M here in my 30s, Sorry for the wall of text but I need to get this out. Not going into too much details because our divorce is still ongoing. I was married in early 2024, it was within our community. I work abroad and she is doing some independent work in India.

I grew up in a different background, and she in her own. There was just a small gap between our engagement and marriage. Prior to our engagement we only texted, and only after seeing each other did we start talking on call. It wasn’t a restriction or anything, we just didn’t initiate it from both sides.

Issues started popping up between our families after the engagement regarding how well off they were or how much i was actually earning. Both sides said some things that were never supposed to be said…. But I pressed on for the marriage because I knew that such obstacles were guaranteed in such a commitment. I wanted to go through with it because there was something about her that I couldn’t let go of. I’ll be blatantly honest, she looked cute to me. And while talking she had a very cute voice that just melted me. I know what you’re probably thinking. Im setting myself up for a disaster right? Well you would be right depending on how you view it.

Post marriage, we never had any intimacy. Neither I or she initiated anything. Personally, we were absolute strangers and I wanted us to get to know each other better. I strongly believe in consent before anything. And i know that she does too.

After marriage, the first signs of trouble started popping up. She said i wasn’t being communicative. Now growing up away from India, my social circle was rather small, mostly like minded people who don’t talk much but we have a strong inter-personal understanding. We could go on for months without talking and still meet after a year as if we were only together the previous day. Keeping this in mind, i didn’t consider this as an excuse for my lack of communication. I took it as a something i needed to work on. I told her I would work on it and that I accept that I have a shortcoming when it came to this. However she wasn’t with me on it. There was no encouragement or feedback on how I was doing. Without this I was unsure of how I was doing. Friends, family and coworkers said that its a non-issue and I’d get over it.

Her second problem with me was that my EQ was non existent. This was evident as well due to my upbringing and my nature to keep personal things in life to myself. I never expressed any emotions. I am a monolith when it comes to emotions. Again I said to her, “now that you’re here, I have someone I care about deeply. Building my emotions will take time, but with you at my side I’m confident I can do it”. But again, there was no feedback. Instead all I got was criticism.

A month after our marriage, I had to leave India and rejoin my job. We would talk on the phone everyday or video call. Some days it was normal, others just plain hurtful. I slowly realized she had a very toxic nature of bringing up the past and sometimes even minor incidents after our engagement. She wouldn’t let go. She would put herself in the spotlight as a victim for something that was long gone and forgotten. Months later she was able to come join me abroad. Now at this time, I had just left my old job in anticipation of a better job with far better pay. I was under immense mental stress trying to negotiate the finer details for the job. Taking care of her, trying to keep her and my mother from going apeshit on each other (thats a story I wont get into because it is honestly so petty and childish its not worth frying your brain cells), and looking for an apartment. Until then I was staying with my parents.

Now during all this time, she never gave me an ounce of support morally. She was mentally absent. Eventually I would get a nice apartment and furnish it in every way she wanted. Now here I have to admit, she is great at setting up a home. She put a lot of effort into helping me clean it and arrange things. I was so proud of her for that. I thought things were finally starting to turn positive in my life. But I was so wrong. She went back to her old habit of bring up the past and things long over and buried. I thought to myself, this is my fate but she is the one I chose and I made up my mind to be with her till the very end. I never told her I loved her explicitly, I would save that for the day when we truly fell in love with each other. I think you know what I mean when I say that.

Then one day she said she needs to get something done that she left hanging back in India and that she needs to leave. She promised to be back soon. I told her to take all the time you want and finish what you started. I would support her in any way she wanted. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and many months went by. Communication went from normal to toxic and then to non existent. We even had a conference call with a mutual family friend to see if I could iron out our issues, but it was of no use. She didn’t want to return, and she didn’t want to live with me anymore. Even worse was that she said she had planned to cut off contact with me once she got back home and not return. The lie and betrayal hit me pretty hard and I went through a stage of depression that I still haven’t recovered from. A month later, I get a call from her dad saying he wants a mutual divorce (emphasis on he, not she).

Considering all i went through financially, mentally and physically (i lost 10 kgs in a span of 3 months) I deduced I’m better off without her. It wasn’t worth the stress. But to this day I am sad that things didn’t turn out the way i expected it to. I cared about her so much but I showed it in ways which she did not appreciate it (money, gifts etc) and I know that’s not how women’s brains work. But she didn’t put in the effort to work with me on my shortcomings. We lived together no longer than 3 months in total. And that was that.

Now I sit alone in an apartment, waking up everyday to see her gone. I see her face everywhere I go. Perhaps its for the better that she and I are no longer together. I learned a very hard lesson in life that women are not all that they seem to be. There are much more sinister details to this story that I would love to but sadly cant share. Not a day goes by without that feel that there is an empty hole in me. I dread getting free time because my thoughts become clouded about her and what we could’ve built together. But she threw it all away in search of god knows what.

I’m sorry guys, I am not a perfect man by any means. If I had done anything wrong, it was because I did not know much about my own culture and how people interact with each other in my own country. I never raised my voice against her or even showed anger at her. She was my wife after all, someone with whom I planned on living out the rest of my life with. It solves no purpose being angry with her.