My [26 M] girlfriend [24F] of ~1.5 years broke up with me after I forgave her fo

[Jagabee]

Background
My girlfriend and I first “met” and exchanged a few messages on Tumblr over 5 years ago and we had been following each other for a while. We only started really getting closer and exchanged Facebooks, Instagrams and phone numbers in around 2015. We talked almost every day through these means for over 1 year or so before we even met. By the time we met, we had already begun to kind of like each other and we eventually got together. I was with her for a little over 1.5 years after we met and got together. She was my second girlfriend and I felt my relationship with her was a thousand times better than with my first. We have so many shared interests, can talk to each other forever, and the sex is amazing. She truly made me feel wanted and attractive in a way my previous girlfriend couldn’t.
 
The majority of our relationship had been long distance as she went to a college about 6 hours away. However she visited back home often, we went on trips together, and we communicated heavily through text and online. We’d been insanely in love with each other this entire time, although we did have some issues. Last month she graduated and moved back home (we still live about an hour apart though). We were super excited to be closer to each other again and could not wait to spend more time together.
 
Everything Else
However, last Thursday she confessed to me that she had kissed another guy the night before her graduation, while she was really drunk at a party. She does like to drink and dance and have fun, and she’s a very sexual person (but not the whole sleeping around kind of person, she’s very sexual with the person she loves). She has always been adamant in telling me that she thinks cheating is wrong (she’s been very mad at her friends who have cheated) and I truly believed she would never do something like that, so I knew that she knew she had made a terrible mistake. But I was still in shock and I told her to leave the house right then. She texted me and said she was really sorry and that she hopes I give her a chance to explain herself sometime. After a few days of thinking and gathering my thoughts I asked her to meet again on Saturday night. I decided I was going to forgive her as long as it was just a kiss (and not sex) and meant nothing, so I needed to hear her story first.
 
She explained that it was indeed just a kiss with a stranger at a party and it meant nothing. I believe that to be true. She was extremely remorseful and she said she doesn’t know why she did it and it was extremely uncharacteristic of her. So I told her that I forgive her. She did not think I was going to take her back. But then she said she thinks she did it because it was around graduation, lots of stuff was going on, and she got scared. Scared of how serious we were getting. Now, she said she’s feeling unsure of herself and about a lot of things. She said she loves me and cares for me now but she’s not sure what she wants anymore. She said she needed to go home and think.
 
The next night she asked me when I’d be free to talk. She said she’d be available on Wednesday. Then she said she was sorry we hadn’t gotten the chance to talk all day and asked how my day was. We talked like normal and she ended the convo with good night and I love you. The next day we talked normally as well, she even showed me a link for an exhibit in a museum and asked if I’d like to go with her someday.
 
Wednesday comes, and she ends things. She said that if she’s not sure what she wants then she shouldn’t be in a relationship. She said she really loves me but she doesn’t want to hurt me more because of her uncertainty. The whole thing lasted about 15 minutes.
 
Later that night, I could not sleep for shit. I was so confused by everything, and everything happened so fast. I felt like I needed more explanation. I ended up messaging her telling her I was hurting bad and missed her. She said she was so sorry for the hurt i’m going through and that she really does love me, but she can’t give me what I want. Still, we talked for hours, until 4am. We talked about our relationship and the good memories and what we love about each other. We told each other we love each other so much and had so much more planned to say earlier that day but couldn’t find the words to say it.
 
I asked her since she said she wasn’t sure what she wanted/wasn’t ready for a relationship, if that meant she wanted to see other people. She said no, she just wants to be alone now. She’s not thinking about anybody but me. So I told her I understand that she wants to work on herself, but I asked why I couldn’t help her with that if we stayed together. Her response really moved me, as she put it together so well. She told me: “I know who I am when I’m with you. But I need to know who I am when I’m alone too. I can’t give you all of me if I’m not sure who that is. And this is just something I have to figure out right now.”
 
I understood her reasoning, it was completely legit. She’s in a big transition point in her life, having just graduated and moved back home. And she hadn’t landed a job before graduating. So I know she has a lot of things to figure out and take care of.
 
We kept talking that night even though we were so tired. We didn’t want the conversation to end because we didn’t know if we’d ever talk to each other again. She said she wants to be selfish and keep talking to me and tell me to wait for her, but she understands if I can’t because it may hurt. It took me a LONG time to get over my first break up, and considering how this relationship was so much better in every aspect, I don’t know how I’ll ever get over it. I’m obviously heart broken, I truly loved this girl. I don’t think I can be just friends but I can’t bring myself to take myself away from her right now.
 
We still talked a ton yesterday. We started reading our old text conversations together (I had files saved and shared them to her) and going down memory lane. I know most of you are thinking this is a very stupid move and it’s just setting myself up for hurt.
 
We both still love each other very much. She said I was the best thing to ever happen to her and this has been the best relationship she’s ever been in and the most happy she’s ever been in a very long time. She keeps saying she wants to see me but she knows it’s probably not a good idea and that she doesn’t trust herself (she’s been dropping slight hints that she feels like we’ll probably have sex if we were to meet up).
 
Later last night she asked me, if talking to her, and looking through our old convos was helping me feel better or not. I told her talking to her in general made me feel better, but I was still hurting. We both said it’s almost impossible for us to not talk to each other. We’ve both become each other’s best friends and we had basically become 50% of each other’s day, thinking about each other and talking to each other.
 
But I told her I realize I want to talk to her because I want her as my girlfriend, but she wants to talk to me to keep me as her friend. She agreed and said it’s selfish of her, and that maybe she should be the one to step back. She said if we get back together right now, we’re just gonna end up breaking up every time and end up hating each other. I told her I understand, but that right now I wanted to be selfish and keep talking to her too, even if it hurt. And that I didn’t want her to get back with me just because she felt sorry for me. She said she really wants to be with me, and she doesn’t feel sorry for me or anything, just sorry about the situation.
 
I asked her to explain more about what she thinks she needs to find out about herself. Or what doesn’t she know about herself that is preventing her from being with someone. She said that we got to know each other while she was still with someone else, and then we started dating a few months later after they broke up. She said she hasn’t been single long enough to know who she is. She said she’s never been single for more than a year, and that she’s gotta date herself first.
 
She said she guesses she needs to figure out how to be okay with being alone and liking herself. And that it’s hard for her to accept herself and believe in herself. She wants to be able to have the tenacity to believe in herself without everyone else doing it for her. She said she has a hard time tackling the internal problems and that she used to hate it when people told her she looked put together, because she never really felt that way.
 
She also said she notices her interests kinda disappear when she’s with other people, like with some of her exes she tried to be more athletic or listen to weird music she didn’t really like. But she said with me was when she felt most herself.
 
She said it was really hard telling me all this and that she’s never really disclosed how displeased she is with herself. I always knew she had self esteem issues, but I always tried my hardest to let her know she’s beautiful, smart, amazing and worth it. And she truly appreciated me for that. She didn’t want to talk about it more because she didn’t want me to see the way she talks about herself. She said she now understands when people say that you have to be a whole person and not expect people to complete you when you’re with them.
 
This talk made me realize what she meant before by saying all of this was really bad timing, and how things might have been different if we met 2 years later. The whole time I thought she was referring to how there wasn’t a good time for her to tell me about the cheating. She wanted to tell me in person, but she was away at college, and then moving home. And then we she had invited me to this big family grad bbq where I was going to meet her family for the first time, so she couldn’t tell me before then either. Then the next week it was my birthday, and she didn’t want to tell me then either. She finally told me a week after my birthday.
 
But I realize now she was talking about timing and referring to where she is at in her life now. If we had met two years later, it’s possible that she could have gone through all of this by then, and know who she is and be ready for a real relationship. Then, our relationship could have been truly great with none of these setbacks. That's also why I feel it'll be much harder to move on. My last ex broke up with me because of issues we both had, things I did wrong. But this one feels like it was none of my wrongdoing, and that it could have lasted if there was just better timing.
 
I have been talking to my sister about this whole thing. She’s given a lot of great advice but last night she really put me through a loop. My sister suffers from depression and she thinks my girlfriend (or ex now) might also. She understands my ex has some soul searching to do and she went through that before, and that it seems like she has some mental health issues to work through. And that having self esteem issues is really hard in a relationship. Plus now on top of moving home from college, in therapy they consider those as big as a life event as somebody dying close to you, and now my ex has a whole new identity.
 
My sister said being depressed can give you a fear of commitment and make you put up walls, and that the self loathing is strong. And that you want to give up before the person dumps you after finally realizing you’re not good enough, or you’re afraid that they’ll see you for who you really are. She thinks this might be just one possibility of what’s going on with my ex, among many other things. The part that really messed me up that I didn’t know before is that my sister once tried to break up with her now husband back when they were dating because of her issues, but he didn’t let her, and somehow that worked out for them. That makes me feel like I can keep fighting to make this work.
 
Anyways, I’m not really sure what advice I’m looking for. Logically, I know that I have to stop contact and stop being friends with her if I truly want to move on. It’s just that my brain is losing to my heart right now and I can’t bring myself to stop thinking about her and talking to her, and she feels the same way about me. I know that she needs space to truly find herself and I feel guilty wanting to get back together, as it would prevent her from rightfully doing so.
 
But contradicting myself, I’m just having trouble understanding why we can’t get through this together. I mentioned the whole thing about ‘people can’t love someone else if they don’t love themselves’ deal and how I don’t believe that to be true and she doesn’t believe it either. She thinks that it’s more like ‘people can’t love someone else properly if they don’t love themselves properly as well’. But I think that people aren’t perfect, they’re not always going to love themselves. In a relationship, it’s just two people, not the idealistic two halves deal. And in a relationship, you help each other with issues like this and grow together.
 
I guess I more just needed a place to write and vent. But since I need to ask a question I guess I’ll ask how should I deal with this and process this? Should I bother continuing to fight for her? What my sister said about her bf not letting her break up with her really threw me in a loop.
 
TLDR: Girlfriend of 1.5 years broke up with me after I forgave her for cheating. She said she needed to find herself. How can I deal with this and process this?