Marriage marital abuse

Dear Modern Indian Woman, Don't Ever Marry A Spineless Man Like My Ex Husband

( words)
*For representational purpose only.

I don't know where to start from, but well I think it's important that I tell you my story.

I'd not want any more women to fall prey to a man like this.

I'd just finished my education and then gotten my dream job where I'd fly in the sky and travel to places always. I had wanted to be a pilot since my childhood but had bagged another job.

Yes, I was an air hostess, it was my dream job.

My girls grow up wanting to be one and dream of it I was out with friends that's when it happened, we met. For me, I was born and raised as a Hindu and for him, yes it's the same. I was raised by a single mother and had my younger brother. So, we met once, and then our meetings kept happening often. He wasn't good-looking for a man, a thin lean boy, with a sense of humor and someone who just knew how to lure me. He'd get flowers, chocolates, gifts and was full of chivalry. He'd get the cab doors and the chair out for me. When he'd be on his bike he'd ride carefully with me behind.

I was younger than him by many years, approximately 8. We met and spoke to each other regularly.

He loved to party and drink beer, which then gradually drifted to drinking whiskey, and just like that one fine day - he said, "let's get married" and we ran away.

Yes! It all seemed so perfect - running away to marry the person you love. So, he took me home, he lived in SoBo whilst I was raised in the burbs. That's the first time I went home with him, I had butterflies in my stomach but I was with him so I wasn't so worried.

When it's in the name of love, everything seems to be fine and it all looks so perfect even when it's imperfect.

When the door to his house opened, I barely looked up with a straight eye and waited for him to speak first. It was his father, mother, sister, and younger brother. He was the eldest son. So he looked at his father, held my hand, and took me in, and said, "She's my wife, we are married, I married her." But we weren't married yet. His parents looked at him and they then looked at me.

They accepted me in but never accepted me as their daughter-in-law.

His father asked about me and what I did and he told them. That was my first night there in that house, which I'd have to soon call my "home". The next morning, he told me to wear a saree and we took off. He told his parents that he was just going around the corner.

We went to Arya Samaj and that's when we tied the knot. Just like that, with just a basic mangal sutra and a saree, we were announced man and woman, husband and wife.

That's how my journey began, so we were now married. His parents had their own beliefs, and we were lucky to be not very different when it came to caste, just the language was different.

He is a Gujarati and if you know about Gujaratis, you'd know how they are, they believe in multiplying only in their own community. So they married their kids off as early and 20, back in the days, sometimes it was even before that and their sons normally, even if educated, take up the family business, so even the family business is sitting in a shop after one being an engineer, you'd see it happen. And many of them are extremely dominating in the house.

For him he loved making structures and designing them too, that was his job. His father insisted on getting our birth charts matched and took my date of birth. And that's when it all started. So, technically according to his father, who apparently had knowledge about astrology, our birth charts didn't match and there was a fault, dosha as they call it and we'd get divorced in 6 months.

When he told his son the same, of course, he didn't believe it, gratefully he didn't. But he had already sowed the seed of poison in his head and whatever happened after, that was blamed on the predictions of a man who was playing the supreme power or a supervillain of destructing his own son's life.

So, I was shocked that the culture in his house was absolutely different from what he had displayed as his mindset outside the house. It's atypical in a Gujarati house. They are vegetarians, most of them in the house, but don't refrain from eating non-vegetarian or drinking alcohol or being a womanizer outside and some families still follow superstitious practices, yes, that's correct. Superstitious is the word.

So, according to them, a girl who is merely in her early 20's had to dress up like she was raised in a rural area in a saree and had to take a ghunghat and despite the girl being educated and working, she had to wash the entire house and do all the domestic chores and then even get raped by the man she loved and had married because he was a lustful man who only wanted sex every time he got to the bed irrespective of the woman being tired.

Yes, the love had soon died off or in the name of love, it was lust thrusting itself in. So initially when it happens as a woman, you don't realize and later it gets to you. This is awkward.

'I love yo'u doesn't mean 'let me get into bed and show you how it feels when it goes in', it's a lot more but yes, many men think love is only about it going in, actually thrusting it in. And so what started as love went on as force and thrusting it in, even when I didn't want it.

So, I'd do the domestic chores and go to work and he'd live on my salary and he'd thrust in too when I didn't want it. We changed cities then and started living away, which was a nightmare in itself. In the name of meetings and work, he'd be out for hours, be on Facebook for the longest time, and his fetish for chasing white women and fit women was another story.

So we had fights and arguments and then he'd say he regrets not listening to his father. It didn't stop there, one fine day, he came back and hit me blue and black because I'd gone out for a party with his workmates. He would live off my money as he wasn't earning regularly and if he had money coming in, he blew it up on lavish parties with friends and women and alcohol. He had a history of flirting with every second girl at work and also was indebted to many. And when he lived with his parents, they didn't miss one opportunity of harassing me and they showed him the other side and said it was me not fitting in. It's always like that the first child of the house is accepted to marry as per their parents or else there's havoc in these households.

And for me unfortunately I didn't know that the man I married and fell in love with was a lustful man who only craved sexual desires constantly and was inconsiderate to his wife being tired and not desiring the same at times.

We had fights, arguments, and it was one long journey that lasted for few months and had driven me insane, and I had no one to rescue me. His parents always wanted to get rid of me and so they had told him about the dosha and when we lived with them, he had no say even if I was forced to do all the chores and go to work and then hand over my entire salary to them.

Yes, I fed the family, his family and he blew the money he earned on other women and friends who weren't there for him. We did file for a divorce which took its own time as, after the damage he had done, he pestered me but never changed his ways.

Years later, now, of course, I'm married to a man who respects and loves me and taught me what life really is but I only thought of writing this because men like him are still out there.

People don't change easily and some never change. An abusive man will always be abusive. He will never change his ways. Also, it's weird how some operate, they speak about birth charts and faults, and then it forms their beliefs. Any relationship, be it a marriage, or even just a relationship between two people, works only if they want it to work. It works only when they want to stay together, it works when they fight for each other and love each other.

Sex is not love, it's lust, of course, it's important in a marriage but a marriage is not based on it and a man soaked in the wrong belief system can't ever make a husband as he is spineless. His father told him, we had some dosh called nadi dosh and as per that, we wouldn't even have a good love life.

I mean really a father tells his son this and predicts this, he didn't teach his son how to treat a woman despite having a sister at home, he didn't teach his son to earn, he didn't teach his son to not live off a woman's money and make his own money and yes he didn't teach his son the meaning of love, he told his son, 'you need to just thrust it in a woman after you get her naked'.

And that's what many men think lovemaking is, thrusting it inside of a woman, without any other feelings but just wanting to satisfy themselves.

A marriage can't be predicted by anyone, you could have the birth charts matching and still go through a divorce, for a man, like him, he is one of those who will never be happily married and he'd always have a divorce even if he marries a white woman.

Indian woman takes in more compared to anyone, even in this modern age and time. No other woman will withstand it, we have the patience to, till we break completely or must I say - we have been taught to by generations, they teach us to make a marriage work even if the man is a monster and tolerate it all after getting married.

So a man who doesn't know the meaning of love and who can't accept he is wrong and is never ready to change will always be a mess and will have breakups and divorces even if his kudli matches with someone. 

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