# Need Advice please



## sun1 (Feb 28, 2013)

I am considering a divorce.

I have come to realize that this is not a question, it is an essay. So, if you do not have plenty of time at your hands, please do not read this. If you want to read a dragging story, please jump straight ahead.

I am trying to express my personality so that you can respect my decision and help me in making a right one.

A haphazard analysis of my personality:

I consider myself a happy man. I consider myself emotionally very mature. I grew up with a lot of love. I underwent a lot of hardship in life and I believe it made me a better person however the amount of love and positivity in my life made it seem that hardship has to be dealt with and is part of life and reflecting back I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I have seen the worst of life and I believe that I can live in great hardship and still enjoy life. I am extremely patient, generous and warm-hearted. I have child-like humor and I like being liked. I am brutally brave when I am fighting on the right side, I am intolerably modest when I am with people I like, and I am very self-conscious and timid when I am seeking information/knowledge that I am supposed to know, I am very forgiving and eager to share what I know with anyone, I can be extremely frugal and cautious at times depending on the situation and I am generous and extravagant at times as long as it is not wasteful. I hate to waste/throw away anything that can be remotely useful. I treasure gifts and presents. Recently I have become inertia-driven. I can just sit around lazy for hours or I can continue working for 18 hours or even watching TV for 12 hours straight. Its difficult to switch gears from task to task, although I tend to think myself as capable to managing a lot of varied tasks if I am under a time crunch. I find it is difficult to express myself succintly, hence I elaborate a lot. I feel the need to explain things. In the process of elaboration, I get lost in the thought process that I have to pause and recollect my thoughts to make the point through, unless of course I have rehearsed the sentence already in my head before I speak out. Some people call me an elaborate speaker, some call me confused, and some call me an intellectual. I think of myself as an inconsistent speaker - sometimes I am an excellent explainer, sometimes terrible, sometimes hasty, sometimes a very deep thinker. I respect all people, my ideal to strive for would be to have zero ego and I usually am down to earth. I highly respect hard working people, I get intimidated by highly focussed goal-driven serious people. I cant think if I am talking to superiors sometimes and feel pressurized to give a quick reply, so I blurt out something without reasoning it thoroughly and feel stupid later, but sometimes I just pause for a long time to think through the question and miss my chance to speak out. I like to engage in conversations - however I I suck at most topics of common knowledge, although I am quite conversant and feel happy to talk about things that interest me. I enjoy limelight but I am usually not in the limelight, unless it is a silly topic.

In the wake of the recent crisis, I have been evaluating my personality and I have discovered many negative things about myself. Let me list them below:
1. I am extremely liberal and patient: I may actually be insensitive. I tend to think that I am a caring person, but I think I may not be. I found out that although I get a great deal of happiness helping people, I help people readily who I dont know. If I get to know them and they expect my help, I ignore them until I know that they desperately need help. However, people that I know that dont expect my help, I feel like I want to help them. 

Having said that, I am a socially disconnected person. I know my friends and people that I know deeply care about their family. Although I love my family, I don't check on them. I feel that I am quite selfish this way, because since I don't check on them I feel that it is similar to not really caring what happens to them. However, if I know that they are in trouble, I would be glad to help them, else I wouln't even care to think about them. Isn't this being selfish? So, I often get asked why I dont call for many days. It just doesnt occur to me that I have to keep a close eye on people that I love. So, may be I dont really love them. So, when I think of the opposite scenario of how it would be to not have them around, I cannot bear losing them. It is sort of I have taken their presence for granted.


In search of a life partner, I gave this person who contacted me online at a matrimonial site a phone call. Then, I chatted with her for a total of may be 8-10 times on the phone - each session lasting for about an hour or so over a period of 6 months. I was getting a bit pressurized to marry from my family - but it was upto me who I would marry. Arranged marriages are common practice in my country where usually the bride and bridegroom marry only after a meeting or two. I felt slightly privileged that I am able to slightly get to know this person before I marry her. 

In my case, I was living in the US and the girl was in my home country. After a few conversations over the phone, she seems like a reasonable person to me - her views were not extreme and she seemed to be very understanding. 


In the meanwhile, her parents visit US and I get to meet them along with her family in the US. However, I am only in phone contact with her. Their family like me and get me to marry to her as soon as possible. Towards this agenda, I thought that I would let my Dad and brother meet her and her family in my country while I am still here. Since it is difficult for me to travel and also expensive, I thought, If they like her, then I will proceed with my plan and may be even consider marrying her. My Dad has always taken the best decisions for me growing up, and I trust in him much. After their meeting, they are positive about the girl and the family. This is all that I was looking for, a reassurance so that I can commit and may be even marry although I have never seen the girl in person.

After the meeting, the girl's parents have gone to elaborate measures to convince me that I should marry her when I meet her when I travel to my country. At no point do I commit since I have not met the girl. However since my Dad and brother had no issues, I thought it wouldnt be too bad to commit.

Then it is time to travel to my country. Having almost made up my mind that I am going to marry, I go home home optimistically. We set up a date to meet and if everything goes well, the plan is to get married in a week from our meeting. 

The girl is by now madly in love with me, so she claims, in her emails, although I only have a sense of good feeling but never could develop feelings since I never met her. After I land in my country for a brief vacation, we set up a date to meet. My Dad and my brother have already seen the girl. So I travel with them to visit her and their parents to meet the girl that I have been having conversations with. When I first look at her, I am in a big shock since she does not look like the photoshoppped pictures she sent me. My Dad and brother never got to see the pictures she sent me. Although the features are the same roughly, I was not one bit attracted to her and we had no chemistry. I was badly trying to avoid gazing into her since I couldnt imagine marrying her. Bottomline - I thought we didnt have a charisma together, I didn't enjoy her aura. Before we left I was asked by her mom if I would like to marry her daughter since her daughter had her hopes high on me. In my mind, the answer was a clear no, but I told them that I would get back to them.

As I went home, many thoughts kept racing in my head - mainly as to how the situation even got so far and how my Dad thought she would be a girl suitable for me. For the first time, I felt that this was a decision that no body else could take for me, and I had to take it myself.

I had to get back to them in a day with a response and I also had to get back to US in a couple weeks. If I said, yes, then I would be married before I left my home country. 

I told my Dad that I didnot like the girl. I thought that it would the end of the story, but I knew it wouldnt be easy. My Dad wanted me to get married as early as possible, and he tried to convince me to marry her but did not force me. I respect my Dad enormously. So, that night I started digging for reasons that brought me to come to my country and even meet her. I found that what made me meet was that when we talked over the phone, I found her to be a reasonable match. I had spoken to a few other girls but I did not like them or I felt their personalities were very far off. However, this girl I thought had a gentle personality and a positive attitude. In the meanwhile, my Dad tried to share some wisdom. He told me that if I am rejecting the girl because I didnt physically like her, then that is not a solid ground and that beauty is only temporary.

I am myself a bit idealistic and philosophical. After 6 months of chatting, I couldn't come to terms to tell her that I would not agree to the proposal because I didnt like how she looks. To me it sounded like an immoral reason. However, deep down my selfish heart, I knew that I didnt like her and if I had met her the first time, I wouldnt have started the conversation with her. Instead, I ended up meeting her entire family, spoke with her quite a few times on the phone. In fact, we tried meeting on skype video once though the computer, but it was so hazy. So, I was in such a predicament and I had to make the biggest decision of my life that night. I was always fed stories from childhood that a person is known by his or her character and not by his or her looks. This impressed on me much and since I was a kid I tried to live by many such values. It would go against my values to reject this proposal based on my values. Also, the girl sent me emails that she cannot live without me and she stopped seeing other matches and had decided in her mind that I would be her life partner. This made things more difficult for me since I had this girl who loved me and I am blind to the love and looking elsewhere. 

Also, I thought the years of experience of my Dad must have see something in this girl. When I thought about the concept of arranged marriages I know that people first marry and then being to love after they get married. But atleast they get to see each other and accept each other before they get married.

In my case, I didn't like the girl, in fact she looked like the last person I would like in the normal distribution of girls. I hated the moment. But I decided to trust in the concept of arranged marriage, and in the belief that I would one day find love in her and with the hope that love would grow between us after marriage, I decided to say 'yes' the next morning. In retrospect, that I was the probably the biggest mistake that I made. We got married. I then had to return back to US alone. 

She joined me in U.S after a couple of months. I hated looking at her and felt cheated by my values that I had to marry her. I hated myself for hating her. She is a good person, but I had no feelings for her. When it came to a physical relationship, the man's drive takes over the pleasure senses, however at the fundamental emotional level I was depressed. 

Troubles soon started not just for me but for both of us. I highly value a clean place, hard work and cleaning up after. She was used to a servant and didn't like being told to do menial household tasks. I consider myself an extremely patient person, but I was surprised that I quickly lost patience and got to a stage after many tolerating moments that I had to take a tough stand and order that she has to clean up after herself like I do. She didnt like bossing around. Neither did I, I never like bossing around, infact if I have to do that that would be the most distressing situation and unhappy moment for me. But, there was no place for soft words since normal house hold things didnt get done. It would have helped if I liked her, but I was far from it. Also, I was just beginning to get to know her. It was one of those things that I cannot explain. My emotions were probably not mine - it was a sequence of events: my uneventful marriage. Although I believed men and women are born equal, she believed that all work should be shared by both of us. I agreed except I had to work 8 hours and then come come and help her as well. After a while, I told her its not fair and she had to take responsibility for most house hold tasks. Things got to a point where it was not about the stupid household tasks, but the attitude that she believed things would get done by themselves. For me it was unbearable if she sat around and come home to find the sink with dishes undone left all evening and night and woken up to find them still undone. I would do the dishes, but after a while it was just that I had to find a way to tell her that each of us have to work hard and I personally find hard work an attractive trait. Anyways many months were lost with her feeling that I am abusing her with domestic duties since she was not used to them at all and me feeling that she is slacking off since I would do it all by myself before we started living together. 

A couple months into the relationship she branded me as an abusive husband. I find discovering myself and I see myself as a new me where I constantly have to talk to her about the correct way to do things since she is not used to the new life and responsibilities. I felt regretful that I am being this person that I am not used to, but again I felt that if my wife didnt want to handle responsibility then I would never be able to like her. But trying to teach her responsibility made me a really harsh person. Of course, I was guilty of the fact that I could teach her to do things lovingly. But, the start of the relationship was so unromantic and jerky that I couldnot find a soft corner for her. 

There were incidents that I cannot explain here that made matters worse between us. After 3 months together, I was strongly contemplating divorce since I never began to like her. Infact, I think after we got married, we got further apart and I started hating her. She was extremely adament, but patient. She would call me abusive and intolerable, constantly complain about me to her family, but her family would ask her to be patient and ask her to settle issues between us.

In the process, there were a few core issues that I was not comfortable between us. I told her that we had to have a serious discussion and if things dont go well between us, we should consider divorce since it would be a bad idea to think of it after we have kids. And I told her that if she believes that I am not right for her, there is really no point wasting time and dragging her life into this hell. Well, obviously since she liked me before she married me the idea of divorce was not an option for her. I was harsh by bring up the topic of divorce but I thought with the kind of situations we had, her behavior and many other things made me tell her that if she wants to get out, this is a chance and she didnt have to bear living hell and I told her frankly that I dont love her especially considering the way things went on between us over the past few months.


She hated me, but she tried hard to change her ways. Although there are a lot of things we still dont agree on, I have to accept that she did make progress by taking on responsibility even if it was resentfully. 

Well, cutting long story short, it has been 7 months and these past 7 months have been the most distressing, disappointing, stressful and hateful months that I have had in my entire life. These 7 months have brought the monster out of me. I never thought I was capable of disciplining someone let alone myself. I have turned into a harsh person and I have gained the reputation of an irresponsible and pathetic abusive husband. She still wants to live with me. I have tried my best but I couln't begin to like her let alone love her. Every day for the past 7 months felt like my bachelorhood was a blessing and I wished I could go back to it. Sometimes I feel that I would rather stay single the rest of my life rather than live with someone that I dont like.

Bottom line: She is a good person at heart. I dont like her. She contantly complains that I am a pathetic husband, but doesnt want to divorce me saying she loves me. Its hard for me to take all the drama, and I have reached a point where I dont care what she does. Recently she sent me a suicide threat saying that she is fed up with my behavior. I believe she is an adult and she has the right to live her live the way she wants and I cannot impose things on her if she doesnt like to agree on sharing core values. I have been thinking of divorce ever since we starting living together and I cant wait to get it over with. At the same time, I cannot bear to think that I may have been a reason to destroy her life since I entered her life. Also, I feel bad that I had to become stone hearted to tell her to do things that are expected of her and share house hold responsibility - she would at times feel bad since I was bossy and I felt bossy too but I had to keep up that stance. In fact, if I did get divorced, I think I deserve to pay a price to cause her sufferring and treating a human being with disrespect. Although I always felt I did the right thing by forcing her to take up her responsibility, I still feel bad about the way it all happened. I would trade all my money after my divorce if I had to compensate for it. Even now, I just put up a tough stance with her since I cannot take a stand filled with love and care based on my feelings towards her. Its hard for me to fake being a loving husband when in the core of my heart I dont like her. If I am happy inside, I show it out, but if I am unhappy inside with the person, I can never fake it. 

I need help please!!

P.S: This must be the biggest posting here, but it has been the past 7 months of my distressing life! Thanks a bunch for hearing me out if you did get this far. There may be a lot of errors here since I am not editing it, I am just typing as thoughts randomly cross my head and so it may be unstructured.


----------



## caladan (Nov 2, 2012)

This one is easy - get help.

I'm not going to go into the risks of getting into a marriage based on someone else's evaluation (you get to live with her, they don't), so what's done is done. 

At the moment, it's quite obvious that you're both floundering helplessly in this relationship. What you need now in my opinion, is counselling. Get a neutral party who is trained to listen to you guys and assist. It's not going to be easy, trust me. You've already "trained" your mind into a whole host of negativity for this woman, getting out will require some work from both parties. Apart from that, I think your marriage/relationship can be saved.

And please for the love of God, if you ever do have children, let them make their own decisions.


----------

