And still, months into their engagement, Jo was having nightmares—dreams about settling. Her family wasn’t excited about the relationship. She and her fiancé argued; they even got into a conflict on the day they went ring shopping. Jo found herself spiraling into anxious thoughts of the future, imagining having to disentangle 10 years down the line, with kids and a shared life.
“He loves me so well,” Jo says she thought at the time. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to experience this again.” Now, in retrospect, she realizes, “I was constantly trying to convince myself, ‘Love is enough, love is enough,’ but I knew it wasn’t.”
Jo journaled about her fears. She spoke to a mentor. Among other things, if she stayed in the relationship, she would probably have given up her dreams of going to graduate school in order to support his education. Jo and her fiancé finally had an honest, painful conversation, during which they agreed to call off their engagement.
“I feel so ashamed,” she told a friend at the time, crying. There were two sources of shame. First, the feeling of failure, given the belief that marriage was the pinnacle of success in a relationship. Second, the shame that she had stayed so long in a doomed relationship. Also, she missed her ex. “There’s that aspect of heartbreak whether you’re the one to call it off or not,” she says.
Jo’s breakup was more than three years ago. She’s now in graduate school and on the way to getting her degree as a therapist. She was able to date again. “I think, in my heart, I held on to the relationship because I didn’t want to be alone,” she says.
She’s single and still sometimes wonders, “Am I ever going to find someone again? Would it have been better to settle?” Breaking off her engagement was undeniably painful. But three years later, Jo’s life is filled with possibility before her. She doesn’t have regrets.
“It’s just embarrassing to call something off.”
When Omika, now 32, got engaged, she and her fiancé marked the occasion with a small ceremony for friends and family.
“I felt so celebrated and so loved,” she says. “I do think that the reason that so many people equate the engagement or the marriage with lasting happiness is because of how we celebrate those milestones.”
A year later Omika called off the engagement, moved to another state, and started a new job. Part of what made the decision so difficult, she says, was the fear of what other people would think and the worry that she was too old to start over.
“I have to continue with this no matter what,” she thought of her relationship at the time, “because that’s just what people do.” Omika’s Indian-American community tends to exalt marriage and stigmatize divorce, she tells Glamour. But when she announced the end of her engagement, nobody shamed her. “In fact, they wanted me to feel empowered and do what was right for my future.”
