Reddit user u/Caulorblind asked the community: "What was the reason you didn't marry the person you thought you were going to?" Many people hopped on the thread to share their own experiences with lost love and almost marriages. Here's what they revealed:
1. "He wanted an open marriage (we were engaged). I am monogamous, and he knew how I felt about anything open. Then, I found out he was in a relationship with a coworker. On top of that, I discovered that if I did marry him, I would be wife number five! He only told me about his first marriage and said that was it. His daughter told me everything. His other exes divorced him because he just didn't understand that being married and having a chick on the side wasn't an option."
2. "My friend found her on Tinder. No, my friend didn't match with her; they just sent me the screenshot. I installed Tinder and found her profile to double-check. I took her profile picture after we got engaged, so it wasn't her old profile. On the upside, I kept the Tinder profile I created to find her profile and eventually ended up meeting my future wife there, so there's that."
3. "Despite telling me she was meeting her mom and friends for extensive wedding planning, she was actually meeting another guy and mortgage advisors for the home they were buying together. A rough few years followed, but now I'm with my perfect wife, and we have two kids, two dogs, and a tortoise. It was a real blessing. Looking back, we were only really rushing into a wedding because her dad was unwell. I asked her because I knew he wanted to be able to walk her down the aisle."
4. "She ghosted me two weeks before our wedding. We had a long-distance relationship while I was in school. She convinced me to drop out to spend more time with her. I ruined my friendships and future for her. Then, she just disappeared. I found out she got married about three months later from a mutual friend. It absolutely destroyed me. I have never hated anyone more. It's been almost 10 years, and I still dream about her leaving me for this other guy."
5. "They quit their job and thought I'd fund their life. I couldn't afford all the bills and the lifestyle they wanted. Every day I came home, they would want to go out for food with my money. Their parents would give them money, and they'd spend it on luxury clothing items. I would tell their parents, and they would say they were giving them money for bills and didn't take me seriously. I talked to them about it, but they would say they weren't ready to work. I realized I wouldn't be able to pay my mortgage, and my credit card debt would increase. They then suggested we have a kid and they could be the stay-at-home parent. One day, I came home, and it was enough. I told them to leave."
6. "She decided having sex with her boss for more money was a better deal."
7. "He had two fiancées at the same time. I almost packed up my whole life in Sweden to move to the States on a fiancée visa. His coworkers called and told me absolutely everything before the final flight down."
8. "We were decent together, and marriage seemed like the next logical step. I bought a ring, and we flew to California for her to meet my parents. I was going to propose to her. She knew my parents had money (but not to what extent), even though I didn't. I had difficulty paying for my $75k house with utilities and basic upkeep. We spent a week living outside anything we could ever afford. We borrowed my parents' cars, spent time at their house in Lake Tahoe, and had nice dinners. Before I actually proposed, she started talking about my trust (which never existed), how much my parents would give us for a wedding gift, and how much I'd be making when I took over my dad's business (that was never going to happen; I never even worked for him)."
"I decided to wait on proposing. Within two months of us returning home, she traded in her car for an SUV she couldn't afford, bought silly items she couldn't afford, and stopped paying her portion of household bills. She was a completely different person. Even when we discussed it, she said she could see that my current lifestyle was just to ensure she wasn't with me for the money. I could never convince her otherwise, and we broke up a few months after we visited California.
I'm married to a woman now who I'm obsessed with. We have a strong and loving marriage. We've supported each other through our career growth and are doing okay financially. I never dreamt I could be this happy. Luckily for me, everything worked out great."
9. "Oh, man. We'll call her A. In the early days, A was such a delight. I knew it was her when I started having actual dreams about what our children would look like, which I've never experienced before or since. For a long time, I was blind to all others but her. A did not feel the same. The emotional distance that she kept between us eventually came to a head when my mom had a severe stroke. It nearly killed my mom, took months for her to recover to a minimal level, and simply stripped away much of who she was. Far from offering support and encouragement during what was, at the time, the worst point in my life (not to mention my mom's), I began to realize that A seemed to view the whole thing as an inconvenience."
"The realization that my life, and my family, didn't really matter to A at all broke me in ways that I'm still recovering from. I saw what I wanted to, of course. In hindsight, A's relationships were always about projecting an outward appearance of high-value normality to boost her fragile ego. My mom's stroke (and my resulting mental state) were not relevant to her because neither added value to her. I'm not sure if she can treat people as anything more than set props."
10. "I realized I would've been his second mom for the rest of my life instead of his partner."
11. "We were discussing former partners, and somehow, she got to the point where she told me she didn't expect me to be her last partner. It was not in the sense of, 'After you die, I'll go on with my life.' She sincerely didn't expect us to stay together forever. I can respect some realism in a relationship, but I decided we wouldn't make it right then. We broke up that same week."
12. "He ended up having a wife I did not know about."
13. "Right as I started to think of marriage, he quit his job and decided I needed to make enough to pay for the both of us. Then, he got mad when I cut the cable TV and things like Netflix to save money because he was not looking for a job and we were slowly going broke. As a gay man myself, I am not paying for another grown man to live. I don't care if he works 35 hours a week at McDonald's. He has to contribute something."
14. "COVID. Just being home, stuck together, stressed about bills. The things we used to love about one another, we quickly grew to hate. We went through the most toxic breakup I've ever been through in my life — 10 months of manipulation on both parts. We had one last dinner together at a nice Italian place. We people-watched an awkward couple on their first date. Laughed some. I went back to her place and played Scattergories."
"We were both emotionally drained but kept trying to make something work. I could sense her emotional fatigue, and she knew I was there, too. That was the last time I saw her. We ended up mutually blocking each other on everything you could think of. We didn't talk for about two years. But dammit, I still thought of her every day and still loved her, even if she was bad for me. I liked to believe she was the one, at one point. She passed away last year. That was a tough phone call."
15. "We were engaged for almost a year. I realized we never laughed together unless I was being funny. Her sense of humor was almost nonexistent. She knew what was funny, but she never made me laugh, and I'm not hard to crack up. On top of that, I had deep thoughts about things (life, philosophy, astronomy, existence) and would bounce them off of her, and it was never a conversation. It was my intellectual renaissance: a time when I started questioning everything and learning so much. She would just say, 'How do you even think about this stuff? You're so smart.' I realized it wasn't that I was smart. It was that she just didn't have a very high intellect."
"She was a wonderful girl, but she wasn't very intelligent. And then, one night, she drove us home and was drunker than I realized, and she got super angry about something small and started swerving the car at 90 mph, saying she was going to kill us. I started getting stuff in order to move out after that. I loved her a lot, but she wasn't it.
I'm married to a beautiful, brilliant scientist who is incredibly funny and makes me laugh. We have a wonderful son. Life is great. As hard as it was to leave my ex, it was a difficult decision that turned out great!"
16. "She slept with our roommate, who then got her pregnant. She tried to play it off as mine until he blackmailed her by saying he would tell me if she didn't leave me for him. But, it was the best thing that happened, as life is amazing now."
17. "I was young, we were still in college, and something didn't feel right then. We broke up. He then tried to date my sister and eventually married my ex-roommate (who was one of the meanest girls I've ever met)."
18. "They just couldn't function for themselves. I had to do all the chores at the house and provide for both of us because they wouldn't get a job after they got fired from their last one. They kept failing their test for their professional certification because they refused to study, despite how much I tried to help them organize time to do so. We were engaged, but they refused to help me plan anything for the wedding, leaving it all to me. We visited my family, and they blew everyone off the whole time. The final straw was when I was getting extremely stressed on the flights home when we got redirected and had to go through security again and I was freaking out that we'd miss our flight. They did nothing to help me; instead, they just shut me down and got upset that I was so stressed out."
"When we got home, I woke up the next morning, went out, and bought moving boxes for them to pack up all their stuff. I asked if they wanted to discuss what happened while we were traveling. They said no. So, I told them to pack everything up over the weekend and that I would stay with my parents in the meantime. I returned home to find all their stuff gone and never heard a word from them again."
19. "He had an affair with my stepmom."
20. "His mother wanted him for herself. He couldn't decide who he'd rather be with. I let her have him."
21. "She cheated on me with her boss about one month before our engagement party. She came home one night from work acting weird and told me she wanted a small break to clear her head. She packed some stuff and left. About an hour later, her BFF (my good friend's girlfriend) was knocking on my door. I swear as soon as I opened the door, it was as if all of the pieces just came together in my mind before she even said anything. I knew she had been cheating. I packed up her stuff and gave it to her best friend to take. Getting over her was the hardest time of my life. I'm happily married with two kids now."
22. "She broke up with me on our one-year anniversary for her 'best friend' who I had asked her to stop flirting with several times because she was making me insecure with how much she did it."
23. "She wasn't ready when I was, and then I wasn't ready when she was. We had a lot of maturity issues because of where we were in our lives, but we both seem to be doing well now. I don't harbor any regrets or bad feelings. It just wasn't the right time. Even when we broke up, she joked that she wished we had met a few years later because she knew things would've been different."
24. "I realized that I just really didn't want to get married. I was pressured into the whole relationship, pressured into an engagement, and pressured into his religion. I was at a point where I thought I would regret my entire life if I married him. I even seriously considered just running away, but I had a lot of people in my life who loved me, so I decided to tell him it was over. His only response was, 'I'm disappointed in you.' It's worth noting that we didn't live together, and I'd only seen him once in the last six or seven months of the relationship. I was very ill, practically bedridden, and couldn't travel much, and he refused to come see me (30-minute drive). It worked in my favor because I had essentially mourned the relationship before it was over. Despite being terrible, I still needed to grieve it, and I'm glad I had that chance beforehand."
25. "I could write a book. The truth, I think, is that we met each other at the wrong time in both our lives. I was immature and didn't recognize what we had was incredibly rare. She hadn't resolved the trauma in her past that was causing her anger issues. It's been over a decade since we broke up, and I never saw her again. Through shared friends, I know she's married with kids (I am, too), but that's all I know about her. I don't ask anyone about her or want to bother her, just to be clear. I truly hope she's happy and having a good life. I'm not proud, in the least, to admit that I have missed her from time to time."
26. "She told me she never loved me and broke up with me on Valentine's Day. We'd been an on-again-off-again couple for about 10 years by that point. Well, a year later, on Valentine's Day, she reached out with this massive 10-page letter and told me how she had been seeing a therapist and was going through a really difficult time in her life. She said she loved me and she made a mistake. Yadda yadda yadda. I loved her, so I thought I'd try again. For my birthday that year, she started a massive argument, and it kind of clicked for me that she had done this for 10 years. She made these massive declarations of love while also doing pretty horrible things. She was pretty shocked when I wouldn't forgive her this time. It's been a few years since then. She called me for her birthday this year, and I just let it go to voicemail because I can't keep trying to entertain this girl."
27. "He had been stalking another woman since he was 19. He would intentionally get new jobs to be closer to her, and I followed him from 26 to 29. I was the backup that he conned into a relationship when we were 26 since this woman kept rejecting him. But, other women had been victims of his con, too. COVID hit, and she relocated to Texas at some point. One of our mutual friends found out he was going to Texas, too, and he mentioned a woman's name but quickly backtracked. Our friend texted me because it was highly suspicious and he didn't want me to get hurt (this guy was a nice, ethical guy who loved his wife and respected other women). My mom has a talent for finding lots of info online with just a name and a location. She pieced together an entire story."
"My boyfriend and this woman went to undergrad college together. She was a writer who blogged about many personal details and mentioned his name in a post. She would get a job in a new state, and he'd move there within a few months. In a Facebook post, my mom found one of his prior 'backups,' and I reached out to her. All the details were confirmed. He conned her like he had conned me.
COVID quarantines made it super easy to cut off people. I deleted his number, moved back in with my family, and never spoke to him again. I checked his social media a few months ago, and I guess being a creepy stalker worked because he married that woman. From her blog posts, I gathered she has very low self-esteem, and she bought into the theory that women were spoiled milk after 25, so I am assuming that's why she married her stalker."
28. "He married someone else on my birthday because he got her pregnant."
29. "He lied about everything, including his job. He'd go to 'work,' but he'd really just go off and do whatever. I have reason to think he hired a sex worker at some point as well. He lied about even the most inconsequential things and broke up my relationship with my best friend because of his controlling behavior. And, this all occurred when I was bedridden from leg surgeries."
30. "He just left one day. He left me in his apartment (I was not on the lease) to go to work and never returned. He never called, texted, or anything. He even changed his phone number. He was an awful partner, and it wouldn't have worked out regardless, but nobody expected him just to disappear. I still haven't heard from or about him. I do not know what happened to him, but I check the obituaries once a month to see."
31. "She woke up after seven years together, looked me in the eyes, and said, 'I don't love you, and I'm not attracted to you anymore.' I loved her more than anything and lived in a city where I knew no one. None of my buddies even asked how I was doing. I was sad and alone. However, I dug myself out of that hole of sadness and started hitting the gym and doing the things I never could in that relationship. Since we broke up six years ago, I got a master's degree and completely changed careers. I get to do the things that I want to do now. I guess it is sometimes dark before dawn."
32. And: "We had been together for three years when I proposed. We held a big engagement party at my parents' place in the country and invited both of our families. Not only did our families not really get along, we didn't even get along with our own families. We talked about dropping five figures on a glorified party for people we don't like. That led to a conversation about whether we really believed in marriage. Together, we called off our engagement at that party (but we didn't tell people for months). This year will mark 19 happily unmarried years we've been together."
Were you with someone you thought you would marry, only for those plans to be completely upended? What happened? Tell us in the comments.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.