Was there an exact moment you went from ‘I’m happily married/in a relationship” to “I’m…married/in a relationship?” And did you ever get back to the former feeling?
Was there an exact moment you went from ‘I’m happily married/in a relationship” to “I’m…married/in a relationship?” And did you ever get back to the former feeling?
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For me it goes in waves, sort of? My baseline is the former but I’ve definitely had moments where I felt the latter, generally during a difficult time in the marriage. I do always revert to the former, though. It helps me to know that the former is the baseline, so I can separate my feelings from the facts during, say, a particularly shitty fight.
I went to a bachelorette party out of town where I didn’t know anyone but the bride, so one of her other “solo” friends was matched with me to be hotel roommates. We gabbed the whole weekend and hearing about her leaving her abusive relationship made me realize… I was in one too? And what I thought was a happy relationship was actually really miserable, because there are relationships where people aren’t just pretending to be happy like I was? It shook my world up literally overnight. I wanted to try and work things out with him but it was too late, so we ended up splitting and now I am so much happier in an actual respectful, loving partnership.
The first 2 years of my marriage were miserable as hell. He was constantly criticizing me, that I should clean more, eat 3 times per day instead of 2, use less toilet paper, tan more, this more that more. I couldn’t leave him due to my immigration status depending on him.
Miraculously at 2 years mark he gave up and just accepted me the way I am, and our marriage turned absolutely idyllic. We went from arguing every week to arguing once every 6-10 months. He learned to be responsive to my needs, and how to support and comfort me emotionally, to sit down and hug and say soothing loving things when I’m feeling down, he stopped putting up a stone wall and started sitting with me and holding space for emotions, and stopped demanding things. It was literally perfect after the first 2 years passed. I suddenly fell in love with him all over again at that point.
Weird, right.
But it wasn’t like happy to meh back to happy. It was miserable/wretched from get go to happy.
No there wasn’t a single moment.
It dawned on me over a period of time that I couldn’t remember when I last felt genuinely happy.
Despite a lot of effort we never got that back.
I was never happily married. I knew before I married him that I was settling for a man that didn’t I didn’t want. I tried really, really hard. There were good moments, of course, but I was never truly happy.
About 6 months after I got married, my ex changed into a different person. He always had some character flaws but they became full-blown red flags and he hid them from me for years. At some point, he started showing his explosive temper. Previously he would just complain about things like traffic or work or someone doing something stupid around him, until it escalated to screaming, hyperventilating, punching holes in the wall, throwing things. I tried to comfort him when this happened for a good while after this change, because I was holding on to the idea of who he was before.
He got sick about 15 months into our marriage and he needed a lot of at home care from me. I spent months playing nurse at home, and single-handedly taking care of the dogs and the chores and the cooking and the grocery shopping. I don’t know exactly when it happened, somewhere between 18 months and 2 years, but one day after he recovered, he got angry and screamed at me. And the first thing that popped into my head was “I wish you had died”.
No, it never got better after his temper came out. I’m 2 years separated and I still wish he had died.