I need some help. I married my husband in the summer of 2022 after nearly three years together. We are both in our mid-thirties, first marriage for both of us. We had a beautiful wedding, although I found wedding planning to be very stressful and it reactivated a lot of social anxiety thinking patterns and behaviors in me. The awful anxiety had to do with deciding who would be invited and making the wedding “perfect” ( and did not seem to be about the marriage itself.
At some point during our honeymoon I started to panic about actually being married. We lived in separate cities during our entire relationship and saw each other mainly on weekends. My husband did not want to live together until after marriage, and although I would have preferred to live together first, I agreed. Once married, it made the most logistical and practical sense for me to move to his house in his city, which is about a 1.5 hour drive away from my city.
I moved in after returning from our honeymoon and I have not handled the transition well. I became very depressed and cried nearly every day. The house has been in a state of chaos because of renovations, making it difficult to settle in. Now that the renos are finished, I find that I don’t want to unpack my things because a part of me wants to escape and go back home. Thinking about our wedding gives me massive panic. I cannot even begin to send out thank you cards, or move forward with joining up our money or making big purchases together. We had talked about trying for a child right away, but I obviously cannot do this right now. I feel full of panic and my stomach hurts every day. I am sleeping a lot and have a hard time getting out of bed. I feel very blank and numb and I cannot tell what is true. I can’t tell if I made a mistake by getting married, or if I’m just having post-wedding cold feet. I feel so out of touch with myself. I am actively looking for a therapist (I used to see one and also take antidepressants). We are also considering couple’s counselling.
Has anyone gone through something similar? I only ever hear of people being in blissful newlywed stages. Everyone keeps congratulating me on getting married and I feel so incredibly low. Does it get better?
Some backstory:
Throughout our dating life, my husband took issue with my past relationships. I was very good friends with a few of my exes and liked it that way. I knew that they were not a threat to my relationship. He feels that I have not taken sex seriously as the sacred thing that it is and in the past tried very hard to make me “repent”. This did a lot of damage. I felt disrespected and judged, and like I needed to hide my past away from him. I ultimately told him what he wanted to hear because I thought maybe he WAS right, but this turned out to be a mistake. A part of me now wishes that I had held very firm boundaries about keeping my friends, who are also exes, in my life, and putting my foot down about my sexual past and letting my hubby make decisions accordingly, but I decided that I wanted to put my then-boyfriend first and make him feel comfortable, so I minimized contact with my exes. I didn’t invite them to the wedding, which was stressful for me. My husband did not even want me to reach out to them to talk to them about it, so I didn’t, and I feel like a jerk. I thought I would get over it, but I haven’t. I am discovering too late that I feel resentful and disappointed in myself for not knowing what was important to me and advocating for that. My husband is also very comfortable with conflict and I am not. I just freeze and want to withdraw. I have been working at it and do see our relationship as an opportunity for me to grow. He also loves to challenge pretty much everything and it makes me very uncomfortable. It makes me feel guarded, like I can’t feel free around him because he will hurt me with a criticism. I realize now, after living together, that I feel very blocked up around him. I feel nothing a lot of the time. He is always telling me how much he loves me, and I don’t really feel anything. I want very badly to be where he is, but I feel like an island that he’s not allowed inside of in any meaningful way. With so many fundamental differences, I am left wondering if I married the wrong person.
He is also a very sincere, helpful person who loves very deeply. I used to have so much fun with him and we would laugh all of the time. He holds the commitment of marriage in very high regard and I desperately want to feel the same, but maybe I had no business getting married in the first place. Feeling very stuck and right now wishing I had not.
5 comments
Love is not enough in a relationship.
I’m sorry to say that you remind me of a friend of mine. She got married after knowing a guy less than a year. During their dating time, he was very upset that she had me as a friend. She and I never had a romantic relationship of any sort — our connections were scouting and community theatre! — but he had a problem with her having a male friend.
She sent me an e-mail telling me that she knew this wasn’t right, but she was trying to make him see how important he was to her, and also trying to minimize friction. She said in the e-mail to not respond. I honored her wishes.
A year later, she got back in touch. They had gotten married and divorced in that time. He also gave her herpes. Basically, his controlling nature and demands just got more unreasonable.
Now, in your situation, it is possible that he’s found his plateau. However, you are currently unhappy where that plateau is. This is not how you should start a marriage.
Further, he has judged you and your former relationships, tried to get you to repent for something which you don’t regret, challenged you frequently, He uses conflict as a tool.
Is it normal to second-guess major decisions in your life? Yes. Things can catch you by surprise, you may not have realized some of the consequences of your decision, and so on.
is it normal to “freak out” after marriage? No.
You can try couples’ counseling, but a warning: Someone who can be charming but manipulative (which might include your husband), can masquerade as a reasonable person during such sessions.
And again: It doesn’t matter how much you love someone, or they love you. They can have personality traits, attitudes, or beliefs that simply don’t work with you. I had a friend one time, someone I only knew on-line, who mentioned that she was going to have an exam that afternoon, so I said, “Good luck!” to her. That led to an hour-long excoriation of me by my friend, about how I was a bad person because I wasn’t sincere, and I was clearly not sincere because I said something that anyone could say. We’d gotten along fine to that point, but clearly, there was something else going on.
You are not happy. This didn’t come about in a healthy fashion. You’ve lost friends in this. You can take time to sort out the marriage situation, but definitely do not bring children into this relationship. Remember, you need to take care of yourself, and marriage (or love) are not about subsuming yourself to someone else’s decisions.
Tl;dr, but in my opinion it should be illegal to get married before you’ve lived together a year.
You don’t love him plane and simple, your husband that is
Reading this up until the backstory I would’ve said that you were just experiencing some situational depression. It is totally normal to become depressed after a move and a big life change and everything all happening at once like that, yes it would be understandable for that to cause anxiety and depression and therapy would be able to get you through that.
#HOWEVER
Everything after the backstory changes that big time. It is one of those things where it’s better to get out now. Otherwise you’re going to get stuck in the sunk-cost-fallacy and stay with him just because your finances are tied and you have kids and it would be hard to leave and all the other reasons people don’t get divorced when they should. You know in your heart it isn’t right so get out now before you establish all those things that will make it much more difficult for you to want to leave.
>A part of me now wishes that I had held very firm boundaries about keeping my friends, who are also exes, in my life, and putting my foot down about my sexual past and letting my hubby make decisions accordingly, but I decided that I wanted to put my then-boyfriend first and make him feel comfortable, so I minimized contact with my exes. I didn’t invite them to the wedding, which was stressful for me.
I mean this was a boundary for him, you being friends with your exes. You can’t really be upset at him for this, but like you stated, you guys could just have fundamental differences. Some people have no issues w/ their significant other being friends with an ex. Much different than having friends who just happened to be opposite sex.
It does though sound like you yourself have compromised a lot for this relationship and then marriage even with the marriage being so new. You wanted to live together before marriage, he didn’t. You wanted to stay friends with exes and have them at your wedding, he didn’t.
Regarding conflict and how the two of you respond differently, this is where a couples counselor could be great. Teaching you both how to compromise and keep an environment where both feel safe to express themselves and get what they need to resolve an issue as well. It’s not a this or that, where one gets what they want and the other doesn’t or vice versa. It’s where both get and give what they want so the other can feel safe in it too.
Remember, boundaries are able to be changed throughout. They aren’t static. They’re fluid. One day you may not have a boundary, and another month you may change that boundary and THATS OKAY.
The fact that you feel blocked around him, and that you feel guarded around someone you married can’t be a good thing. I would hope if he’s this sincere, helpful person that you say he is, then if you sit down and talk to him about how YOU feel in the relationship/marrige regarding the critiques, criticism, and challenges he’ll take that to heart. Just don’t do it in an accusatory manner and make sure you don’t overload it alllllllll at one time about it. Focus on one thing at a time, let that be processed and then another time bring up something else. Our first reaction, especially when someone is telling us how they feel because of something they did is get defensive, but its even moreso if its mutiple things at a time.
Also, I would suggest individual counseling as well. Even if he does or doesn’t agree to the couple’s counseling. And I say that because of the resentment and disappointment that you’ve harbored over the years. One of my biggest beliefs is that resentments are the biggest relationship killers and its typically silent.
Good luck with everything!