my (27M) fiancée (23F) is disrespectful, insensitive and borderline emotionally abusive

Apologies in advance for the hapless tone and wall of text – I’m currently in a mid-life crisis and consequentially have trouble sleeping, eating, and focusing on life normally. Seeking advice by attempting to strucutre my convoluted thoughts and acting appropriately. (PS: I’m a non-native, apologies for any faulty grammar)

Some backstory: I have a run-of-the-mill tier-3 CompSci education but have been earning (not top-dollar but decent) and doing fairly well in my career and agreed to getting married when parents said they felt it’s time. I matched with a girl who belongs to a medicine disclipine and it was fairly exiciting initially to kick things off with her. It’s fairly common in my land of domicile (not US) to get married to complete strangers (ala arranged marriages). She seemed like a nice, mature, intelligent young woman and I could definitely see a future with her together. Since it was a completely arranged setting, we had a couple of months before tying the knot which gives us a great timeline to spend time, understand each other, verify compatibilities and set expectations into the post-wedding future (I’m not so sure I’m thrilled anymore with this “blessing-in-disguise”).

As months pass by, we meet alot often for lunches, dinners, casual hangouts and whatnots. My love and affection for her rapidly grew each passing day and I’ve come to love her to death. Also, we meet each others families on weekends and everyone is really nice and elated for our wedding to go through.

I’m a vested introvert but selectively extrovert with couple of close people from within the family and a bunch of close friends. She’s a complete extrovert, very popular in college, has more friends than one could count stars and generally has a presence with jive and energy filled around her. She was raised (similar to me) with complete freedom and choice in taking our lives directions we plased. Our interests are vastly different with little to no overlap but it’s sorta a positive and catalyses interesting conversations. We got engaged and things sort of got out of hand.

I have a stressful job which demands ad-hoc attention, stretching work hours and sorts. So I cherish every chance I get to meet her and travel well over 19miles very often in rush-hour traffic just to spend time with her in the evenings. She has been, since-the-start, less receptive, and much less reciprocative of my love. I’m a shy and private person but very expressive and open up to her about everything in my life. Lately, since a couple of months actually, she gives me the impression that I’m a piece of trash – she’s grown to be disrespectful, rude, impolite, and hurts my feelings badly. I’ve communicated to her that she needs to be more accomodative and affectionate towards me but she’s taken aback and refutes it with arguments like “I was raised this way” / “I’m not the kind of person to express love but I have it for you” / “I will work on it”. We had these civil discussions a lot and she promised she would work on it but it has actually worsened and that’s worrying me an awful lot. Expectations were clearly set to her that all I need from her to be respectful to me, my parents, and have a net-positive outlook on life but there were instances where she’s borderline disrespectful to my mother during a recent shopping spree. She invited me over to her place and we spent time together but treated me like a complete stranger asking me to leave once it was time for her to go back in to work. She does many things that hurt my feelings, I like to think she does those unbeknownst to her but I would expect her to be more vigilant and invest conscious efforts into repairing this mess as am unhappy with the way I get treated by her.

She gets passive aggressive for no-biggies and uses a high pitched tone which is very infuriating at times. I don’t tell her how badly I’m hurt because an effort was made once which backfired badly, basically ruining my reputation with my in-laws and my parents. She took things out of context, misconstrued them, presented it in a more toxic manner while crying to her parents in my absence and they had a chat with my parents if something’s wrong and basically had everyone worried sick. I was aghast and caught off-guard because she never mentioned any of the issues and only wanted my attention through such vicious ways, I’d have preferred an open-ended conversation rather. I want to set boundaries assertively about how she cannot continue to hurt my feelings and disrespect me continually but am too scared that it will backfire like it did in the past. I disapprove her methods for conflict resolution.

Without getting into too many details, I just want to say that we’ve had intimacies with each other but her character and demeanour which is progressing negatively towards me is alarmingly unsettling and got me into drinking because that’s my only get away from her “emotional abuse”. I wish she would understand the gravity of the pain I’m going through and work with me to make amends and improve our relationship. I’m wronging myself and her by hiding about the drinking but I can only share so much and open-up so much if you’re that hostile to my emotional needs.

Our wedding day arrives soon and people are stoked to see it manifest but I’m in shambles and don’t really know how to tackle this situation. Breaking the marriage is most likely not an option for me because I’ve compelled myself into believing that we had almost sexual intimacies with each other and it’s hugely inappropriate to call the whole thing off because everyone would be devastated and she would be completely broken (as I already am).

I’ve spoken about these feelings with someone who is closest to my heart and they empathized, advised that women in general have certain inhibitions and don’t open up quite easily as men do, he assured me to continue giving unconditional love and it would all work in me and my fiance’s favour after the wedding, I’ve accepted it and done the same for days with no reassurances in sight.

My issues with her, in summary are lack of emotional support, cold-blooded replies, being disrespectful and no appreciation for the things I do for her. It’s tearing me apart from within.

Please help.

TL;DR: My fiance is no longer the sweet, affectionate person she seemed/implied to be since a few months into our engagement. I’m emotionally scarred, deeply affected, and scared of her. I’ve raised concerns but they seem to be largely ignored on her part or are shrugged off to be insensitive. I’m worried about this continued traumatic experience with her in the long run and seek advice on fixing this mess before tying the knot.