40 People Share Why Their Marriage Didn't Even Last A Year

Not me, but my husband’s first marriage.

To be fair, they got married after only knowing each other for 6 months which isn’t nearly enough time to get to know someone before marrying them. They were young - about 22 years old - and impulsive. Luckily no children came of that situation.

Within 6 months of marriage, she quit her job without discussing it first with her husband. She spent the last of her savings on a full arm tattoo (also without discussing with her husband first - not that she needs permission, but if she wants to spend the last of her savings on something dumb, there should be a discussion). She then managed to drain their joint savings account (like $3k) while he was away at a training school. That was the last straw.

We had been together 8 years by the time we got married and I realized I had been pushing for an engagement I didn’t even really want. His mom dictated our whole wedding, and once we were married I realized he was never going to grow up into a real partner, so I divorced him within a year. It was a hard lesson in the sunk cost fallacy, but really glad I made that decision.

She went out for girls' night and met a new friend named Nicole at a bar. She started texting her a lot and then going to hang out now and then. We had a baby at home, and she kept trying to hang out with this girl from another town over with no last name, whom I was not allowed to meet. His real name was Wesley.

We dated for 3 years before getting married. After getting married, every thing changed and became more real, we were both 20 yrs old and very naïve about our future and didn't really think it out.

It was gradual in our marriage but at some point, I realized that we wanted very different things in life. Although we were compatible, we would hold each other back for our future plans. It's been 30+ years. I talk to him, well as much you do on social media. I would never be able to live the life he leads now and be happy. He would never be able to live my life the way I live it now and be happy. It was inevitable that we would divorce. I have never held on to any resentment towards him just the sober awareness that we didn't think things out in a realistic way so I took the blame. He married the right person the second time around and I married the right person the second time around.

He got addicted to opioids after a back surgery. He became mean and cold and stopped physical contact. He had no job and took my whole salary to manage himself. He was controlling and lazy. I’m glad I left after just 5 months of living together.

I was 19 and she was 18. She became pregnant and her family was very conservative. It was basically a shotgun wedding. Neither of us had much in the way of life skills. We barely knew each other. I also had some undiagnosed mental, neurological and physical problems.

Long story short I could never hold a job and she wanted to stay home with the baby. We were living below poverty and I was too proud to ask for "handouts". While I was never abusive I was definitely negligent of her emotions and needs. I was too in my own head trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

One day I came home, a lot of stuff was gone and there were divorce papers on the coffee table.

It took a long time but I've been able to make my apologies to her and we're not what I would call amazing friends but we get along.

While I was dealing with a lot of s**t and eventually went on disability, I don't consider it an excuse though. I was an a*****e.

I really suspect he only married me to go on the honeymoon. Shortly after we got married, he developed an allergy. To what, I don't know, but I know it was real. He was unable to work due to his allergy. He had to take medicine. Then he was diagnosed with COPD. He started taking medicine for that and was feeling better. I started talking about him going back to work and suddenly he was sick again. He confessed, right before Christmas, that he had stopped taking the medicine due to finances.

His mother was a huge issue in our relationship. Prior to marriage, I thought we were on the same page. Whenever his mom treated me badly, he would acknowledge that her behavior was wrong. After we were married, right around Christmas time, he actually said to me, we're married now. There is nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it and deal with it.

He was lazy. I would work all day, come home and no household chores would be done. He would leave as soon as I got home, to go to the store to get food for dinner.

The final straw was one night I got up to use the bathroom and when I came back to bed, I saw his phone was lit up. Thinking someone was trying to call him, I looked at his phone. I found out he had been texting and messaging other women. I confronted him about it and he said they were his online friends from some of the games he played on his phone. I told him if he can't talk to his "friends" in front of me, something is wrong. I told him I wanted to go to marriage counseling in November of that year. I brought it up again in December and he said he wasn't going and he wasn't doing anything wrong. I looked at his phone and he was talking bad about me to his female friends that he was texting. I waited until after Christmas to tell him I wanted a divorce. His parents and brother came over to our place for Christmas and would only speak to me if I spoke to them.

We were divorced almost a year to the day we were married. He moved back in with his parents, one of his "friends" moved into their house to be with him and I met a great guy right after my divorce was finalized. I don't have any contact with my ex husband and I'm not sorry.

I realized I deserved better. He was so angry all the time, and I was constantly walking on eggshells. I definitely settled when I married him. I had a kid before meeting him and thought no one else would ever want to date me.

He expected me return to work almost immediately after a medically necessary breast reduction and put his marijuana addiction over helping me with bills for a month so I could heal properly. He spent $650 on MJ that month instead of helping his wife. He complained as soon as I got home from the hospital about how he’s “not okay” with having to take care of me.

I was in the ER one day and they had to keep me overnight for observation (and possible blood patch) after a lumbar puncture caused some complications, and he came to see me for not even 10 minutes! He left cause the chair was uncomfortable and he wanted to go sleep in our cozy bed that I bought (just like I bought almost everything else to turn our apartment into a home).

He also stopped going to therapy and returned to his porn addiction while arguing that lust is “in his blood.” He would always trade one addiction for another and drove under the influence. I was not okay with that.

I’m much happier knowing I’ll never have to deal with that kind of behavior again. I believe that most of it was due to him being blinded by addiction (which he denied) but you can’t help someone who refuses to help themselves and I gave WAY too many chances. I even became a licensed peer support specialist to try and help him. Instead, I used what I learned to build up myself and develop the confidence to leave.

Not me, but a cousin. She found out that he had a girlfriend the whole time she was dating him and then she stayed his girlfriend after the marriage. She found out that he was sending her stuff to the girlfriend. He’d also ask for money from her paycheck, which went to the girlfriend. She found out and immediately started the divorce. She then had to leave town because he started stalking her.

We were both really young and didn’t even have our drivers license. I was pregnant which is why we were allowed to marry without parents permission.

I quickly matured and was working 3 jobs. He laid on his a*s and acted like a 16 yo who wasn’t married with a kid. I was younger then him and working so hard to support us on our own and ultimately I began to look at him as just another mouth to feed. I told him that me and the baby were going to visit my my mom, he took me to the bus stop and I never looked back and filed for divorce.

A tiny bit longer than that.

We had been dating for a while. It was good. Both our families were pressuring us to make it official. So eventually we caved.

She is lovely. But she wasn’t MY partner. A fantastic partner for someone else. I did find my person later on and we’ve been happy for over two decades.

We would likely have broken up anyway, again we were good to each other just not really for each other. But we had extra steps thanks to family pressure.

We got married in June, she filed for divorce in December.

We got married due to us having a surprise child. We were not compatible and I didn’t fight it. I was working three jobs while she was going to school and I was expected to completely take care of the household (dishes, cooking, cleaning, laundry). I was averaging 3-4 hours of sleep (mostly on lunch breaks) and wasn’t there for my kid.

That was 16 years ago. One of the best days of my life was getting divorced.

There were red flags prior, but I agreed to get married so I could get onto his health insurance. I wanted to leave my toxic job. He quit his job within 2 weeks of marrying. He stayed unemployed for a couple of months and wrote fanfiction. He started amping up his paranoia about me cheating. He stopped letting me go with him to see our friends. One incident that sticks out is him yelling at me because I referred to him as Big Brother in a text to a friend. Another was him driving dangerously because he was upset that someone liked the new Star Wars movies. I tried talking to my mom and a few mutual friends about the abuse, but they told me that I was overreacting.
I told him that I wanted a divorce about 6 months in. I had no other place to go. He kept me from sleeping for 2 days until I relented. He threatened to ruin my life. At that point, a switch flipped. I decided that I could pretend to be happy for a few months while making an escape plan. I still lost a lot of friends over it all.
The kicker is that my mom knew that my ex-husband was letting a "friend" try to talk him into moving across the country with her and her boyfriend. It started around the time we got married. Mom didn't tell me. She, as a conservative Southern woman, also realized before he did that he was walking into a polyamorous sugar mama situation.

Prescription D**g Addict..! No one knew and all she did was open credit cards in my name and stocked up on Prescription pain pills...! Didn't even fight or go to a lawyer, just signed off on papers...

I got shotgun married to a woman who had some mental health issues. I got custody of our kid if that tells you anything.

My ex-wife's family was extremely controlling and didn't want her to be outside of their influence. She was increasingly miserable because of her family's influence on her, had an affair, and didn't want to get marriage counseling to see if we could save the marriage, so I filed for divorce.

She pressured me to open up the relationship so she could date women. I did the work of wrapping my head and heart around being in a one-sided poly relationship and actually got to the point of being happy for her.

Then she caught feels for one of them and decided she didn't want to be married to a man anymore. It was especially horrible because the relationship was very happy up to that point, and she pulled this s**t at a time when we happened to be working very closely on a project I couldn't bow out of.

Married for 6 months. I married the wrong person. I knew it during the engagement but I felt like I was in so deep with all of the wedding arrangements that it was too late. Ive struggled with self esteem for most of my life and I felt that I needed to settle just because he wasn’t a total a*****e like the exes I’d had in the past. He was a nice enough guy, had been friends since high school. We were together romantically for 4 years and had been together since I was 22. I felt at the time that getting married was what I was “supposed” to do at that point. Live and learn. I have no feelings about it or about him. It was essentially like having a glorified roommate. No passion, no spark at all at any point really. The way I see it is half of my peers I’m watching get married will be divorcing in their 40s and I just beat them to the punch giving myself a better shot at long term happiness than they’ve got. I’m glad I divorced after 6 months rather than forcing it for 20 years. To be honest I suspect he felt the same considering his only “fight” against the idea was “please don’t” and 1 couples therapy appointment. I guess I wasn’t moving it along fast enough because although I requested the divorce he ended up filing the paper work.

We were an anxious-avoidant attachment pair. By the time we fully understood the gravity of differences in love styles, the hurt between us was already too far gone to repair. We both learned a lot from our relationship and helped each other to grow into better adults. But I think it was a bond to grow as better individuals, so we can be better partners for someone else in the future.