Chapter 4 Amira Assessment.

"Allen my fiance said, he won't consider proposing again until I made a public apology for embarrassing him and he promise to chill out about my preferences in the future if I concur. But to be honest, I don't feel like I should because he knew I would have preferred something more intimate and romantic just as planned

"Am coming to see your parent next weekend" Allen said.

"No baby, I'd like you to come to my parents after your proposal." I replied

"I'd like people to witness my engagement. Public proposal." He said.

"That wasn't our plans baby. No public proposal, I need something more. Just you and I." I said.

"Your wish is my command." Allen retorted.

"We never plan public proposal. And when I seak for advice from friends, some suggested I should end the relationship following the argument. Some said

"I think you should rethink this marriage. Proposing to you should be about you, but he's making it about him. He made a decision to propose to you in a way he knew would make you miserable, then tried to manipulate you into it. Now, he's punishing you for not doing it." Another of my colleagues said

"Do you really want to marry a guy who completely disregarded what you wanted and now blames you for his embarrassment?"

"I was traumatized by all this and I couldn't contemplate not knowing what to do. But am interested in your story Ms. Amira. I believe I will know what to do next, after telling me the reasons that make you walk out of your engagement." She concluded and was flabbergasted.

"Am gonna tell you something about my best friend Freya. She ignored my text messages 3 hours before her wedding, 6 months ago. She's currently facing traumatic abuse from her partner, and she filed for divorce 2weeks ago, and the husband wasn't ready to sign the divorce papers.

"After walking out of my engagement party. I was tilting back a cocktail to slurp the traces of whiskey when Freya told me she had no interest in marrying her fiancé. It was late last year and we were in midtown Manhattan, seated in leather chairs at a bar decorated like the parlor of a landed nobleman, all rich wood and pastoral oil paintings.

"Freya's wedding was in less than a week. I froze in surprise as she once told me she ain't interested in getting married to her abusive fiance.

"Am surprised you gonna married to him after all you said?" I ask.

Freya sighed, and smile hastily, and threw her hair over her shoulder without mumbling a word. Freya caught the waiter's eye and twirled her finger and her face gleaming.

"The whole relationship is a joke, I care about him a lot, but we fight constantly." Freya said.

"OK. Yikes. How does he feel about it?" I ask

"He says he loves me. But on some level when we argue. The trauma is always on me, making a gesture of my past. He must know this isn't happily ever after." Freya replied.

"Are you going to call it off?" I ask again.

"It's too late to call it off. It would destroy him totally. The invitations have gone viral, A lot of eloquent men and women are invited from different countries. His whole family has booked flights from Australia to Alabama. I just have to do it. I can't turn it down." Freya reply.

I searched her face for evidence that she was kidding. When I found none, my concern swelled.

"You need to cut this off now dear. You're going to leave him someday, and that'll be way worse." I said and she froze at me.

"Honestly speaking, it'll be easier then. The stakes aren't that high. If we can't find a way to make it work after marriage, we can always just get divorced." Freya announced with a lot of excitement. My eyes widened open.

"That was my last conversation with Freya before she went ahead with her marriage." I said.

"She relinquished her choice and happiness and went ahead and married an abusive man?" Olivia said.

"She'd wanna call it off, but Freya was too merciful lost in fallacy to let go of her abusive fiance.

"Freya knows everything I went through in the hands of my stepmother, how she deliberately abuse me without any wrongdoing, which makes me accept Oscar, my first husband. I was living in the house of abusive for more than 15 years before I met Oscar." I said and Olivia was astounded.

"So what's happens now? Did Freya's husband cheat on her? or he's a narcissist? I mean abusive?" Olivia asks abruptly gesturing to know.

"Freya and I had been friends since high school. In our late 20s, and we had a lot of mutual acquaintances, and gossip moved swiftly. I had heard that she was engaged and got married, after our conversation. Ever since then, we had fallen out of touch.

"She never called or texted since she got married. It was last week she returned the text I send to her 3 hours before her wedding, that was 6 months ago.

"Perhaps she saw meeting me as a preview of her fate, should she walk away from her fiance. If so, this fate was slightly manic, 10 pounds heavier than usual, and glugging a dicey amount of whisky.

"After the waiter dropped off our third round of whisky, Freya asked me about my breakup."

"But why?" Olivia ask.

"The same reasons you're here Olivia." I retorted.

"Are you glad you called it off? I mean your engagement?" Olivia ask and she gave me a funny smile.

I paused. The decision to end a floundering relationship is far from straightforward. People ask whether you love the person as if a simple "yes" or "no" will resolve the whole matter, but the truth is always more complicated.

I cared about my ex-Oscar. During my first divorce, we lived together after marriage, so we shared intimacies and banalities routines, chores, and money. My family, friends, and co-workers knew him and loved him as the one who rescued me from my abusive parent. They had come to think of us as a unit, so our relationship was integral to my social identity.

Walking away from my third engagement meant exchanging the delights of a bride for the embarrassment of a deserter not to mention enduring the intense pain of a breakup, and the miserable work of starting over from scratch.

When I ended my relationship, I deeply hurt a truly good man and his family, whom I knew and loved. I disappointed my own family by appearing to turn away from a certain kind of life. I was on the brink of 25, emotionally shattered, and facing the prospect of beginning again after all the abusive words from my stepmother and the trauma encircling me.

I experienced the bizarre power of unmet expectations that lead to my divorce. Those arbitrary fatbergs within me, which, if not managed down to reasonable scale.

But when I'd asked myself whether I could promise to love again, I'd faced endless uncertainty. Ultimately, it came down to this. I could not base a lifelong commitment on a foundation of doubt to commit myself again.

"Yes. I'm glad I cut it off. I should have done it sooner. I wasted too much of everyone's time that makes them to discriminate and victimize my decision." I said to Olivia finally.

"Am not against you, because I know what it takes to stay in an abusive relationship. That's why am interested in your story because my fiance is one." She said and shook her head while smiling.