"I’ve Never In My Life Seen A Bait And Switch Like That": 15 Partners Who Completely Changed Their Personality For The Worst After Getting Married
Warning: The story below discusses suicide.
Even though marriage can be the end-all, be-all for some couples, sometimes the relationship can sour because one of the individuals completely changes their personality after they say "I do." So when Reddit user Bibliophile521 asked : "People whose partners did a complete 180 after marriage, what’s your story?" I thought I would share some of their answers below:
1. "Not me, but my grandma. She met a wonderful Indonesian man. He cooked her all kinds of food, and she helped him with his English. His family sent her all kinds of beautiful gifts. He started pressuring her for marriage pretty fast, after three months, and my Grammy, being catholic and very religious, agreed. This was in the '60s, mind you. The day after they got married, they were flying to Indonesia for a honeymoon and to visit that guy's family. He had been snappy with her all day, but she assumed he was nervous about flying. She wanted to get something to eat, and his exact words were (and she told me this because she said she knew at that moment the marriage was a mistake), 'You don't need any food, pig.'"
"It only got worse. When they arrived in Indonesia, his family started asking for money, and her husband said her money was now his and wrote a check for half of her savings. He wouldn't let her eat more than a few bites of food before insulting her , and the rest of the time, he pretended like she didn't exist. She said that as soon as she got home, she immediately filed for divorce and had to move because the guy kept coming to her apartment and cursing at her through the door. It was such a horrible experience, she swore off dating for 10 years until she met my grandfather at 32, and he treated her like a princess. They were married for 45 years before he passed away."
2. "Not me, but my friend. Their partner misled them on how involved their parents would be in their marriage. Within one month of tying the knot, my friend was expected to provide their in-laws with a lot of emotional and physical labor daily. Their partner demanded that my friend clean the in-laws' house, fix their money issues, help them manage their unruly adult son, who is a sponge, and more. The in-laws would show up unannounced multiple times a week at their residence, even though they lived 1.5 hours away. Before their wedding, they had met the in-laws maybe four times in two years."
3. "My partner of five years was very thoughtful and caring. It was the first relationship I've been in where I felt like someone was making an effort to last together forever. He was deployed to Afghanistan not long into our relationship, but we stuck it out together. He medically retired with a 100% VA rating and moved in with me shortly after. Because of his rating, he was making enough money to pay half of the bills and technically didn't need to work. He had the entire day to himself, but at the time, my job required me to work 10-hour shifts. The difference in job loads started to cause issues. I would come home tired, and he would be waiting, having spoken to no one all day."
"I tried to get him integrated into volunteer groups or different veteran groups, but he wasn't interested. His existence became sleeping in and then gaming for the day. He started down the right-wing pipeline, which was opposite of what he was politically when we met. He would say I wasn't putting any effort in and should get up early before work to make him breakfast or things like that. I would try to jump through all these hoops to make him happy, thinking he just needed to adjust to being out of the military. I ended up feeling more like his mom than his partner, and it decimated my libido.
He became progressively angrier and more demanding. He would flip out on me for the smallest of things and follow me around the house screaming for hours on end until he would get some sort of reaction out of me. It was a terrible existence. We eventually ended things, but watching someone I loved so dearly and had all of these fun memories with turn into someone I couldn't even recognize left me pretty traumatized, and I've only recently been able to speak about it. I struggled for a long time to accept that I'll never know if it was PTSD, the medications he was on, struggling with life after the military, or him becoming radicalized that changed him so much."
4. "My wife and I were happily married for four years. In 2024, she was suddenly converted to Christianity by some of her coworkers. She was raised Christian, but in college, she distanced herself from it. Home life became a judgmental, exhausting experience. *** stopped. Everything became about God and the Bible, and nothing else mattered. I tried giving it time, but nothing changed. I tried to hold on for about 10 months before I finally gave up. We're finally in the process of filing after fighting over whether divorce is morally okay (uncontested divorce is a hell of a lot cheaper) and being separated already. Fortunately, we don't have kids."
5. "We got married, and then she became a cop. In about the span of a year, her personality changed from an empathetic person who truly saw the police as helpful to an ‘us/cops vs. them/public’ mentality. She became very bitter and resentful towards the homeless and anyone struggling, and really, really socially withdrawn from all her friends who weren’t cops. The straw that broke the camel's back was when she was laughing at a photo a fellow patrolman sent to her. The photo was of a guy who had blown his head off from a died by suicide call they had responded to."
6. "This happened to my sister-in-law. SIL had been best friends with Ernie since they were kids. After they went through divorces in their mid-30s, they really leaned on each other and eventually realized they were in love. We were all really excited when they got married because he was already like family. A few months after the wedding, he quit his job. No explanation, just quit. SIL makes good money working for the prison system, so she was able to support them, but they had to cut out all extras — except he refused to do that."
7. "This is me. We dated for two years before we got married. The minute we got married, her personality changed 180°. I had no idea what was going on, but I married her kids along with her and chose to stick it out because I'm not a quitter. Well, that lasted 12 years, and when there was absolutely nothing left of me, she finally left. Strangely, in the parking lot after the divorce proceedings, she was back. The lady I dated was back. She switched 180° again. It was heartbreaking. Turns out she had undiagnosed borderline personality disorder, and I didn't know what it was or how to handle it at the time. I ended up with a PTSD diagnosis out of the deal. Eight years later, I'm relatively back to normal."
— drbronco
8. "He was so kind while dating me, but it was a means to an end. The lazy set in, as he assumed he had married a '50s-style housewife as well as the breadwinner. I can’t do both without help. Happily divorced."
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9. "My dad’s wife had a complete personality change after they got married. He thought she had just been pretending to be sane and nice until the wedding, and then took the mask off. They divorced, and then she was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease that makes you act like an *******. He took care of her until the end and buried her. It took a really, really long time for her to die, so he spent several years moving her from assisted living to nursing home to hospice and going over and feeding her every night when she lost the ability to hold things in her hands. She lost the ability to hold a conversation, then to follow a conversation, and then to think and speak, and became like a baby again."
10. "For me, it was after we had our daughter. I should have seen the signs that he wouldn't make a good father years before, but I thought he would rise to the occasion. His video game addiction killed our intimacy, and for years, he made me think I was the problem or that I had a low libido. Having a kid and going through the trials of parenthood, essentially feeling absolutely alone, made me realize that I had been parenting for years without realizing it. Having to mother him before having our kid had already killed my desire for him, and whenever I brought it up, he minimized it and blamed me. I tried to schedule counseling, and he shot it down because 'there was nothing wrong with him.'"
11. "He started to create distance between us, and intimacy fell off a cliff. Managed to get pregnant a year later, and that’s when the real 180 happened. He became paranoid about me, as though I was out to get him. He stopped supporting me in any way whatsoever and became emotionally abusive. Turns out he likely has borderline personality disorder and wore a mask for like five years until he couldn’t maintain it anymore. Now we are divorcing."
12. "He decided he could do whatever he wanted because now that we're married, I couldn't leave him. Well, we have been separated for 14 years, still married though, because every time I try to go through with a divorce, he self-harms and ends up in the hospital, telling everyone I made him do it. It just isn't worth the drama when I have no intention of getting married again. Oh, and he STILL thinks we're going to get back together and pretend all this **** never happened."
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13. "Our marriage didn't undergo a complete change until we had our first child. Once our child was born, a big shift occurred: Our commitment shifted from our marriage to our child and her family. What made it worse was that during this time, I allowed my mother-in-law to move in, under the understanding that my MIL would help around the house. What ended up happening was my MIL just sits at home all day watching TV, eating our food, and cranking up the AC since she doesn't have to pay the power bill. Well, it's been over 10 years now, and my MIL is still here, and she even decided to retire with a small Social Security payment with no retirement savings. While living at my house, she never saved any money, even though she didn't have to pay any bills, because she has a spending problem. Now I can't get her out, since I've been told she can't afford her own place."
"What frustrates me is that she continuously spends above her means by financing purchases and buying random junk. She continuously leases cars even though she barely drives anywhere. I'm at my wits' end. I've expressed my feelings to my spouse, but it doesn't seem to matter as I'm seen as the problem. I've lost my privacy, my personal space, and just consistently miserable seeing her in my home. I've been complicating filing for divorce, but my child is the only thing holding me back."
— vasaline
14. "It happened the day we married. There were hints of it the day before, but I was caught up in wedding stuff and brushed it off as stress on his part. In hindsight, there were plenty of red flags, but I didn't see them as red flags at the time. I was in my late teens; he was in his late 20s. We were long-distance most of the time and only physically together for three months before marriage. We were both in highly controlled religious settings. His was even more intense than mine, due to additional cultural factors. My family was deeply concerned, but I was a legal adult, and they couldn't do much beyond telling me. He immediately changed his behavior when we married. It was such a wild change that I felt like a whole different person had replaced the man I thought I married."
15. "OK, mine is different. Arranged marriage (pretty common in our culture). He was much more serious and quieter before we got married. He became literally my biggest cheerleader, best friend, and just an all-around incredible partner after. Turns out he's a goofball inside."
Have you had a partner do a complete 180 after getting married? Let us know what happened, either in the comments or in the anonymous form below:
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