I Love You, But I’m Leaving You, Wife Tells Husband After a Broken Promise and Years of Sacrifice
Romance has an expiration date, according to Dr. Fred Nour, a neurologist in Mission Viejo, California, and author of the book “True Love: How to Use Science to Understand Love.”
But what about love? “If you decide your partner is still the right person for you after the passion ends, you’re on your way to finding true love. It happens gradually and slowly: You’ll usually start to feel it one or two years after the previous phase. Your feelings will just continue to grow deeper over the years,” Dr. Nour explained on Today.
Dr. Nour discussed the four phases of love in Today’s article, “How long does passion last? Science says…” by A. Pawlowski. These are:
- Mate selection, guided by the body’s reaction to another body that says your mix of genes will produce healthy offspring.
- Romance and falling in love is the phase when people feel the ecstasy of being in love, which lasts just a few years.
- Falling out of romantic love is when passion finally ends and you wake up to reality, a time to re-evaluate your relationship and decide if it’s worth keeping even without the fireworks.
- True love. Yes, it becomes true love once a couple passes the stage of falling out of romantic love but still feels their partner is the right one for them. The euphoria of romance — produced by the brain chemicals monoamines — gets replaced by a sweet, lasting bond that comes from the nonapeptides, according to Dr. Nour.
However, in the case of a married couple who have been through a lot of challenges together, it was not the loss of romance that pushed their relationship to the edge. Not even infidelity. But a broken promise to help each other fulfill their dreams did the trick.
This wife felt betrayed — and after being threatened by her husband that he would leave her if she would not obey his will — she decided to let go of what could have been a great love story.
With the username u/No-Call-5556, the Original Poster wrote her story on Reddit’s r/TrueOffMyChest: “My husband and I got married pretty young (23), and we have been through a lot together, but I would say that our biggest struggles have been our careers and deciding on which paths to take. By the time we were 23, neither of us had graduated college yet, because college and life are expensive, and we don’t come from money. We both had to choose between working to survive and working to further our education on multiple occasions, ultimately setting us back in college many times.”
OP shared that her husband worked for a construction company, which exposed him to hazardous conditions. Meanwhile, she was involved in dead-end retail jobs. One day, they decided to discuss their situation to find ways to have a better future.
OP wrote, “So I decided then that because we still needed to survive, I would work to provide for us while my husband focused on earning his Environmental Engineering degree since he only had three years left for his degree vs. my year left in undergrad and four years for med school. So we came to an agreement that he would solely focus on finishing his degree so that he could in turn provide for us while I focused on med school solely down the line.”
Her sacrifice and her husband’s perseverance paid off. He finished his course and found his dream job. OP was so proud and happy for him, and now she was looking forward to finishing her own education. But she gave their new situation 90 days to see how her husband would adjust to his new company and for their life to stabilize.
Then, she continued to share in her post, “After the 90 days, I sat my husband down to talk to him about the plans I have to continue on to med school. He convinced me to give us a couple of months to set up a rainy day fund just in case we needed it before I quit my job, which I fully understood. Six months went by, and our rainy day fund is pretty well padded, so I again talk to him about school plans, and he begins to say that he wants to start a family now and doesn’t think we could work out starting a family and all my attention being on med school.”
That’s where their contention began. They had agreed before to have a family, but only when the two of them already have established careers. When OP insisted, her husband issued her an ultimatum: “Well, I think right now is the perfect time to start a family, and I want one, so if you choose to go to school over our family, I’ll be forced to part my ways with you.”
OP was in deep shock upon hearing those words. They had made a promise to each other, but he was now saying that her dream was unimportant after all the support that she’s given him to achieve his.
She still loves him, but that love was not enough to make her give up her aspiration for professional growth.
One vital element of true love: honor.
