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A Breaking of Tradition
Here is a piece of advice I wish I had followed: If you are going to get married, at the very least, marry someone who has achieved a similar level of education to your own.
This is My story.(Elisa mc)
I was born the eldest child in a family line that had never known an uneducated or poor person. We are a deeply traditional, upper-middle-class family. Education was the central pillar of our success; it was the mechanism by which every member of my family achieved high-ranking positions in government and private organizations.
I, however, was the one who broke this powerful family tradition.
In short, I married a man from an extremely poor background who had not even properly passed his G.C.E. Ordinary Level exams. I must be fair and say that he had achieved a considerable level of success and a good job through his own sheer dedication and hard work by the time we met.
We are the same age, and we met when we were both thirty. We didn’t have a long courtship; we got married within a year and a half of meeting. Not a single person in my family approved of this marriage. Everyone unequivocally opposed it.
They all said, in one voice, “Daughter, this man is not suitable for our family. What are you doing to your life?”
But I didn’t listen to them. I believed I wouldn’t be wrong, and that I was making the best decision of my life.
The Inevitable Divide
We got married. Not a single member of my family attended the small ceremony. Only his poor relatives, along with his friends and mine, were present. While my husband’s mother showed some fleeting irritation that my family didn’t attend, I knew it was pure performance. For them, marrying into a family like ours was a huge blessing, a major upward leap.
We decided to live separately. His family was large, and I preferred the independence. Honestly, the decision to live separately is probably the main reason our marriage lasted as long as it did. If we had lived in his ancestral home, I would have broken the marriage and left within a week or two.
Because even living separately, the difficulties caused by his family created immense problems between us.
Everyone—and I mean everyone—came to him to ask for money, always as a short-term loan. Eventually, they started expecting me to contribute as well. It was all taking, and no giving.
They would borrow household necessities without any intention of returning them, assuming that we would simply come over to fetch them when we needed them. When there was a sickness, a disaster, or any problem, they all came to us to pour out their troubles. We could handle that, but they had no concept of boundaries. They didn’t understand that as a married couple, we needed privacy and freedom. They would call or show up at our house at any hour—late at night, early in the morning—whenever they felt like it.
Frankly, I don’t think anyone in this world has as many problems, shortages, and difficulties as those people did.
The Unbearable Lack of Refinement
Now, let’s talk about my husband.
His sense of order and cleanliness was at absolute rock-bottom. He never thought about his own cleanliness. His personal hygiene was terrible, and he showed absolutely no consideration for the fact that he was living with a person who valued order and cleanliness.
If he used the toilet, he wouldn’t properly flush the water. He didn’t know how to use a bathroom correctly. That was the extent of it.
He would wear a dirty shirt from today again tomorrow—the collar and cuffs stained with grime. He didn’t care if his underwear or vests were torn or full of holes; he wore the old ones even if I bought him new ones.
I had noticed the dirty collars and cuffs when we were dating, but I had assumed he was simply dirty from a hard day’s work, since we only met in the evenings.
It was these daily, fundamental differences that started the problems between us. Over time, I began to realize that he carried on these habits deliberately to irritate me and make me uncomfortable.
His lack of hygiene and disorder made being intimate with him utterly repulsive to me. Eventually, I reached the point of refusing to be with him physically. His accusation in response was that I must be seeing other men.
As time went on, he began to act with intense jealousy and resentment towards me. He started to deliberately embarrass me.
If we went out, he would just wear any old thing, haphazardly. He would come to pick me up near my office looking extremely unkempt. I began to understand that he did this specifically to shame me.
I started avoiding taking him to the parties, functions, and events I was invited to. When he did come, he would drink heavily, behave poorly, and become the joke of the crowd, tarnishing the respect for my position and status.
When I started attending events without him, he started new issues. He would say I left him at home because if he was there, I couldn’t freely check out other men.
When I confronted him, saying that wasn’t the reason, but that he simply didn’t know how to behave at those places, he asked, “What’s wrong with my behavior? We go there to eat, drink, and have fun!”
I told him, “There’s a proper way to do that. You may forget what you did in an hour or two, but I have to go back and work with those people every day. I’m the one who hears the gossip and faces the embarrassment. You don’t have to face anyone, but I do.”
A Decade of Despair
Despite all the ways he humiliated and insulted me, he would still speak about me and my position with immense pride everywhere we went: “That’s my wife. She is so-and-so.” He never physically hit me, but he used his words and actions to mentally break me down to the maximum extent possible.
Two years into these problems, we had our son. I thought that having a child would make him settle down and become more orderly and respectable.
It didn’t. He ended up giving our child the same poor role model. He started shaping the child according to his own ways, essentially alienating the child from me.
He would use our son to make snide remarks and jokes at my expense, pointing out my faults and shortcomings to the boy. He convinced our son that I was a terrible, mean, angry woman.
Perhaps I was angry and mean. But I must say that my husband and his manipulation of my son drove me to that point. My anger and “bad temper” only made my son cling further to his father, listening only to him.
Eventually, I grew tired of my marriage, my child, and my job. I fell into severe depression and sought medical treatment. When I asked the doctor for a solution after hearing my whole story, he advised me: “The best thing is to give the child to them and get yourself out of this. Otherwise, you will get into serious trouble.” He added that if I had come to him before the child was born, he would have advised me not to rush into parenthood.
Freedom and the Final Lesson
Finally, I spoke directly to my husband about divorce. He refused. He knew he would never find another woman like me. No matter how much I insisted on divorce, he would not allow it. I had virtually no one to support me because my own family had distanced themselves. I had no one to check up on me.
I made a final decision: I would leave the country. I made all the necessary arrangements in complete secrecy.
I had been telling him for some time that I was planning to go abroad for further education. He didn’t strongly object, as I kept telling him that I would first settle in, and then bring both him and the baby over.
In the end, I came to the United Kingdom. When I left Sri Lanka, I resolved that even if I returned, I would never go back to that man. I would only bring my son over if he ever wished to join me. I left our son with his father and walked away.
I have been here for two years now, having put an end to my ten-year marriage. He tells me that he understands everything now, but I no longer care. There is no need to inspect a sack once it has been untied and all its contents examined.
When I compare the life I lived in Sri Lanka to the life I live now, I feel as though I was living in a hell with a “dead spirit” for a husband.
So, I tell you: if you are going to marry, think carefully if you are going to bind yourself to someone who is not compatible or suited to your status and education. This is especially true for women.
No matter how much people insist that love ignores caste, creed, class, rich or poor, I strongly believe that those factors matter, at least in small ways.
Let me say it again: Those things may not be obstacles to love, but they are absolutely obstacles to marriage. Some people may harshly criticize me for this view, but I speak from ten years of painful experience.
I, too, was radical in my youth and believed in those ideals, and that is how I ended up in trouble.
I suffered endless hardship, insult, and shame due to the deep, irreconcilable incompatibility and lack of refinement in my marriage.
The inferiority complex that some men carry is often worse than any generational curse.
