Marriage
New Beginnings
Grief

The Marriage I Grieved, The Woman I Lost, and the Life I Choose

Aarthi Krish

4 min read2 days ago

There is a version of Aarthi I wish I could go back and hug.

The girl who entered marriage believing she had found her person. The girl who imagined companionship, friendship, unconditional love and a home where she would always feel safe. The girl who thought that no matter how difficult life became, she would always have someone standing beside her.
I wish I could tell her that she wasn’t asking for too much.

For years, she tried. She adjusted, compromised and made room for things that slowly took away pieces of her. She navigated difficult family dynamics, restrictions and the loneliness of not having her partner beside her when she needed him most. She tried so hard to be a good wife, daughter-in-law and eventually a mother, often forgetting that she was a person with needs of her own.
Somewhere along the way, the marriage she once cherished became a place where she felt increasingly alone.

And life didn’t pause to let her process any of it.

She went through pregnancy without the emotional support she desperately needed, and became a mother, through a C-section. She also experienced a miscarriage. She entered motherhood carrying wounds that hadn’t even begun to heal.
Imagine becoming someone’s entire world while quietly struggling to put your own world back together.
Between physical recovery, sleepless nights, breastfeeding and the demands of motherhood, she was also coming to terms with the reality that her marriage was nothing like the one she had imagined.

Nobody really talks about grieving a marriage while still being in it. There is no formal goodbye to the dreams you once shared, no closure for the future you had imagined. Just the slow realisation that the life you hoped for and the life you’re living are two very different things.

And perhaps the hardest part was grieving the woman she used to be: the girl who kept waiting, questioning herself and believing that if she tried a little harder, loved a little more and adjusted a little further, things would eventually change.
I wish I could tell that version of Aarthi that she wasn’t difficult to love. She simply wanted to be respected, considered, cherished and chosen.

And she deserved all of it. Eventually, she began choosing herself.

It wasn’t sudden. It came with guilt, confusion and difficult decisions. But she realised that staying in a marriage simply because she had once dreamed of it wasn’t a reason to keep sacrificing her happiness.
There were also things she discovered along the way that changed how she looked at the years she had spent together. The kind of discoveries that make you revisit old memories, question conversations and wonder how much of what you believed was ever real. Trust, once shaken, has a way of changing even the most familiar faces.
She could be a good mother without remaining an unhappy wife. She could acknowledge the life she had shared with someone without wanting to continue sharing it in the same way.

And she could start again.

I hope the future brings Aarthi everything she once quietly wished for. The places she hasn’t travelled, the dreams she hasn’t pursued, the experiences she hasn’t had and the versions of herself she hasn’t discovered yet.

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I hope she meets someone someday who adores her for who she is. Someone who understands her little eccentricities, celebrates her ambitions, respects her individuality and genuinely cherishes her presence.

Someone who worships the person she is on the inside.

I hope she experiences a love where loyalty is natural, affection is effortless and respect is never negotiable. A love where she never has to question her place in someone’s life.

And above all, I hope she doesn’t pass her wounds on to her little boy.

I hope he grows up knowing that love is kind, respect is mutual and nobody should have to lose themselves to keep a family together. I hope he remembers a mother who laughed often, pursued her dreams, travelled, played, loved fiercely and lived freely.
I want to give him the emotional safety I once wished for myself. I don’t want my past to become his inheritance.

To the woman I once was, I want to say this:

I’m sorry you had to go through so much alone. I’m sorry the marriage you believed in became something you had to let go of. I’m sorry you spent so many years hoping for a love that should never have required so much convincing.

But I’m proud of you.

You became a mother. You built a career. You survived incredibly difficult years. You found the courage to acknowledge your unhappiness and the strength to imagine a different future.
You are not starting from nothing. You are starting from experience.
I don’t know what the next chapter holds. Perhaps another love story, a new home, unexpected adventures or simply a life filled with a peace you never knew you could have.
But I know that the rest of my life will not be spent mourning the first half of it.

The sky is still bright. The sun is still shining. There is so much life left to experience.

I release the marriage I thought I would have. I honour the girl who endured it. I cherish the mother she became.

And from here on, I promise her one thing:

I will never abandon myself again.Not for love. Not for marriage. Not for anyone.I will continue choosing myself, in every lifetime, in every version of me, until eternity.