There is a lot more that goes into making a marriage work. Time, commitment, understanding and trust are just a few of those things. If you have found yourself in an unhappy marriage, chances are you made a hasty decision.
Are You In An Unhappy Marriage?
Someone wise once said that Bollywood has much more to offer us than trashy item numbers and stalker-turned-heroes. The same someone, also known as good old me, believes that a lot of life’s lessons can be learned from the twisting and heart-breaking tales of love and hatred that the industry gave us.
One such lesson came in the form of the movie Dear Zindagi, where India’s forever-crush Rahul-naam-toh-suna-hi-hoga a.k.a. Shahrukh Khan offered us some life-changing advice. It is okay to fall in love with a lot of people, he assured us. It is also okay to fall out of love with these people. It is only natural.
Sometimes it is meant to be, sometimes it just isn’t. After all, people take so much time in choosing a mere chair, sitting on various ones and trying to judge what fits exactly. So, of course, you are allowed to take time when choosing someone you are going to spend a lifetime with.
If it fits, well and good. You are already luckier than the average. If it doesn’t, it might just be time to pack up and leave, no matter how much it breaks your heart. To break up is hard, we know, and it only gets harder each time. But surviving an unhappy marriage is not any easier either.
It does not matter if everyone gives you the stink eye and calls you names. It does not matter if you can’t exactly put into words exactly where things went wrong. You do not owe anyone an explanation. This is about what you choose for yourself and what makes you a better person. Being happily single is a reality now too.
You only owe yourself a lot of courage to keep standing by yourself and to know when to call it quits. So, in case, you came here looking for the strength to do exactly that here’s why a breakup is way better than a lifetime of being stuck in a bad marriage:
1. You will never be fully happy
It is true that all relationships require adjustments and compromise. But when your entire relationship is just based on putting up with each other when you don’t want to, you will never be truly and fully happy. Both of you will try to find happiness somewhere else, in work or affairs. While distracting yourself can help to an extent, you still have to eventually live with someone that you are unable to make things work with. You will see the nasty sides of each other and resent coming home at the end of every day. An unhappy marriage means a lifetime of this misery and, as the saying goes, life is too short for that shit.
2. It will start to affect your mental health
You might think that making society and your parents happy by marrying someone they approve of but you don’t particularly love is not such a bad idea. But, believe me, no one is ever ready for the life of misery that follows. After all, humans are self-centered creatures. And to an extent, we should be. If we do not take care of our own happiness, it will start affecting our mood and mental health. Pleasing other people is not going to get us anywhere.
3. You will start to lose yourself in an unhappy marriage
If you are in denial and continue to be in a loveless marriage, you will at some point start to lose yourself. Since you defied your basic instinct by choosing something or someone else over your own happiness, you will never be fully comfortable. Even if you can’t point out exactly what is bothering you, you will start getting pissed about the tiniest and strangest things and end up being an eternally cranky person.
4. You will start resenting your partner and yourself
If the reason you are choosing to stay in the marriage is that you have this fear of society’s and your partner’s expectations, sooner or later you will not only start resenting your partner and society but yourself for being such a wimp. And that’s definitely not a happy feeling. You will have angry outbursts and you may take it out on your partner in ways that are unfair to them. There certainly are many conflict resolution strategies that you can try but a part of you will cling to all the negative thoughts you have harbored.
5. Your children will bear the brunt of your fights
Since neither of you will be happy in a particularly sucky marriage, you will fight a lot. Each will bring out the other’s nastiest side. And guess who has to put up with all this nastiness? Your children. If you have any, that is.
6. Life will start to lose meaning in an unhappy marriage
It is said that the aim of all humanity is the pursuit of happiness. If we chose to give up this pursuit and doom ourselves to endless frustration and misery, of course, our lives will cease to have meaning at some point. To be in an unhappy marriage is to subject yourself to these pangs of constant misery. Moreover, this will affect your day-to-day existence. You may not be able to meet your friends as a couple or even walk your dog in the park together anymore. Everything you enjoyed as a person will just vanish.
7. You will lose motivation in the workplace
If you are a driven or ambitious person, a bad or loveless marriage can destroy that for you. Not only does an unhappy marriage ruin one’s mental health. it can also mess up one’s confidence which can affect your work. Feelings of being an insecure husband or wife will overcome you and you will tragically fall into an abyss of feeling lost. The things that would give pleasure and respite to you before will lose their power to do so. If your work is something you really care about, an unhappy marriage can take that away from you. Everyone grows up with the very romantic idea of spending their lives with their first love. But reality often messes up our carefully laid plans. If we are lucky enough, our first love might actually love us back and we might end up deciding to spend our lives together. But in most cases, it is an unreciprocated love. In fact, the road to finding love can be riddled with many heartbreaks. As a result, so many people settle for less than they deserve with the hope that they can somehow make their happily ever after a reality with someone they barely love. In doing so, we choose a life of compromise over one of happiness, because of how afraid we are. But while various religions will tell us about other chances and afterlives, in all probability we only have one shot at this thing called living these incredibly short lives. And if that is truly the case, why do we so often use up this short precious time being stuck in a dead-end marriage or relationship? Honey, you deserve better than that. So pack your favorite t-shirt, take all of your savings out and leave this sordid mess of a relationship, before you are stuck there forever.
