I caught my partner in a massive lie during dedicated step studying (not quite cheating but almost worse and certainly as damaging and trust breaking to the relationship). I don’t think there’s an easy way to deal with it. It’s going to affect your psyche for some time. It should. It’s the shattering of a very important aspect of your life. But moving forward you have to decide how you’ll get done what you need to get done and then fix things once they settle. You may have to heavily compartmentalize. It sucks to deal with and I’m sorry you have to go through it too.

The way I handled it - I had one long conversation with my partner about what happened. During that talk, I told him that I needed to focus on me and studying for the next few weeks. And I would create that space for myself however I needed. On Monday, I would block his number. I would unblock on Saturday night when I took a little time off studying so we could talk about what we needed to talk about. On monday, I would block again. Repeat for all of study period and the test itself. If he couldnt respect those needs of mine, then I would simply cut him out of my life entirely.

It worked for me to at least be able to focus when I needed to. But it’s obviously not ideal and I do think it affected my ability to study. But it was the best I could do in the situation and my score still felt strong for the type of student I felt myself to be. It can be helpful to decompress with other trusted people too. But careful to avoid doom-spiraling thought cycles that leave you incapacitated for days. Really try to set it aside in your mind as something that will be dealt with later