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This is just going to be a very personal journal about how my longest relationship failed and I'm just putting it out there so I can save myself the time explaining it all to anyone ever again.

Well, anyone who knows me pretty personally knows I was engaged for the last 5 years and working on getting married to an American. 2020 was hard for us, I was working an extremely depressing job and living in depressing circumstances just trying to get through every obstacle to finally get my visa. Sometimes it took a lot of willpower to handle the complicated paperwork, travel and enormous cost issues that kept coming up, not to mention the anxiety about dealing with Covid-19 and all the ways it kept interfering with our plans. I was ready to book my consulate interview in spring of 2020 and the pandemic made that impossible until the winter of 2020. I finally had my interview, and then had to find additional paperwork, paperwork that was now called something entirely different by the Canadian federal police, so that made it even harder to find. By spring of 2021 I had finally found what I needed, completed more background checks, and everything I could do was done. I had my visa by April, and I had a plan to leave by the last week of April.

We didn't talk as much as he wanted through 2020. I was just working such a horrible job that drained me of all social energy, I didn't even talk to most of my friends, I had no energy left for connecting with people if it felt like work. He tried nothing to bridge that gap, he didn't call me more often, he didn't try harder, he didn't make plans for us to spend online time together, he didn't find more things to share, he just sat there stubbornly feeling disconnected like it was entirely up to me to fix. That was the way of our relationship, every problem that ever came up was something I had to fix, instead of something he could work on changing his attitude about or something he could lean into as an opportunity to love and trust more.

All through this my fiance had been expressing frustration at how much difficulty I had with dealing with the immigration process. Any time I felt overwhelmed and took my time on some part of this process he held it against me. He brought up a particularly hard period where I waited a month to proceed on something every single time we talked to our therapist. Constantly pushing me and expressing frustration at how the process, which was entirely made of work I had to do and fees I had to pay for, was taking me a long time. He had no patience for how hard any of it was for me, be it the costs or the logistics or arranging transportation, hotel, it was an endless series of problems that were entirely mine to solve and while he could have helped financially, the costs were the least of my worries. I never felt comfortable asking him for money because I felt it would just give him more to be frustrated and complain about. In the end, he expressed doubts about proceeding with marriage, after all the work I had just completed in all those months of research, calls, interviews, fees, paperwork, background checks, fingerprinting, vaccinations, mailing paperwork, scanning paperwork, scanning photos, and all this while I was let go from my job, the only steady income in my household where I lived with my disabled mother and recovering addict sister.

I promised things would get better when I got to Texas. That we could get back to the things we knew, the ease of sharing space, of sex and chores and hobbies and seeing his family and making plans and every obstacle would be out of our way. I argued that we should get married even if we didn't feel better because at least then we could keep working on things and improve our relationship instead of turning everything we had done, all the suffering we went through into wastes of time and energy. I proposed a research plan to find out from people in our lives how they made their relationships last and work, and we talked to a lot of people to find out more, they were very insightful conversations with people we cared about, and then we spent a lot of time talking about what we learned. But he still felt disconnected, unengaged, still had no ideas for how to make things better and still tried nothing to actively address the problems other than telling me the problems existed.

When I got to Texas I was immediately warm, touchy, loving, relieved. He was as cold and distant as a stranger. When we talked about how we felt, he expressed that he wasn't attracted to me, didn't feel love, and still felt disconnected. I stopped trying to be so forward and let him do the leading after that. But he was busy all the time and never once made a single plan for us to spend any time together. If I tried to talk to him he never paid attention, I had to repeat myself because he was always watching TV, consumed by basketball, the food network, I kept trying to find a way to talk to someone who was actively distant and uncomfortable. He never tried to be tender or intimate in any way, never touched me at all. Most days the only things he said to me were criticism, instructions, bringing up problems. He didn't try to engage me on anything, we barely had a single conversation in the first month. All I heard was that my loose hairs were a problem for him that I had to deal with. I had to vacuum and sweep more. I did every chore in the house and all I heard were criticisms about how I could do them more to his standards. He treated me like some moron who couldn't be trusted to do anything lest I damage the house or destroy the furniture. I had lived in his house for 10 months in the last 5 years and I still couldn't be trusted to do anything right. It started to feel like a long unpaid internship where I knew I wasn't going to get the job.

During the middle of that his nephew died and we ended up finally seeing his family. While the circumstances were tragic I got to see him interact with other people normally, see him smile and laugh and it just made me feel even worse. One night during the time we were with family he told me how the loss had made him think about how important it was to be with someone introspective. It felt so much like a criticism I cried myself to sleep that night. All I had done since I got there was introspect on how I could make things better, how I could do 100% of the problem solving while he tried nothing and ignored me as much as possible. It just never got better.

The therapist recommended some couples conversation games to stimulate us and I couldn't find anything that felt genuine. She recommended a workbook but everything in it was stuff we had discussed years ago. I don't know how you're supposed to restart a relationship when you already know everything about someone else. But I kept trying and kept coming up with new ideas for how to converse, new things to try, I kept trying to get him to open up, to volunteer to run his errands with him, to be present for anything he had going on, to speak up about anything, to be helpful, to be attentive, I put everything I had into trying to close the distance and he just kept himself closed like a stranger. I felt so unwelcome and unwanted.

We had a huge conversation where I got all this off my chest and it made me feel much better, much more accepting of whatever the end result would be. It helped a lot to say that I felt like he was wasting my time and was going to decline to get married and send me back to Canada. 60 of our 90 days had already gone by so I encouraged him to lean in and try to be vulnerable and actually engage me in some meaningful way. Try something instead of nothing. He expressed how much he didn't want to be single at his age, which was about the most selfish possible way to look at our relationship falling apart. He treated our relationship like a burden and an obligation and not an opportunity that cost us 5 years, a lot of money and work to make happen. He still had his 3 careers, his properties, everything to offer, absolutely nothing in his life would change or be lost without me. I had given up 3 jobs, 2 homes, all my friends, my hobbies, my side income, so much of my health, really and truly everything I had to be with him.

In the end he decided not to get married. At the time I felt sorry for him and sad that he was going through so much in his life. But over the next couple of days my pity was replaced by anger. He was pushing me to figure out the best day to leave, it hadn't even been 24 hours since he completely destroyed my plans for the future. We had a fight the next time he criticized me and I actually stood up for myself. So he booked my plane ticket and transportation home that night. Yesterday, Monday the 12th, I left Texas and spent 12 hours getting home to my family and the tattered remains of my life. Now I have to figure out what I'll do next and I'm actually in the worst position I've been in since 2015. I have to restart my whole life with almost nothing.

I'm sorry if you've tried to talk to me in the last 2 years and I've been distant, cold, or unattentive, this relationship and everything it put me through has cost me pretty much everything I was ever proud of or liked about myself. Now I'm sitting in the attic I spent the last 2 years living in, with no AC, a throat infection, an ear infection, I've lost my voice and I have to plan a whole new future for myself.