Jesus Christ, I have no frame of reference for someone thinking that they could and should have “saved” a marriage by electronically surveilling their partner who falsely accused them of a crime. Sounds like one of those teen dystopian novels.

Marriage is but a set of constraints designed to make two people cooperate to achieve a win-win scenario; If the two people actually trusted each other, they wouldn’t marry.

I've up voted though i vehemently disagree as I would love to engage in a discussion on that last sentence... I know many people who say that, but it always seems to end up a very narrow and uncommon definition somewhere.

In particular I find a lot of people Think of "marriage" as an external event driven thing - a ceremony, a signing, the guests, potentially the name change, and of course the laws and such.

Anyhoo, Do you essentially propose that no two people who trust each other would marry, and if so, why?

It feels like such a strongly universal statement that it cannot possible hold true...

It's not enough for the two people to trust each other because they have parents friends etc. These people, and societies norms are a huge influence on the decision to get married.

But I do think at the end it all boils down to trust. If marriege was not an external event, then why the ceremony? The rings? Etc? It's full of symbolism describing and alluding to your responsibilities and how you're going to be judged for not abiding to them.

So yes, in a world where two people have total trust, and society is more lenient in it's pressuring of norms marriege would be obsolete.

Assigning consequence to relationships is not a sign of distrust.

> If I had a little bit intelligence of what she was cooking up, I could have even saved the marriage.

How could a marriage be saved when one person has plotted to falsely imprison the other, while extorting them for money?

She was being led by her mother. She was to naive to believe her mother's bs. I could have tried to convince her that her mother is only taking her on a path of destruction.

FYI-- here's what a healthy relationship looks like:

1. Someone important to your beloved tries to convince your beloved of X.

2. Because trust extends in both directions between your beloved and you, your beloved tells you, "Someone important to me said to do X."

3. Because your beloved has agency, they follow that statement with something like, "I told them that this is what I think of X."

4. A conversation among two mature adults ensues, with the full range of human emotions in play.

You can do high-tech problem solving with 20/20 hindsight until you drive yourself crazy. But if you didn't have two-way trust, or at least one party didn't realize have adult-level agency, it wasn't a healthy relationship and you should move on to one that is

Seeing your writing inspires the possibility that all significant social processes can have their most critical elements be explicitly written in some form of symbolic language (likely English + additional symbols from math, logic, graphs, etc.). I wonder if there are books or people working on that topic?

Exactly how many Indian extended families have you dealt with? You need to act like Giuliani dealing with the mob if you want to preserve your independence (leverage over their assets, reputations, businesses etc) because they think they own everything. I jest, but not by much.

That only makes what I wrote more pressing.

You can't fish someone out of the mob without them actively wanting to get out, and that requires the person start by relying on their own agency.

Look at the Nxivm cult-- a member was literally starving herself to death and even her own mom had to spend years patiently working with cult deprogrammers before she could convince her to leave (and on threat of FBI prosecution, at that).

Not only is it ineffectual to try to force that person back to sanity-- it's literally counterproductive. It plays into the mob's hand-- an outsider is trying to convince so-and-so to become a rat! You're not a rat, are you, so-and-so?

I'm sorry OP has to go through the heartache of coming to terms with this, if that is indeed anything like what they're going through. But I have to admit to being less concerned with your and OP's blanket warning about Indian families, and vastly more concerned that you and OP apparently think a broad statement like that could somehow justify tapping a loved one's phone. On HN of all places.

To be crystal clear-- if that mom of the Nxivm cult member had actually bugged her daughter's phone at any point in the saga, it would have shattered her trust with her mom and made it impossible for her to ever leave. You get that, right?

I'm not defending bugging the phone. That's a bridge too far for me. You would somehow need to threaten to get their business partners/people they have tea/hookah with in the neighborhood to think they're a bad person to have any leverage (or even more evil but effective when done in public, a bad Muslim/Hindu/X). You need to understand that these families see you as a cash cow or an object to barter to increase access to resources, preserve resources within the family, or increase social status and plan a response accordingly.

Case in point but with an (white) American family. I had a friend whose dad was welshing out on child support for his sisters. My (adult) friend called up a bunch of his dad's clients (he was a contractor) and calmly left messages explaining the situation. His dad paid up but also slapped him with a restraining order and they didn't talk for a decade. I mean being able to threaten going nuclear like that, not necessarily tapping phones, should be par for the course.

> FYI-- here's what a healthy relationship looks like

An arranged marriage does not a healthy relationship make.

Diamonds work.

They're great for grinding hard materials, but how would they have helped here?

> I could have prevented all this my bugging my ex's phone. Why? Because it all happened so suddenly. Everything came down raining without even a hint from my ex.

I could sympathize until here. If you can't trust your partner why marry them in the first place? I find it hard to believe there weren't signs of things going wrong before she slapped a case on you.

> If you can't trust your partner why marry them in the first place?

There are a lot of nuances here, than just trust before marriage.

Many of the marriages are arranged ones, where the families arrange and negotiate the marriage. If the woman is not satisfied with any aspect of the marriage, some of them resort to these tactics to get rid of the husband.

Of course, there are those who actually suffer and are rescued by this law, but those are few and far between.

Exactly. Just for clarity, arranged doesn't mean forced. The woman in almost all cases gives a consent. And if she later regrets, this is the path she chooses instead of just leaving, and her parents usually support her. There are various reasons for choosing this path:

1. Free money. 2. Free sympathy from the society. 3. Feeling of revenge.

In addition to the three above reasons, many choose this path to "clear their name", as in "I am a victim", who deserves a second chance at marriage.

Remember that marriages for divorced women are extremely difficult in India. If the woman was separated from the husband, "as a victim", they have a better chance, especially if she is young.

However, due to severe misuse of the law, now the situation is such that any woman even as much linked to a court case regarding marriage issues, is effectively shunned from marriage.

And this affects genuine victims a lot.

Well, there you have it. When people are cornered into an impossible situation, they'll do anything to get out.

> If you can't trust your partner why marry them in the first place?

People often marry under family and peer pressure. In such cases, trust becomes secondary. And many people realize it late that marriage is first and foremost a legal contract. Everything else comes after that.

Since all gloves are off and they're talking about ruining lives...why hasn't contract killing developed?

At least to exist as an options. "Sure you can do this, but I can do this other thing "

It’s not as complicated as contract killing... India is notorious for men pouring acid or petrol on women to kill them. They don’t hire a third party.

Regarding acid attacks, a 2013 report says that 45% of victims are men. Some stories from recent times:

https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/apr/30/k...

https://www.deccanherald.com/national/east-and-northeast/wom...

https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/woman-threw-acid-o...

https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/aligarh-19-year-old-gi...

https://zeenews.india.com/india/woman-throws-acid-on-ex-boyf...

Not true. These are mostly young age boys, after getting rejected by a girl for dating because she is not interested, reason being either genuine lack of interest in him, or in dating, or concerned about studies, or scared of their family. & Not all boys, only a single digit percentage of a one or two states. Most of these boys never went to school. & Most of the time it is never to kill, but just to scare, or make her ugly.

About a generation ago, till 2000s, married women used to get killed by in laws by getting poured kerosene oil. Story pushed was always that she was using kerosene oil stove, & oil tank exploded. Too common that songs were written in protest questioning how kerosene stove knows its the daughter in law? Why its always daughter in law? In songs girls used to request her father to not give her a stove as gift. Popularity of LPG gas, electric & such pushed kerosene away, & those cases almost now are unheard of.

what could have saved the marriage was to learn how to communicate without judging, and active listening to the partner. but that needs to be in place before the trust was broken. When one needs to resort to bugging the partners phone "for intel" the train has left the station (probably years before).

The partner is like an insider-threat from a security pov. Doing OpSec against a spouse is IMO impossible because the whole point of a romantic partner is to have somebody one can trust.

Some people will never believe love+trust should be the pillars of a relationship because that's not the model/framework they learned from their own parents.

The expectation is that it's only a matter of time for said partner to let them down (like they have seen it by their own parents in childhood). It's a self-fulfilling prophecy almost.

My ex tried to finish me off by forging signatures on some of my cheques (an old cheque-book she knew belongs to a closed account that book actually should have been destroyed by me), lies-lies-more lies, manipulate our kids with tactics such as repeatedly mentioning events that never happened ... She also became quickly physically violent so I had to call 911 a few times because I was terrified of further escalation (she would attempt to start physical fights by running to the kitchen to grab a knife ...

Getting rid of this abuse has costed me the relationship to my kids (they had been told by my spouse I was too lazy to bring them to school when in fact I was having severe PTSD/depression, and was not only unable to drive but also unable to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen to prepare a meal).

Another example was when I stood across the room making a cup of tea when she started screaming my son's name asking him to come quick and help. I was so confused that I didn't know what was happening - she literally told him I beat her and she needs his protections when I was at least 9ft away from her. I couldn't believe what happened at the time but now many years later know the purpose was to implant false memories. I never beat a woman in my whole life because it goes against everything I stand for. ... I have dozens of little horrible anecdotes just like this ...

Some relationship reach a point from which they never return. Others should have never happened in the first place. Hard to tell which is which (or what is healthy or correct) when you've run from abusive parents yourself. The correct (positive) reference model is not missing - it's totally incorrect.

India adds another twist: arranged marriages do not put value on love+romance before the wedding. It might all fall in place after a while but it's not a precondition.

I really hope you can see how messed up your post is in the fact that you honestly think that had you been spying on your wife the whole time you could have avoided any sort of mess and "saved your marriage". There is just too much too respond to on this. You have a daughter, shame on you, do you want some man spying on her watching every message and when he doesn't like what he sees maybe he will "fix his marriage" by doing something stupid like spousal abuse or attempt to stop her by controlling her probably by gaslighting her every move. What you suggested is not normal and you really should reflect on why you feel spying is a normal part of a relationship for you. Your belief that you need to spy probably extends to your entire way of being and that way of being is probably why she left you in the first place.