It’s hard to count the number of celebrity couples who rushed into marriage then promptly filed for divorce just months later.
But that doesn’t only happen in Hollywood. We all know someone (or have a friend who knows someone) who walked down the aisle only to divorce not long after. What happened, you can’t help but wonder. They divorced so quickly, they had to have had some doubts, some understanding that there were problems in the relationship — and if that’s the case, why did they go forward with the marriage in the first place?
Many short-lived marriages begin because couples assume things will change for the better once they’re wed, says Terri Orbuch, a therapist and author of Finding Love Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship.
“They think, once things settle down, once he gets a job or we live together, things will change. He will not do this or that. She will be different,” Orbuch told the Huffington Post. “They assume the problems they’re having are a result of them not living together, the stress of planning a wedding, or not being settled or fully committed yet, when it’s the core relationship between the two people that’s the problem.”
“They just might be incompatible,” Orbuch explained, “When it dawns on them, that’s when you see couples divorce.”
This question of why couples divorce after mere months of marriage was at the heart of an Ask Reddit discussion Tuesday. Read the 10 most revealing responses from those who were married briefly below.
1. “I’ll spare you the sob story: We were together for four years. I had reservations but due in part to some past issues with my family, I went ahead and married him. He was all I really had and I relied on him too much. When I wanted to wait (he was seven years my senior) to marry, he told me how much he loved me, and how it would work because we belonged together. I believed him because I loved him. Six months in, he cheated. It was the first time in our entire relationship. We tried to work on it afterward but he forgot our first year anniversary because he was out with her yet again. I asked for a divorce and was finalized this past December.”
2. “I went through with the wedding because I loved her, obviously, and I thought she loved me. I mean, she ‘proposed’ to me, albeit in a messed up way: She guilt tripped me into proposing. (Yep, I’m an idiot.) What happened after we married? She became a different person. She was never home when I was and always with friends. She stopped paying rent and other bills. I had to pick up the slack. She got ‘mugged’ so I gave her my credit card so she could get necessities like gas and then she goes and spends thousands on irrelevant junk. When she left me, she keyed my car and told me she had met a guy at a bar a while back. We were together for over eight years before we married and all that happened just a few months in. I shouldn’t feel loss after she left me, but it still hurts a year later.”
3. “I married him because I felt so happy to be part of a big loving family since my own is deeply dysfunctional and abusive, and I’ve mostly cut them off. He had been saving for years to buy a home before we met and was happy that an extra income would get him to that goal sooner. We agreed to start trying for a baby about six months after the wedding — nevermind that he didn’t have sex with me anyway or care about fulfilling my needs in that department in other ways. This situation didn’t change, and he would sometimes harangue me about why I wasn’t pregnant yet … I finally left when he yelled and swore at me, calling me names in the middle of a crowded restaurant at a friend’s toddler’s birthday party. The best I can figure out, he got cold feet on the home-buying and baby-having front after the wedding and just never had the guts to actually enunciate that. He just passive-aggressively undermined everything and became increasingly bitter and nasty.”
4. “My ex-husband and I had been best friends for seven years. According to everyone we knew, we were soul mates. We finally started dating, then moved in together. We were madly in love and after a year or so, we said our ‘I dos.’ One month after we were married he went out drinking with some friends. He tried cocaine…and that was it. He became a severe alcoholic and drug addict. He drained our accounts, stole every penny, destroyed our house, violently threatened me and finally disappeared. Then he overdosed and spent months in rehab only to continue his habit the minute he got out. This sounds like a trashy love story, but he was actually from a wealthy, upper-class family and very well educated. His behavior was a complete shock to all of us. We were only married eight months from ‘I do’ to our day in court for our divorce. He is still a junkie and it still breaks my heart to this day.”
5. “Long story short: she started loving someone else. That was the worst 90 days of my life.
6. “My ex-husband thought that our marriage certificate gave him license to treat me like property and do whatever he wanted. He blatantly disregarded my feelings because I was ‘stuck’ with him. Wrong. It was definitely a shitty situation, but I learned a lot. Like, if a guy stalks you and sabotages your PC in order to get a date, he’s probably not fit for dating. (I was 18 at the time, what can I say…)”
7. “Our problem was an underlying incompatibility that I wasn’t fully aware of until later. I’m not overly affectionate and she very much needed that. Every time our relationship would get to a point where she was ready to make a split, we’d cross another milestone (saying ‘I love you,’ moving in, getting engaged, getting married) and she’d be back on cloud 9 without a worry in the world. I didn’t know about this roller coaster she was on until it was far too late. By the time we separated and sought counseling she was already checked out. She unintentionally gave me a dose of my own medicine by not being responsive to communication or intimacy.”
8. “We were really young, really dumb and didn’t know what we wanted. Well, she did — and it was someone else. Unfortunately, in the time we were together, she found ways to sever my ties with a lot of really good friends and ruin chances of making up with them.”
9. “I was married for almost eight months. We were together for three years or so beforehand. I was going through a lot of problems in my own little world (my close friend/boss of four years dying, my parents splitting up) and we were paying for everything ourselves. I told myself things were wacky because we were both under tons of stress. She lost her job two months after the wedding and refused to look for other work (before, she was making almost twice as much as me per hour). So there I was, trying to support us on $8.75/hour. She always drank a lot, but she started drinking even more. She got mean and nasty and everything just spiraled out of control. She just moved out in April.”
10. “I met my ex through Facebook. He was from Scotland and I’m from California. We were both young (23 at the time) and wanted to carry on our relationship for more than a few weeks at a time. It was expensive to keep flying halfway across the world, so we decided to take the plunge and marry. It wasn’t until after we were married that I found out he thousands of dollars in debt with the Bank of Scotland before he moved here. Not only that, he was spending a lot of time driving around in my car to pick up high school girls while I was working. Of course, as the oblivious and dedicated wife, I didn’t believe when people were telling me he was cheating; even when it came from the women who were sleeping with him. Needless to say, we got a divorce. Pro tip: Don’t marry someone just because they’re from a different country. The novelty wears off after a while.”
Source: Huffington Post
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