I am writing this because I genuinely don’t know whether I am being unreasonable, whether I expected too much from my marriage, or whether I am ignoring something important. I will try to be as honest as I can. I don’t want to make my wife a villain, and I know there are always two sides to a story. This is simply how I have experienced things. I got married around 8 months ago. My wife is now pregnant. Before this marriage, I was in a relationship for almost six years. It started during college, and I was deeply in love with her.
Both our families eventually agreed to our marriage, and I genuinely thought I had found the person I would spend my life with. But in 2024, everything ended. She eventually wanted someone more ambitious and had different plans for her life. Whatever the reason, the relationship ended, and I was devastated. It took me a long time to recover. I didn’t immediately jump into another relationship. I took time to rebuild myself and my life. After about a year and a half, I started dating again.
I met several girls, but nothing felt right. Eventually, I met someone with whom I felt a connection. She was from another caste. My parents were completely against the idea. They were already worried because I had been badly hurt once and believed my judgment might not be right this time either. Caste was also a major concern for them. After everything I had gone through, I didn’t have the strength to fight my family again. So I stepped away from that relationship.
Then I met my future wife. She is a lawyer by profession. She is a very quiet and private person. She had gone through the trauma of losing her elder sister and is now the only daughter in her family. She had never been in a relationship before. I met her only once before our families started discussing marriage. My first impression was that she was a good person. She was polite, kind, and had good behaviour. But she was not very open, and she had considerably less exposure to the outside world compared with me.
I am a doctor, and I have always valued communication, emotional connection, deep conversations, and the ability to make decisions independently. I was looking for a partner who could understand me emotionally, communicate openly, make decisions when necessary, and show maturity when situations became difficult. With my wife, I couldn’t establish that kind of soulful connection before marriage. I actually told her this. I told her about my expectations, my personality, and my concerns.
I initially resisted the marriage because I wasn’t sure whether we would be compatible. But both families were very eager to proceed. Her mother was particularly aggressive about getting the marriage done, and my family was also supportive of the arrangement. I eventually convinced myself: “Maybe everything will fall into place after marriage. Maybe with time, we will understand each other. Maybe I just need to put in the effort.” So I said yes. And I genuinely tried.
After marriage, I tried to balance my responsibilities toward both families. I never wanted her to feel that I was separating her from her parents. Her workplace is around 35 km from where I work and stay, so she stayed near her office. But after our marriage, she came to stay with me only for around two days. I was the one travelling to her place every three or four days. I accepted this initially. I understood her circumstances.
I never wanted to be the husband who says, “Now that you’re married, forget your family.” In fact, I encouraged her to spend time with her parents because I knew she had already experienced the loss of her sister and was the only daughter in the family. But slowly, I started noticing something that hurt me. Whenever her family was around, she seemed extremely excited, comfortable, and emotionally involved. With me, I often felt that excitement was missing. She tells me that I am the love of her life. She tells me that she loves me. She tells me she misses me.
But I have always struggled to feel those things through her actions. Maybe that’s partly because she is naturally quiet and not expressive. Maybe that’s simply her personality. But for me, actions and communication matter enormously. I want to talk about things. I want to clear misunderstandings. I want to have deep conversations. I want to know what my partner is feeling. She tends to keep things inside. Whenever something happens, I want to discuss it immediately.
She often avoids the conversation. That difference has slowly created an emotional distance between us. Then she became pregnant. I have genuinely tried to be there for her. I have taken her to the gynaecologist around 12-13 times. Whenever she needed me, I went. Whenever necessary, I took leave from work. I tried to support her physically, emotionally, and financially. I never stopped her from being with her family during pregnancy. I actually encouraged it. Recently, after her Godh Bharai ceremony, I really wanted her to come and stay with me.
She also agreed. For me, this wasn’t about controlling where she stayed. It was about finally feeling like we were becoming husband and wife. Eight months into our marriage, I still felt like we hadn’t really lived together as husband and wife. I missed her. I needed her emotionally. I wanted her beside me. Then her parents asked her to come back home for a few days. I told her:
“Let’s go together after some days. Right now, please stay with me. I really need you.” But she decided to go. And something inside me broke. It wasn’t simply that she went to her parents’ house. It was the feeling that when I needed her, my emotions were still secondary to what her parents wanted. I tried explaining this to her in every possible way. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted her to understand why it hurt. But eventually, she left. She has now been at her parents’ home for around 10 days. And during these 10 days, I have felt extremely lonely.
The difficult part is that I know she loves me, or at least she says she does. But I don’t know how to reconcile those words with what I experience. There was another incident that made me think about this. My sister once came and wanted to stay with my wife. My wife told me that her mother was coming for a medical check-up and asked me to adjust. I understood that her mother needed her. But again, I felt that when it came to choosing between my family and hers, her family automatically came first.
I reacted emotionally. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I am becoming overly sensitive because of everything that has happened. I also made another mistake. When I couldn’t make her understand how lonely I felt, I shared some of these feelings with my family. I now realise that this was probably not the right thing to do. Marriage problems should ideally be solved between husband and wife. But later, I found out that she had also shared almost everything about our relationship with her mother.
That hurt me too. I don’t expect her to hide things from her parents. But I believe that after marriage, husband and wife eventually need to develop their own space, their own communication, and their own decisions. Parents will always be important. But the marriage should eventually become its own unit. The relationship between our mothers has also become complicated.
My mother and mother-in-law are not on good terms. There have been disagreements since the marriage. My mother-in-law has strong opinions about almost everything happening in her daughter’s life, and sometimes I feel her influence plays a major role in my wife’s decisions. I don’t necessarily blame her for that. She is her mother. And I understand that my wife is very attached to her family.
But I am struggling to understand where our marriage ends and parental influence begins. Now my wife wants to come back to me. And this is where I am confused. Part of me desperately wants her to come home. Another part of me is hurt.
I keep thinking:
- “Where were you when I needed you?”
- “Why did you choose to leave when I was asking you to stay?”
- “Why should I feel like an option when I have made you my priority?”
I don’t want to reject her. I don’t want to punish her. She is pregnant, and I know this is an emotionally and physically difficult period for her. But I also can’t pretend that nothing happened. I am lonely inside my own marriage. And perhaps the most painful thing is that I don’t think she fully understands how lonely I actually feel. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I expected emotional compatibility to develop faster.
Maybe I am comparing my current marriage with the six-year relationship I had before, where emotional familiarity had developed over many years. Maybe I am expecting someone with a completely different personality to express love in the same way I do. Or maybe there really is a deeper problem that we need to address before our child arrives. I don’t know. I don’t want to leave my wife. I don’t want to break my family.
I don’t want my child to grow up in a broken home. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life feeling emotionally alone either. So I am asking people who have been through marriage, arranged marriage, pregnancy, and similar situations.
Question: What do you think I should do?
Option 1: Give her time and accept that she expresses.
Option 2: love differently.
Option 3: Ask her to come back and focus on rebuilding.
Option 4: our husband-wife relationship