Reply To: Struggling with a Loveless Marriage and Fear of Being Alone – Seeking Advice

There’s a lot to unpack here, and since your South Asian there’s a lot of class and cultural things that I think a lot of the mostly working and middle class American posters here might not be totally qualified to speak on.

You are terrified of change. I get it. I hate change too. But your life is pretty miserable right now, and your life could be so much better. Your wife seems awful and doesn’t really bring anything positive to the table.

Are you an equal parenting partner, or is your wife doing most of the work? Statistically, more women end up with custody of their children, but that’s only because men are less likely to seek custody at all. There’s a lot of studies that show when men seek either joint or sole custody, they are successful over a lot of the time. Based on what you’ve said here, there’s very little reason to believe that unless you totally surrender custodial rights to your child that you wouldn’t have access to your child.

I don’t want to downplay things for you: your life will change and it will be hard, but it’s necessary. You have to remember you are modelling relationships for Z. They are learning what is an acceptable way to be treated from you, and what is an acceptable way to be tolerated. You are repeating what your mother did for you by staying in a miserable relationship for the sake of supposed stability. You can bet that Z will repeat these same steps in the future if you and X continue to model them.

You have a fear of being alone. You met X during college and haven’t been alone since. Get comfortable with the idea of not having a partner.

Best of luck.