Well, she gets to come out of this knowing her fiancé is someone who cares about her enough to shoot down something he’d been wanting for years, just to keep her safe. So that’s a small win for someone.

Also, regarding a point which you raised earlier about the girl becoming a social pariah and which 1-2 others raised too: My own cousin had gotten engaged to her boyfriend, and after a 1-2 year long engagement, he broke it off because she still needed time to get married to him. Despite the fact that this was not even an arranged engagement, her main problem was that the person she’d been in love with for years, left her. She eventually got an arranged marriage and is happy now. (It seems and I hope) I have also known desi women who have married to people in their second engagement, and have even remarried after being divorced. I know these could be isolated cases within my community and maybe some other communities have it much harder, and I personally have no idea how it would have been perceived in this girl’s extended family... however, all of this made me hopeful that she would be okay too, and that all of us can have a happy ending either way. I also know people who got pressured into marrying only to get divorced (after kids, too) and remarry their exes. I don’t ever want that. I wanted us to be able to sort this out now before the possibility of any bigger messes.

Life IS short and it’s been getting to me now that I’m turning 26 because I had a future I’d envisioned for myself in which I’d be married to someone I love with a kid or maybe two by now. Instead, because of my own passiveness about my own life (as you rightly pointed out), I’m heartbroken and I have no idea when I’ll be okay enough to move on with someone else. Even if I had to be in an arranged marriage, I would not want it to be one where I’m half in it, while a part of me works on moving on. I’d need time to heal and by then I’d probably be 27/28 which throws off everything I’d hoped for.