The Worst Mistake I’ve Ever Made, Can I Really Accept Forgiveness?

i need to talk about a mistake i made and i’m trying to find a way to get it out and get honest feedback. to start, i made a mistake. In the first week of dating my current boyfriend, i cheated. (For a few years now, i’ve been on online chat sites at first looking for people to talk to. I ended up being taken advantage of since i was young. and it started a sort of weird addiction/fascination with sending explicit content to online strangers. i know it’s terrible that i did that and i’m trying to work through that) i sent sexually explicit videos and photos to online strangers. after that i had never done it again. it made me feel awful. i had a pretty decent fear of commitment and i was thinking about how this was my new circumstance and i acted out. not that it excuses it but it’s what happened. my boyfriend noticed that i was off. i told him about the commitment issues i had but i couldn’t bring myself to tell him i had cheated. he is a wonderful guy and didn’t deserve it. but it was so new and he was more into it than i was and it had a bit of a fearful reaction on my part. the relationship continued and we got a lot better. and as things started to become so beautiful i kinda started to forget that it had even happened. everything seemed perfect and i didn’t want to remember what i did, so i had blocked it out. and the further we went the more i had forgotten about it especially because i couldn’t even imagine hurting him.

there was an instance where we had a discussion that sparked some trust issues in him. before we were official i had been sending photos and videos to a guy i was previously involved with. I didn’t tell my bf at the time and after we were official i cut it off. but it still made him feel weird and uncomfortable.

we’ve been dating for over three months now. i love it. and like i said i love him and i could never imagine doing anything to hurt him. and for a bit now i had realized that my initial fear was gone and wanted to be completely and totally committed to him. and lately it had been going so well. i gave him the password to the snapchat that i had sent the videos and pictures on. i didn’t even think about it because i had honestly forgotten. he realized the dates and questioned me immediately. at first i didn’t think he was serious, then my heart sank when i remembered. we talked about it for hours. he decided that he didn’t want to break up with me to my surprise. but i’d have to earn his trust back which i thought was pretty merciful. i gave him the passwords to everything. i came clean about everything that had ever happened (i had never done that after that last time) and gave him the location of my phone. he is away for school right now and we are going to see each other in about a week and a half. i really am so sorry about it and i expressed that to him. and i want to fix it and earn back his trust but the thing is i did mess up. ill never meet the standard for what i think he deserves because i already did the worst and hurt him. i don’t know if i deserve the second chance and my mind is racing. he says that he isn’t mad and that i do and he doesn’t want to throw away everything we had. i don’t want that either, but i just don’t see how i deserve it, i’ve already fallen so far from that standard in my head that i know he deserves.