How my Job cost me my everything | Getting Divorced

I don’t know how to start this. Honestly, I never thought I’d be the guy writing a story about getting divorced. But here I am, sitting in my small apartment in Bangalore, staring at the walls, trying to make sense of how everything fell apart.

It wasn’t always like this. We were happy once. Or at least I thought we were. But I guess the cracks were always there, I just didn’t want to see them. I was too caught up with work, coding away for hours, trying to keep up with the deadlines my manager kept throwing at me. My life became a cycle of meetings, code reviews, sprints, and late nights.

My manager, let’s call him “R”, didn’t help. He was always there, hovering over my shoulder, sending pings at 11 PM asking for updates, expecting me to work on weekends because “the client deliverables are critical, and we’re short on time.” I kept pushing myself, thinking if I just put in a little more effort, things would get better. Spoiler: they didn’t.

I used to come home exhausted, mentally drained, and my wife... well, she got tired of waiting. She’d try to talk to me, and I’d say “later” or “just give me 10 minutes to finish this one thing,” but that one thing would turn into another hour, and then another, until she’d just go to bed. I thought she understood, that she knew I was doing all this for us. I thought I was being a good husband by working hard and securing our future. But in reality, I was just absent. Physically there, mentally checked out.

The fights started small. She’d complain about how we never spent time together, and I’d tell her “I’m doing this for us” and that “things will calm down after this release.” But there was always another release, always another deadline. Slowly, the gap between us grew. She stopped asking for my time, stopped expecting me to show up.

Then one day, I came home, and she wasn’t there. Just a note on the dining table saying she couldn’t do it anymore. That she felt alone even when I was there. That she needed more, and I wasn’t giving it to her. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t even surprised. Maybe I’d seen it coming but chose to ignore it, hoping things would magically fix themselves.

I blamed her at first. Told myself she didn’t understand how stressful my job was, how my manager was a slave driver who didn’t care about work-life balance. “R” always acted like he owned us. If you’re not working, you’re not productive. It was all about efficiency, outputs, and timelines. I couldn’t even tell him about what was happening at home because I knew he wouldn’t care. He once said, “personal problems should stay personal, we’ve got business to run.”

But maybe... maybe it’s my fault too. I let work consume me. I became a machine, doing what I was told, losing track of what was important. My wife, my marriage, everything took a backseat to my job.

Now it’s just me. No wife. No marriage. Just a pile of undone laundry, cold dinners, and an empty bed. Bangalore feels lonelier than ever. I go to work, I come back, I repeat the cycle. Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve fought harder, said no to “R” when he pushed me for those late nights. Maybe I should’ve drawn a line somewhere. But I didn’t, and now it’s too late.

So yeah, that’s it. I’m divorced. And I blame myself... but also my manager. If he’d just understood that we’re not robots. Or maybe if I’d understood that earlier myself.

I don’t know what to do next. Maybe I’ll just keep coding, keep working. It's all I know how to do.

picture: drinking gin with my btech friends after divorce. man i am depressed.