Earlier in the pandemic I was dating someone for several months who I genuinely wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Early on we talked about past relationships a little and she mentioned one guy she had been "seeing" but not dating - this felt like such a mixed message though because she talked about how they traveled to Hawaii together to meet her family and had plans to go to Scotland together (pre-covid). She said she ended the relationship because she wanted commitment and he didn't. I admitted to her that I felt a bit jealous of this guy who seemed both extremely serious and not serious to my girlfriend in the past.

Fast forward about a month, and my girlfriend tells me that this guy has reached out to her, saying he'll be passing through our city and asking to catch up with her. She asked if I would be okay with that and I told her the truth - it made me uncomfortable but I'm not going to tell my partner what the can and can't do. I asked her what her goal was from this conversation and she said "closure," - so she agreed to meet with him. After the meeting I asked her about it and what they talked about. She said they walked around Target because it was too cold to be outside and caught each other up on what 2020 had been like for them. She told me they had plans to meet up again, one on one in her studio to talk more. I told her that I was confused and apprehensive about this since "closure" conversations seem like a one and done type of thing. She said they hadn't discussed everything she wanted to talk about. I asked her if she had mentioned me to him, and she said no.

It was at that point I feel like our relationship irrevocably shifted and I completely broke down. I felt so hurt - I had told her how much this meeting made me uncomfortable but trusted her to handle it, and I feel like she completely betrayed that trust. She assured me that nothing happened, it wasn't because she was still interested in him, she just wanted to wait to talk about it in a more private setting, but none of that helped. We eventually broke up several months later because I still felt like I couldn't trust her and still broke down about this incident whenever we tried to talk about it after.

When we broke up, she said "you're reacting as if I had actually cheated on you, which I didn't" and she's right - because in my mind that was her motive for not mentioning me. When I observe myself from the outside I agree that my reaction to this is out of proportion to what actually happened. Rationally I believed her explanations and her assurances that she was no longer interested in him, but I was never able to regain the closeness I felt to her prior to that incident. I kept her at arms length and that eventually ended the relationship.

Even though we're no longer together, I still ruminate on this and make myself upset for no gd reason. I don't want to hold on to this anger and pain anymore, but I don't know how to let go. I still break down every time I think about it and its aftermath. Part of me feels like I'm justified in being as upset as I am, and maybe that's true, but that upset isn't serving me anymore. I think I worry that by letting it go, I'm implicitly saying that it was ok or that it never happened. How can I move on?