked another guy. When she left me, she revealed all of her idiotic secrets. Of course she masturbated. She wanted to hide her sexual pleasure from me because she never found me attractive. She told me she only wanted to be my girlfriend because she liked my personality and didn't want me to lose interest if she wouldn't go out with me. So she ran a fucking sham of a relationship to use me for my infinite generosity for four and a half years of my life. She told me that night on Halloween wasn't even the first time she cheated, and that she'd just go after whatever guy seemed hot to her when I wasn't around. She wasn't interested in pleasing me or bringing me comfort of happiness. I was just a convenience whenever she was lonely or needed something. My life from age 17-21/22ish was a lie. Wasted years under insane amounts of stress from her and school combined. It destroyed me. I wanted to kill myself. She convinced me she intended to marry me and then walked away when my trust in her ran out. I felt like everything had been taken from me.
Now I have a really hard time trusting people. I went to a therapist, transferred to a school back home to be around my family, started lifting and running. I look much healthier and stronger now. I feel better, physically. But in the year since that went down, I still haven't found a woman I could trust, or one who was interested in me in the slightest. I still see a lifeless shell in the mirror. I still have nightmares about who I thought she was. I'm still trapped in the lie I'd been living for my entire adult life. Yeah, I get it. A lying, cheating, evil bitch. Not that bad. But nearly a quarter of my life so far was invested in her and I'm completely incapable of escaping it. I don't know what to do to move on. I've gone on dates, tried to get with other girls, but nothing works and it just keeps going back to how much I'm haunted by her. At one point she had the audacity to come to me to complain about how much of an asshole her new boyfriend was. Are you fucking kidding me?