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I Was Only Trying To Be His Newly Wed Bride, And He Beat Me Up For It

( words)
*For representational purpose only.

I have been married for 7 long years. I live with my husband and have a 2-year-old boy. We own a house in the U.S. We have two cars and have good jobs. We go on holidays and a few solitaires adorn my body.

We all dream of living a life like this, don't we? It seems so perfect from the outside. But sometimes some things are too good to be true.

I am stuck in a loveless marriage. From the very beginning, I have not been very lucky with love. I was in a relationship with a guy for 6 years when I was in college. We belonged to different castes. 

He never had the guts to take a stand for me in front of his family.

I went through a hard time after this breakup. I would cry all through the day and night. That is when my current husband came into my life. Initially, I wasn't too sure about him.

But he supported me when I was going through this rough phase in my life.

He belonged to our community, was good-looking, our horoscopes matched and he had a U.S. visa. In short, he was the perfect son-in-law for my parents.

Also, he seemed to have the guts to take a stand for me in front of his family.

He introduced me to his mother and sister and met my dad before he left for the U.S. Everything seemed so perfect.

Finally, our marriage was fixed. We had an e-roka over a video chat. But his family started creating a lot of problems for us. His mom called me a day before the roka and said they were cancelling it. We had already made all the arrangements.

But my husband talked to them and somehow convinced them to go ahead with the plans.

This is where the negativity started building up between his mom and me. She was an uneducated lady with a backward mindset and was a miser. Every day till we got married she would create some new drama. I can write numerous stories about all that she did during this time.

Finally, we did get married. I moved to the U.S. with my husband thinking that the bad phase was over. But I didn’t know that my real challenges were just about to begin.

My husband seemed to be a different person altogether now.

I was in a small city near Chicago in January. I had no idea about how harsh the winters could be. The days were very gloomy there. I would be alone at home all day long. I would do all the cooking and cleaning.

I was educated and had a technical degree but I couldn’t work due to my visa issues.

Luckily I found some friends who made it less painful for me. My husband would lock himself in a room and talk to his family for hours together. I understood that he missed his family a lot but I needed some time too. Back then, I didn’t even have a phone of my own. He would wake up at 10 – 11 a.m. and would keep talking with them till around 4 p.m. I found this difficult to bear. I couldn’t call my friends or family back home as the phone was never available.

When I confronted him one day, he pushed me around and beat me black and blue.

He said I was trying to break his family. I had just wanted him to spend some time with me.  I never asked him to stop talking to his parents.

I just wanted him to limit it to a couple of hours.

His sister was also living in the U.S. and she would call him in the evening. His sister too had got married at the same time and they would talk to each other till 10 p.m. in the night. I am a morning person. So I could never stay awake after 10 p.m.

Our sex life sucked as well. I felt worthless. Slowly I just convinced myself that this is how my life was going to be.

Then I got a phone of my own. I now started applying for jobs. He forced me to learn the skill set that he was good at. I did this and I am not boasting when I say this but I am a quick learner.

Luckily I landed a good job and moved to a different city. That is when things started getting better.

He would visit me over the weekends and spend time with me. Then he too relocated.

Things between us were better now so we thought of planning a family.

In the meantime, his sister was going through a rough patch in her marriage. I asked her to stay with us till things were sorted out between them. And that turned out to be the worst decision of my life.

She made my life hell. She created misunderstandings between my husband and me and we ended up fighting badly with each other.

He would beat me up in front of her and she would do nothing about it. I was broken. I lost all the love and the respect that I had for my husband. He asked me to say “Sorry” to her by touching her feet in public on a cold winter night for no fault of mine.

I started hating him when he did such things.

Luckily my sister-in-law went back to her place and my husband was his usual self again. Life was getting better for us now and I conceived after this. Those 9 months were beautiful and then my in-laws visited us. My mother-in-law would complain that we never gave her enough money. She never gave me food when I needed to recover.

I had a C-section. 5 days after my surgery she asked me to enter the kitchen. She had no humanity. She never loved our son and went away to my sister-in-law’s place within 40 days of my delivery.

I was upset because I was recovering and had no one to help me at this time. I had a little baby to take care of too.  I kept complaining at this time and nagged my husband a lot.

One fine day cops came into our house. I hadn’t filed any charges against him though he had abused me several times. That incident left a big scar on my heart. I had done everything for them. I had cooked and cleaned for them. And this is what I got in return for all my efforts. 

I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive my husband and his family for all this and the saddest part is that they never felt sorry about doing all this either.

When my parents visited us, my husband behaved badly in front of them too. He forced me to work when I wanted to take a break and spend some time with my baby.

A lot of resentment was building up between us now.

We followed different sleeping patterns. We had different tastes in food and movies. He would simply switch off the TV whenever I was watching my favourite movie without even asking me.

We fought on almost all our luxury holidays.

The solitaires that adorned my body were just a form of compensation for all that he did to me. Even today, he takes more than half my salary and invests it somewhere. The money is not even invested in my name. If I don’t give him the money, he threatens to sell the house. I am living with him only for the sake of my baby, my parents and sister.

He makes me feel worthless though I know I have a lot of potential.

But I have to admit that he is a good dad. He doesn’t beat me anymore. But I still resent and hate all the things that he did to me in the past. I wonder if I should continue staying with him or leave him. That is the question that haunts me every single day.

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