I cheated on my girlfriend while in a long distance relationship

This is going to be a long read but I hope there’s someone out there who can weigh in on this. It would be greatly appreciated.

My ex and I were in a relationship for a little over a year. Seven months of it were long distance. While we were long distance, I had downloaded bumble because I was bored and lonely. We had barely talked. I met up with one girl and did stuff with her but we didn’t have sex or even oral. I also messaged other girls out of boredom but never met up with them or had any intention of doing so.

Fast forward to late August of last year when I move out to my ex’s city to be with her, things were going fine for a bit but we would argue on certain topics but had pretty good conflict resolution. She had caught covid and it seemed that afterwards, our intimacy was lacking. I had messaged a couple from a swinger’s group on Facebook to try to bring some fire into our sex life. I felt ashamed and that’s not really my style so I abandoned the idea. My ex had seen one of the messages on my screen and asked me about it. I quickly denied it because I was embarrassed. This was in early December. In between that, I had checked her phone, mainly just because I was interested in seeing how her past partners looked. Fast forward to Sunday the 7th of February, we had just returned home from a nice trip to the vineyards. Granted we had a fight on the way back because I had gotten all bent out of shape over something she said that wasn’t a big deal.

We had made up from that argument when we arrived at my house and I thought everything was good. That is until she tried to airdrop photos to me and it wasn’t working. I then brought my phone over to her so that we can figure out what was going on. There were some video clips of a girl from Whatsapp saying thank you to me and blowing a kiss. The story behind this is that I met the girl on a language exchange app and we switched the conversation to whatsapp. When she started to get off purpose (language exchange) and started getting flirty, I ended the convo and deleted it. However the videos remained in my photo album since whatsapp automatically does that. So my ex asked who she was and I didn’t feel like getting into another argument, so I lied and told her it was a girl that my friend was talking to. Bonehead move because she kept grilling me on Monday the 8th until I flipped out and told her who the girl was. She then came over on Tuesday the 9th and we talked and made love. She asked to borrow my Ipad for her upcoming therapy appointment. After thinking about she said no, that she didn’t want it. I insisted because I wanted to build trust. Turns out that it was the wrong move because she came by on Wednesday Feb 10th to break up with me because she saw messages from the girls I spoke to when I was long distance. It was ugly. I pleaded for her not to leave me and it evolved to the point where I hurt myself.

We have spoken a couple of times since then. Once on Friday the 12th when I asked if we could talk the next week and she had given me the cold shoulder. Then we talked on Saturday the 13th where she messaged me due to an email link she had gotten from the couples counseling asking me to leave her alone. She then said a few more things like there’s no way we’re ever getting back together. On Valentine’s day she had messaged me basically throwing a lot of insults my way. I kept calmly explaining that I would love a chance to try and reconcile and show her that I’m not all talk. She was being seemingly resistant but also seemed to open up. I then talked about no-contact with her.

I didn’t say anything about the long-distance bad choices because I was ashamed and wanted to put that behind me.

Do I have any chance of reconciliation at all? This woman is truly special to me and I love her with all my heart and will do anything to have another chance with her. Has anyone on this forum come back from anything like this?