25F 26M — My 3+ year relationship ended because his parents won’t accept me due to caste. Is this relationship worth fighting for?
I’m struggling to understand what I’m supposed to do with this situation, so I’d really appreciate some outside perspective.
My relationship of more than three years recently ended. My boyfriend ended it because he believes his parents will never accept me because of my caste.
He is from a brahman family and i come from an OBC caste. He has two older brothers. His eldest brother had an arranged marriage within the same caste. His middle brother had a love marriage with an OBC woman. According to my boyfriend, things have been very difficult for them since that marriage. His mother has apparently made caste-related comments and other hurtful remarks toward his sister-in-law, and his brother now regrets his decision to marry her.
My boyfriend says he has tried talking to his parents and tried to make them more accepting, but nothing has changed. His conclusion is that “you can’t change the mentality of parents,” especially since they are in their 60s/70s.
For the last three years, we genuinely believed we would eventually get married. My life became very intertwined with him, and I had a future planned around our relationship. So this breakup has completely shattered me.
I told him that I’m willing to make adjustments and that we could figure things out together. I work in corporate in NCR, and I told him that even if we had to live with his parents, I was willing to handle it. I told him that I understand his parents may not change, and I’m not expecting him to completely change them or constantly fight with them for me.
I told him that if things get difficult, I’ll deal with it. I can rant to him, we can figure things out together, and I won’t expect him to magically change his parents’ mentality. And realistically, because of my work, we would have to come to NCR from time to time anyway, so we could manage things as they come.
But he says he doesn’t want to put me through what his sister-in-law went through. He also says he cannot stand against his parents and doesn’t believe their mindset will change. He is afraid that if we marry, I will suffer, he will constantly be caught between me and his family, and ultimately neither of us will be happy.
So instead of fighting for the relationship, he has decided that ending it now is the safer option.
I understand his fear, but I’m having a very hard time accepting that the relationship can simply end because of something his parents might do in the future. At the same time, I don’t want to convince someone to marry me if he has already decided that he can’t stand up for our relationship.
Should I respect his decision and let him go, even though we both believed for three years that we had a future together? Or is this something worth fighting for and trying to work through?
And for people who have been through inter-caste relationships/marriages in India, especially where the parents initially opposed it — did things actually get better with time, or did the concerns about family acceptance turn out to be justified?
I’m not looking for someone to simply tell me “move on.” I’m trying to understand whether I’m losing a relationship that could have worked, or whether he has shown me that he simply isn’t willing to fight for it.