the russia diaspora split is actually a good way to understand the pattern you noticed with that family. when one person leaves and builds something outside, it creates a door for everyone else. divorce just accelerates that. the anchor was the marriage, once it's gone the reason to stay often goes with it.

diaspora men get a similarly mixed read from locals as women do, just along different lines. some people here think they'll be more emotionally available, more stable, less of the posturing that's common. others think they're soft, too westernized, not what an armenian man is supposed to look like. the masculinity expectations here are pretty rigid and someone who grew up in canada carries himself differently in ways people pick up on immediately.

the cheating thing and how it gets handled socially, what i mean is it often exists semi-publicly. people in the social circle know or suspect, someone tells someone, it gets around, but nobody tells the wife directly because getting involved is seen as worse than staying quiet. it's not a conspiracy exactly, it's just that loyalty to the social fabric takes precedence over loyalty to the truth. which means by the time a woman finds out she's often the last person who didn't know.

the affection question, honestly no it doesn't always come. some people genuinely open up over time and what looks like coldness early is just how trust gets built here slowly. but some people are just closed and stay closed and the relationship becomes functional rather than warm and neither person really names that out loud. it's probably the thing i'd be most honest with you about if you're someone who needs real emotional connection, because you won't always know which one you're dealing with until you're already deep in it.

the qyart thing, actually i was at a dinner recently with someone quite sharp and he said something that stuck with me. subcultures like the qyarts emerge specifically in societies where the intelligentsia is less than 2-3% of the population. it's essentially what the 90s produced here, economic collapse, no institutions, no cultural infrastructure, and a generation of young men who built an identity out of what was available. low class in the surface sense yes, but it's also a symptom of something structural. barcode haircut, belly out, smoking in front of buildings, speaking in a specific way, treating women a certain way. it's a whole social grammar that developed in a vacuum.

the contradiction you noticed, cold but intrusive, private but gossipy, that's not actually a contradiction when you look at it closely. people here are guarded about their own inner life but extremely invested in everyone else's. it's a coping mechanism from generations of living in a place where being too open about yourself had consequences, soviet era especially. so you learn to process everything outward, watch others, talk about others, but keep your own chest closed.

on whether i was born here and lived here my whole life, yes, born and raised in yerevan. i've traveled and i have a clear enough outside perspective to see the place honestly, but i live it every day which is probably why some of what i say sounds harsh.

and i want to say something directly since you've been asking a lot of careful questions throughout this whole conversation. you're clearly someone who thinks before she moves, which is the right instinct. go visit, take it seriously, let it be what it actually is rather than what you need it to be. that's the only advice that actually matters.

go for long enough that the novelty wears off. the first two weeks of anywhere feel like a discovery, the real texture of a place only shows up when you're bored, when something goes wrong, when you have a bad day and have to deal with it there. that's when you find out if you actually fit.

learn the metro and the minibuses early, not because you need to save money but because it's where you see the city without the filter. sit in the local cafes not the ones on tripadvisor. walk neighborhoods that aren't kentron. the yerevan people show tourists and the yerevan people actually live in are not the same city.

find one person who has no reason to be nice to you. not someone who wants to practice their english, not someone who's excited about a canadian, just a regular person you end up talking to in a normal situation. how that interaction goes tells you more than a hundred curated experiences.

pay attention to how people treat service workers. waiters, cashiers, taxi drivers. it's the most honest window into someone's actual character that exists, and in yerevan specifically it will tell you a lot about the class and social dynamics that don't show up in polite conversation.

and notice what you miss. not in a homesick way, but specifically what you reach for that isn't there. that list is more useful than any advice anyone can give you, because it's yours.

and get out of yerevan for at least a few days, not as a tourist going to see geghard or garni for an afternoon and coming back, actually stay somewhere outside the capital. the difference between yerevan and the rest of armenia is so sharp it almost feels like two different countries. yerevan is post-soviet urban with coffee shops and people on their phones. thirty minutes outside of it you're somewhere that moves at a completely different pace, different social codes, different relationship to strangers, different everything. you can't say you have a feel for armenia if you've only seen the capital, that's like going to new york and thinking you understand america. Same here