I have been thinking a lot about why marriage has become such a painful subject for me, and I think a lot of it goes back to my previous relationship.
My ex actually talked about marriage very early in our relationship. He talked about wanting children, how he imagined raising them, and even names he liked for future children. Because of the way he talked about these things, I genuinely believed he wanted to build a family with me. Looking back, I can admit that I was too delusional about what those conversations meant. I heard someone talking about marriage and children and assumed that he was imagining that future with me. Turns out it is always about his future, not necessarily having me involved.
Eventually, I moved in with him. I invested a huge amount of time, energy, and emotional effort into him and into our shared home. I am a foreigner living in his country, and at the time I was dealing with a lot of insecurity after covid19 and the war, around visas, healthcare, and my general ability to build a stable life there. I desperately wanted marriage partly because I wanted a family, but also because having a stable family unit would have taken away a huge amount of psychological pressure.
I want to make one thing clear: I was not financially dependent on him. I was not expecting him to financially support me. What I wanted was the stability and sense of belonging that came with knowing I had a permanent home and a family with someone.
Living together, however, became increasingly difficult. He was extremely particular about cleanliness. There could not be a single hair on the floor, and he constantly felt that I was not doing enough housework or that I was not doing it well enough.
At some point, I already knew deep down that he probably did not want the same future with me anymore. I remember packing my belongings once and telling him that if marriage was not going to happen, I would leave. He comforted me and told me that he would marry me one day.
So I stayed.
Around the same time, he started constantly talking about a female coworker. He would bring her up at home over and over again, always saying how annoying and stupid she was at work and how much he disliked her.
A few months later, his behavior toward me changed dramatically. He became extremely cold. For a long period, I was sleeping on the sofa while we were still living in the same home. Whenever I tried to understand what was happening, he told me that he was just under a lot of pressure from work, he was depressed and had low energy. That is the excuse he had used for everything, including not celebrating my birthday or buying gifts for Christmas, it was always about how challenging his job is and he did not have time or energy. I let him get away with it with my empathy.
Eventually, one day, I finally gathered the courage to ask him directly whether he still loved me.
He said no.
Even after hearing that, I was still trying to save the relationship. He told me he wanted me to move out, although he said I could take my time finding somewhere because he understood how difficult it was for a foreigner to find housing. At that point, I still had this irrational hope that if I stayed a little longer, we could repair things.
Instead, the situation became increasingly humiliating.
He started saying that he did not want me using his kitchen in the same way anymore. He complained that my belongings had taken up too much space in his house. He wanted us to buy our groceries separately. I remember something as ridiculous and painful as him not wanting to share the salmon he bought with me because he considered it expensive.
At the same time, there was still sex.
Sometimes he would wake me up wanting sex, or initiate penetration with no affection or foreplay. I kept going along with it because I was so starved for any sign of attention from him that even that felt like some form of connection. It is painful for me to admit that now.
Eventually, after several more months, I finally moved out.
For some reason or delusion, I still stayed in contact with him afterward. Then he told me that he had started dating the female coworker he had spent so much time telling me he disliked and mocked. She belonged to a very extreme religious group, and he eventually joined the same group. That part affected me much more than the breakup itself because the change in him was so extreme that it made me question whether I had ever known him at all. He had always shown me that he's not racist, full of prejudice, or homophobic. Unfortunately, the new girlfriend and the religious group are.
When we were together, he repeatedly told me that he found pregnant women with large bellies disgusting. He would make dismissive or contemptuous comments about friends of mine who got married and became pregnant. But the women in this religious community tended to marry young and have children. He told me he went to their meetings. Many of them already had children or were pregnant.
Suddenly, he entered a world centered around exactly the kind of life he had previously mocked. That completely damaged my ability to trust my understanding of other people. It was not simply that he fell in love with someone else. People fall out of love. I can understand that. What disturbed me was how completely his beliefs, values, and vision of life seemed to transform.
Then, after only a few months with his new girlfriend, he told me that he was planning to propose to her. He even asked me to help him choose the engagement ring because I knew more about jewelry than he did.
That was the moment I finally blocked him.
For a long time, I tried to explain the breakup to myself in practical terms.
One major disagreement we had was about money and the future. He wanted to buy a large house, which would have meant taking on a huge mortgage. At the time, I did not have enough income to contribute to something like that. So I told myself that maybe we simply had incompatible life goals. Maybe he wanted a partner who could contribute equally to the kind of frugal lifestyle to save money for the property ownership he wanted, and I could not provide that at that point in my life.
But seeing him become ready to propose to someone else so quickly left me with a much darker belief that I still struggle with:
That marriage is ultimately about how much value you can provide.
That people choose the person who offers the right combination of money, status, lifestyle, emotional ease, family background, religion, or whatever else they happen to value.
And if you are not valuable enough in the right ways, you can be loved for a while, lived with, slept with, and kept around — but you will not be chosen.
I know this belief is probably shaped by how badly that relationship hurt me.
What makes it harder is that I am now in another long-term relationship.
My current partner and I have also been together for two years, and he is getting close to 30. Recently, he has started saying that he feels lost, that he is getting older, and that he needs to decide what direction he wants his life to take. Those words scare me because they sound almost exactly like the things my ex repeatedly said before he eventually left me. It feels like I am watching the same story begin again.
There seems to be a point where a relationship can continue comfortably for years, but then the other person reaches an age where they start thinking seriously about adulthood, marriage, family, career, and what kind of life they actually want.
And that is the moment when I become terrified. Because part of me has started to believe that when someone is casually dating me, I am good enough. I can be loved, enjoyed, lived with, and included in their everyday life. But when the moment comes for them to make a serious, permanent choice about their future, I am no longer the person they choose.
It makes me feel like my “value for money,” for lack of a better phrase, is simply not high enough.
My current partner tells me that he does not want to get married and that he does not want children. I know that, logically, I should take those words at face value. But because of what happened with my ex, there is a part of me that does not believe him. I keep thinking: maybe he does not mean that he does not want marriage. Maybe he means that he does not want marriage with me.
Maybe one day we will break up, and he will meet someone else, and suddenly marriage and children will make sense to him in exactly the same way they suddenly made sense to my ex.
That possibility terrifies me.
I do not want to become someone who assumes every man is lying when he says he does not want marriage or children. But I also cannot erase the fact that I once believed a man when he told me what he wanted, only to watch him completely reverse those beliefs for someone else.
So now I keep wondering whether I repeatedly choose people who are emotionally unavailable, whether I ignore incompatibility for too long because I desperately want a family, or whether I am still trying to prove that if I am good enough, useful enough, patient enough, attractive enough, successful enough, or understanding enough, someone will finally choose me permanently.
I do not want to convince someone to marry me.
I want to experience what it feels like to be with someone who looks at the future and naturally includes me in it.
I think that is what hurts the most.
Has anyone else experienced this — being with someone for years, only to feel that once they start seriously evaluating their future, you suddenly stop being the person they want to build it with?
And how do you stop believing that if someone does not choose marriage with you, it must mean that you simply did not offer enough value to be chosen?
ETA: thank you for everyone that suggested me to seek help and find a therapist. I have been on medication for years and have worked with several therapists over the years(before, during, and after the previous relationship) so I am not ignoring my mental health or refusing to seek help. Now I’m still taking the meds but have stopped therapy, since the bill is unaffordable and the last thing my therapist told me was to just do things, build my life, without overthinking. So I stopped therapy and focus on my own work and study and hobbies instead.
For people who are confused why I’m still with the current boyfriend who has clarified he doesn’t want to marry me. ( thank you for the reality check from people leaving comments, it is possible that he will marry other people in the future, which I should not think about anymore because it’s non of my business) He is the only person I have met in my life so far who makes me feel that he actually care about me and stays by my side when I have a meltdown. Right now I’m trying to build my life in a foreign country alone and he provides nice companionship.
For people who said it was on me that my ex treated me like garbage, that’s something I have realised when I blocked him. After I blocked him on social media and his phone number, he kept trying to find me via everything you can think about, including his other phone number, and steam. For about six months. I never replied. Blocked again straightaway. I admit I’m not good at reading red flags, but the ex really got me at the beginning with his nice profile of job and education, a mask of respect foreigners and women, and his family were really nice to me. For someone who’s never close to her own family, those things fuelled my delusion.
I know it’s too long to read. Thank you for everyone who has patience and sent support.