Gori Girl

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I had hoped that I would be able to tell a story that ended happily, but like many of the posts I'm finding on this forum – there is an insurmountable wall of culture/family/expectation that I cannot seem to find a way around.

K and I met in Dec 09 and spent the next 12 months enjoying each other's company.  We're both in our early 30s, he's Tamil and has been in the US for~11 years.  The additional aspect is that he's a brilliant scientific mind, which has its own set of challenges. 

Things seemed to be going well, but the biggest obstacle was always communication.  Whenever I would ask where were were going, his response was that we were friends – friends who shared a bed, spend a good part of each week together and spoke nightly- but friends.  He kept saying he was waiting to see if he could be "serious" about me – since he would not define for me what he meant by "serious,"  I managed to find a way to balance my ever-growing optimism with my defensive pessimism about the whole thing. Mostly, I just went with the flow and flow was pretty damn awesome.

Early on, I asked him about his family and if he would be expected to marry an Indian girl – he was quite clear that that was not going to be the case.  He is a middle child and both brothers are in India and married (both love matches).   

He was recruited for a job out of state in late November, and had planned to visit his family in India in December.  He had mentioned bringing me along, but the timing was not good for me with work and the job change left the trip fairly uncertain up until a week or two before he left. 

Since he was going out of the country and then moving, I did press to have things a bit more mapped out or ended, since it seemed a good time to make a break if one was inevitable – again I got the stony silence and a "wait until I come back."

Upon his return, he seemed sullen and quiet – but warmed up after a day.  The comminication began to drop off and when pressed (again) about whether we ought to just call it quits, he hesitated – said I needed to accept that things would not change in the next year, but that he did not wish to lose me.  I tried to get him to explain what was happening this year – especially as one of his gifts to me was a Tamil language book.  I was of course willing to learn, but only with some commitment that it would be worth my time and effort.

Although I love him deeply, I have never been one to feel aligned with this or that culture.  If I loved someone who spoke German, I would learn German.   So on one hand he was signalling that it would be in my best interest to learn Tamil and moments later he was telling me not to change anything about myself for him.  I sent him Mr. Gori Girl's guest post on talking to your parents to prepare them for a non-Indian partner, and his respone was a link to a Tamil Language website.

Over Easter, we spent another long weekend together and like all the others, it started rocky, but then evolved into our usual ease with each other.  Except this time he actually told me he did not think we would work out.   No reason.  No explanation. 

Do you have to marry an Indian? No

Do you have to move to India? Silence

Is it your parents? Silence

Do you not love me? I did.

What happened? It's complicated.

Can you explains? It's too painful.

Since I felt it would be our last weekend as more-than-friends, I decided to make the best of it and it was spectacular – and made leaving that much more difficult.  Each day I spent with him made me feel more and more that this is my husband.  Heaven help me this grumpy teasing brilliant stubborn man is going to be my husband and I wouldn't have it any other way.

When I got home, things felt fine again.  I was back in the hope-for-the-best-prepare-for-the-worse place I inhabited for most of our relationship.  I always felt better after talking to him, but after a year+ I realized I deserved some answers and they were just not being made available. I tried metaphors, logic, reason, discussions about cause and effect, the scientific method, a prescription from my therapist so she could help me frame what happened. I even laid out scenarios for me moving to India and him bringing his parents here.

Nothing.  And I don't know if that is his Indianness or his Scientificness or if it was merely a K-specific issue.

So I decided to accept the breakup and doing that is proving far more difficult than I imagined. 

I want answers to everything.  Why the indecisiveness. Why can't he tell me? 

If I knew what caused this, I could help him solve it, or at least it would make greiving and moving on a little easier for me.

But no – he sort of lightens the mood and tells me that nothing has really changed – my daily life hasn't changed.

But it has.

I was his and now I am not – the direction of my life has changed drastically.  I was looking forward to learning my sweetie's language, to feeling anchored and learning the traditions of another culture.  I was proud that my friends and parents and even my grandmother (84) embraced him as a potential member of the family because he made me so damn happy.

The post script at this point is that he seems to want to continue to treat me the same way as before.  This is wonderful in theory, but if I allow our interactions to remain the same, I will continue to be optimistic about something good coming from all this. 

So yeah, thoughts? Reactions? What could this possibly be if it's not that he's getting married and it's not that he stopped loving me – what the heck *IS* this? 

The only other thing is that he mentioned something about it being 5 of more years before he could settle down and couldn't ask me to wait that long… am I missing something?  Or is he just lacking in relationship skills and I unwittingly chose a fixer-upper.

At the very least, than you for the opportunity to share my story of almost becoming a Gori Girl.