This article is based on the AskReddit question “Redditors whose marriage lasted less than a year, what went wrong?”
[Source can be found at the end of the article]
1. Bad karma will catch up to you
We expedited the marriage because she was pregnant, and I loved her already, so there wasn’t any concerns. I was working crazy hours so she could stay home with the baby, and our schedule started shifting so we didn’t spend as much time together. She had postpartum, and started playing online role playing games all night, and met a guy who didn’t work, and lived off of his mother, so he had all the time to talk to her. Long story short, she kissed our daughter, gave her to me, and ran off with him.
Fast forward over a decade, and we’re fine as friends now, and my daughter is cuddled up beside me as I type this, playing on her tablet. The karma is time and lifestyle haven’t been kind to her, and our daughter would rather be with me, and trust me more.
Jebediah_Goodplow
2. Everything happens for a reason
Was married in July and found out in November that he had been cheating on me the entire time we were dating and married. This was quite a few years ago – I’m now happily married to another man who is pretty amazing, so I do believe that everything happens for a reason. Even the stuff that seems bad at the time.
LuckysGoods
3. A wonderful wish come true
My mom’s marriage to her first husband was only a year, year and a half at most. He was diagnosed with cancer and he said that he wanted to marry her before he died, so they got married and took a honeymoon to Hawaii, because he’d always wanted to go there too.
shiguywhy
4. Have some compatibility first
My cousin was married for eighteen hours, or something ridiculous like that. To hear her tell it, there was a really apocalyptic argument on their wedding night over where they went from there.
The moral of the story appears to be that before you get married, you and your spouse should have roughly compatible ideas of what you’re looking for out of a marriage: how many kids, when to have them, where you live, whether you both work, money issues, etc. That’s not stuff that just works itself out magically over time.
hashcheckin
5. Leaving the groom for the maid of honour
I dated a girl for 6 years. We got married, had a big expensive wedding and a two week honeymoon in Italy. Came to find out less then six months later that she was sleeping with her boss who was also at our wedding. She left me for the maid of honor. I did not see that one coming at all. The divorce took longer than the wedding. Hey kids, if you aren’t sure on your sexuality it’s ok, just be honest about it and don’t ruin someone’s life over you wanting to stay in the closet. It destroyed me.
groggboy
6. Dramatic exit
Buddy of mine found out the night before the wedding his soon to be wife slept with her ex. He goes through with it and as the vicar ends the ceremony he tells all, in front of everyone, throws the ring away and asks the vicar if he does take-backs.
NotMuchInterest
7. What a terrible way to find out
This ones kind of messed up, happened to a friend.
We were deployed to Okinawa. My friend married his girl prior to deployment. He found out mid deployment that she cheated on him. But the way he found out was kind of messed up. He checked his Facebook one day and saw a message from some dude he didn’t know. The guy straight up told him that he slept with his wife. She didn’t say she was married and when he checked her FB he saw she was married to my friend. He felt guilty and had to message him.
My friend wasted no time and divorced her in Oki. I’m not sure if that was possible. I just remember him doing some kind of legal work the following day.
TeufeIhunden
8. Why get married in the first place?
Husband decided to start an affair within 3 months of marriage, found about 6 months after. Still maintains there was nothing wrong, just thought it would have been over before I found out…oh and our baby was only 6 months old. What a catch of a man….started divorce proceedings after waiting the year minimum.
fizz16
9. Young, immature love
We got married in Feb 2013 after being together for 5 years. We were 21 and still had a lot of growing up to do. We broke up 6 months later (a week before our daughter was born) after he didn’t come home from work one night (he was a chef so finished around 10pm) and I phoned his work because his phone was off – they said he’d left hours before that. I managed to get onto a co worker who told me he was at a party with heaps of colleagues, I kept trying to call him and he’d hang up on my calls. I ended up getting so upset I was having contractions, left my rings on the TV stand and moved into my mums that night. Turns out he was having sex with a co-worker. Was a rough couple of months with a newborn and messy break up but I’m happier 4 years later than I ever was with him.
jessplusplus
10. Getting conned by marriage
After spending a year together we got married so he wouldn’t get deported. I took care of him, paid all the bills, paid to sponsor him…
…turns out he was already married in his own country. Yup. Took me a while to stop being bitter over the thousands of dollars I got conned out of.
My dad had recently died and I suppose he saw me like a lion sees a wounded gazelle.
SophiaLongnameovich
11. Sometimes its for the best to end it sooner than later
We had been dating for seven years so we thought it was a safe bet. Realized a year into our marriage that we were better as separate people. And it was terrible. There were a ton of tears, a whole lot of begging not to let it end, a whole bunch of “trying new things (living separately, splitting money, etc)” so that we could be apart together but it just didn’t work. We were just live-in friends when it came down to it. And I think, too, that if we hadn’t gotten married, we never would have seen it. It was sort of the impetus for us both to move on, as terrible as that might sound. It was a shake-up in our otherwise completely hum-drum stable life, and it ended up working out for the best, but it sucked for a long time.
MrBeanNonStop
12. The nerve of some people!
Got married after five months, he wanted to move to Washington and virtually forced me to do it since I didn’t want to. So I quit my job, left my house, and stayed at a hotel a couple of days. The day before moving he said he fell out of love… and would go without me. Left me heartbroken, homeless and jobless.
Bonus: He didn’t move to Washington, he’s in davenport (Florida) around 10 minutes away and got a boyfriend after a day of leaving me.
UChess
13. Run! just run away!
He started drinking on our wedding day and never really stopped. Then he got into drugs and was fired from at least 3 different places within 6 months because of his drug and alcohol abuse. He became physically and emotionally abusive (I developed severe anxiety during my marriage that is still plaguing me after 11 years) within the first few months of our marriage. He had sex with me against my will often, flushed my birth control so I could begin popping out his 3 children, and the last straw was when I found out the girl living down the street from us was pregnant with his child. I had to pack up my things and leave him before he came home for lunch one day, since the last time I tried to leave he pulled me out of the car by my feet and I smacked my face on the concrete.
Hairhelmet61
14. Some people dont want to change, not even when married
My sister left her husband after 5 months of marriage; she still loved the guy but felt he was not ambitious enough, for example with wanting to earn more money so that they could have children some day. She thought getting married would direct his focus more towards the next step – having a family. However he didn’t change, she got frustrated and left him.
__hypatia__
15. Unbelievable!
We were both immature and in our early twenties. Both of us were socially awkward penguins who had never been in a relationship before.
It went well until he got into porn, and tried to force me to do gross things he had seen in porn. Then he became physically abusive.
He divorced me on the quick and got me kicked out of the country.
His parents bought him a flat for divorcing me. I went back to my country where I spent several years being homeless.
Starsuponstars
16. Nope, not happening
She started feeling ‘trapped’ as in, my expectation of monogamy was too much. So she discovered polyamory, decided she wanted to be polyamarous with her boss, and that it was worth opening the marriage no matter what. She was pretty surprised when I divorced her.
Erisianistic
17. What exactly went wrong?
We were together for 7 years, living together for 5, before he proposed – total surprise to me, we hadn’t discussed it. Got married a year later, 7 months after that he started withdrawing and acting depressed, so I tried to get him to talk about what he was feeling. He said he couldn’t stand to be around me and hated me – then moved out two weeks later, divorced 6 weeks after that. I still wonder what happened, we haven’t spoken since he called to confirm he didn’t want to do counseling and just wanted a divorce instead.
cattshop
18. Look and listen to the signs
She had another boyfriend when I proposed and kept him around while planning our wedding. They got married after our divorce.
Don’t get married while you’re in the military.
vectorama
19. Notice the red flags
We met and started dating right after bootcamp. Like so many others….. we at least dated for about 3 years before marriage though. But all the while it turns out we were terrible for each other. Hind sight is 20/20. There were tons of red flags. He went on deployment a week after our courthouse wedding. When he got back things went downhill fast. I went back to my moms, he cut off communication almost entirely. When I finally got him on the phone to talk, he said he just didn’t want to be married to me or anyone else right then. I began divorce proceedings. He still wanted to be boyfriend and girlfriend but by then I was picking up on this red flags and ready to sever it completely. Once it was finalized I sent him his copy of the decree and haven’t seen or heard from him since. I do wonder if hes happy at least. He was super high maintenance and I’m totally not. I know he had his demons from before the military, I hope he’s at least come to terms with them.
shamncheese
20. Cheaters always get caught
Married her because my penis said so not my brain. She maintained several online affairs in exchange for items in Everquest (which she hated until I told her to play for a bit to see if she really liked it)
Ended up coming home one day about nine months in to our marriage and heard the unmistakable sound of her having sex. Confronted them, he ran away. I told her I was going to go spend the weekend at my best friends and that I wanted her and all of her stuff out by Monday.
Filed for divorce immediately. Was contacted by the guy she cheated on me with. She’d been cybering dudes for months and using fake pics. She finally decided to cross the physical line and this guy took the bait. He had weeks worth of chat logs. He offered to testify in open court about it. At the hearing, he said his piece, the judge looked at her with her best “what a whore” look and gave me my divorce and gave her nothing.
atlgeek007
21. Live and learn
I was in grad school. Her conservative parents hadn’t let us live together until we were married. We got married as soon as she graduated undergrad and got her first ever job. Her parents were also rich and she didn’t have to work. She became a teacher and we moved to where she was teaching, since I only had a year of school left. I had a 4 hour a day commute to school, and was working full time on campus, so I think I slept from midnight to 4am 5 days a week. Come the weekend, I would crash and recover. Meanwhile, she wanted to go out and enjoy life, freedom, her own money, all that. She started going out with her girlfriends, then a guy joined the group. I suppose I can yadda yadda the rest.
The hardest part was that I was in my last year of grad school and couldn’t devote any attention to it. In the end, though, I found out she was lying to me about trying to work on our relationship, so there wasn’t anything to fight for.
I think we’re both better off now. I know she married the guy and they had a kid, or maybe some kids. I remarried, I’m financially better off, I have a great son. I hope she has the same.
AFreebornManoftheUSA
22. Love is blind
College roommate. He met a girl junior year that our ENTIRE group thought was wrong for him. But love is blind. Fast forward to summer after graduation and they are to get married in the fall. I am in the wedding.
They were apart for most of the summer as he was working and she was finishing school and putting the wedding together. We converge on her home town in Colorado, wedding goes down, big reception, LOTS of money dropped on this one!!
We see them off to the honeymoon and I return to St. Louis to Home Sweet Home. 7 days later, I get a call from him asking if he can come stay with me. Sure. ????
I pick him up at the airport – single. At his insistence we hit the nearest bar, and I get to hear all about how she cheated on him over the summer but went ahead with the marriage because she felt pressured by how much her parents were paying. She told him pretty much as soon as they were alone AFTER the ceremony. Not at any time during the 7-10 days they were together BEFORE the wedding. She insists they go on the honeymoon to “work things out.” But refuses to be intimate as she still has feelings for the other guy.
So he never returns to her. Gets checked for all the STDs – negative, and has the marriage annulled within 6 months.
Pardon_my_baconess
23. The controlling husband
He was an irresponsible, spendthrift drunk when we met and, silly me, I thought his disappointment over me demanding at least 2 years before we got married was a sign that he’d mature a little when the certificate was signed.
Nope. He just got more controlling and violent after the fact.
I left 9.5 months later, after a fight got so out of control he chased me in his car, which he bought with “our” wedding money from his parents knowing I couldn’t drive standard. Since we could only afford 1 vehicle on my 3 jobs and his 15 hr/week cashiering gig, it was one more way to control where I went and what I did.
BeckyDaTechie
24. Wasn’t meant to be
Mine lasted 13 months, but I think I could still contribute to this conversation. We were together 4 years when we got married. I feel like we used marriage to “fix” things, but didn’t realize it at the time. I genuinely loved him at the time, but over that next year I for sure fell out of love with him. I stayed because I felt it was the right thing to do and we could fix things cause that is what you do once you are married. I then could see how miserable we both were and I decided to end things. He hasn’t taken the separation as well as I have, in my opinion. I don’t hate him or anything, just we weren’t meant to be forever.
We also got married in secret, so only some of my friends know about it. The one comment I get from people is that “Well, at least you weren’t married.” and I just laugh and then kind of cry a little on the inside because they don’t know I am currently going through a divorce.
coraline4ever
25. Unstable relationship from the beginning
Me and my ex got married in August, she got pregnant in September, we left our country and moved to DR (due to war in home country and other things) in January, moved to Panama in March, baby born in May, divorced and she got back to home country with the baby in June.
Stuff didn’t add up. We were breaking up before, was very unstable relationship from the beginning. We have lost trust, respect and love to each other (not sure if any of these was present in fact). We also had lack of basic fundamental compatibility analysis and were incompatible by means of character. She was also lying about big things (her past, suicide stuff, health) big time. I did wrong strategic decisions to move from our country while she were pregnant and was also less understanding at times.We do not talk at all. I see kid once or twice a year.
safitudo
26. The divorce led to much better things
Not me but my brother:
Were married July 2014. A DAY after the wedding, she snuck out and had sex with one of my brothers “friends”. He didn’t find out until 3 weeks later. Kicked her out. She said she’d pay for all the cost of the divorce, but the kicker is she was too poor to pay for that (since my brother mostly supported them both.) Brother was fed up waiting for her to get the money and just paid it himself. Not even 5 months later, she married the guy who broke up the marriage (he’s a useless excuse of a human, barely supports her, spends all of his time on his butt, etc.)
I now live with my brother. Only silver lining was that we got to keep all the wedding presents, and the bro and I are even closer friends.
d_e_a_d
27. Please don’t make the poor kid suffer
The day after the wedding a sheriff showed up on our door step with child support papers for a 3 month old baby. Turns out my husband had been sleeping with his coworker. I was willing to look past the indiscretion but when he refused to take responsibility for his child I couldn’t handle it anymore. The kid shouldn’t have to suffer because his dad is an idiot. Divorce was final 11 month after our wedding day.
ScootchyMcNugget
28. Nonstop cheating. Whose fault is it?
Got married within a few months so we could live together. I found out she cheated on me in those few months. I stayed because I loved her and she said it would never happen again. It took everything I had to stay with her because all I thought about was her cheating on me again. I was fixated on it. Then when I finally was like enough is enough she started acting super weird and ignoring me. So it was killing me. I’d call her a bunch of times when we were supposed to do things together but no answers. Then the guy that she worked with, you know the “he’s married don’t worry about it” guy was having sex with her and supposedly was everything I wasn’t. So she cheated on me again because I was trying to get over the first time she cheated. It was all my fault. She never tried to gain back trust, kept blowing me off, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the cheating. I found out about it New Year’s Eve from the guy’s wife.
Shawshenk
29. All he needed was a divorce for motivation
My sisters marriage didn’t last very long. The guy had dental surgery, got addicted to pain killers and then made the jump to heroin. He managed to hide this for awhile but eventually spilled the beans a few months before the wedding. She naively decided to go through with it while he tried to get clean. He was in and out of rehab multiple times during their marriage. Eventually he started accusing her of cheating, then he trashed their apartment and took a bunch of her stuff and she decided to end it.
They got divorced and he’s been clean for over a year and actually works at the rehab place that helped him. I guess that was the rock bottom motivation he needed. She’s doing pretty well too.
AvatarJack
30. Married for the wrong reasons
We married because she got pregnant (I figured that is was the right thing to do) this ended up not being a good decision, we should have waited longer, as I’m military (insert stereotype joke) and had to move bases just months after getting a house at my last base with her. It produced a ton of stress on top of her being pregnant. Every day was a fight, over money, attention, doing things, having different opinions on matters. It’s the typical marriage things that usually work out. But we never tried to work on them, we both just gave up trying to work on ourselves which led to a doomed marriage. Just married way to soon to understand the entire concept of what was going on pretty much.
CrazedReaper
31. What went wrong?
Asked me to marry him, of course I said yes. We dated for 7 years. A month in, he began giving me the cold shoulder. Told me nothing was wrong, but he still refused to spend time with me. Was always “too tired” to go on a date or converse with me, but he sure did have time for his video games. I became depressed and acquired severe anxiety to the point where I had to move back to my parents. He still refused to talk to me. He filed for a divorce about 5 months in. To this day, I still have no closure.
Scatterbrainx3
(Source)
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