My wife hasn’t found a solution yet. She will sleep in until 11 on a weekend and get out of bed only to get upset with what hasn’t yet been done. She does very little with herself outside of work.

Like your wife, any compliment is actually an insult. That sort of dynamic definitely complicates kindling or maintaining romance.

I remind myself that it’s worse for her than it is for me. I’m also grateful for the challenges it has presented because in many ways, it has made me a better person.

I do wish she was happier. For her sake and for our kid’s sakes. Life isn’t always happy though, and it all takes work. Relationships take work. With the right framing and patience these things can be worked through.

Your last point about maintaining your own mental health really is key, though. I’ve crossed that line several times and essentially developed my own depression. It’s very dangerous.

I’ve found it very helpful to reflect on what I contribute, how hard I’m working towards my duties as a partner, and how my actions meet my intentions and so on. When I can honestly tell myself I’m doing well, just about the best I can manage, I let things slide. If it’s all I can do and it isn’t good enough for someone else, I’ll still reward myself for my efforts and let the depressive ire slide off my back. Most importantly though I’ll recognize my own efforts and make sure I don’t allow myself to be pulled into thinking it isn’t good enough.

I think I did the right thing when I read through all the comments in this thread.

All the focus in your post is on your duties, not on hers.

I obviously don't know your relationship from the inside, but I experienced similar and it was relief to get away from it.

I think a major complication is that she's somewhat manic in that she has highs and lows. Her lows are extremely low. When she's higher though, she can be very pleasant, kind, good to her family, etc.

I find it very difficult to nail down who she is on that spectrum, or where she might eventually land between those states, and how I can judge her or my decisions based on how things fluctuate so much.

The word gaslighting is absolutely accurate, though. She does this a lot and I wish she didn't. I'm vulnerable to it because I tend to blame myself and hesitate to engage in confrontation when I'm uncertain of myself.

If you don't have kids, you should leave her. People's characters don't usually change or improve.

There's an interesting set of perspectives around this type of problem in psychology. Whether you look at popular moderns like Alain de Botton, Jordan Peterson, ancient philosophers, religion, etc. there is a recurring theme that commitment to a person matters, and without it, things kind of fall apart.

I find this interesting and compelling. I don't expect life to be easy, and I think welcoming and anticipating challenges is very healthy. This sort of problem does straddle boundaries that I find difficult to define, though. At which point is enough enough? When do we decide the commitment is no longer warranted? How "easy" should a relationship be? If I leave, will I be foolish for seeking anything different?

Not to drag this on - I find the topic very fascinating for both personal and more general reasons. This is a problem I believe a lot of us face. If I can't sove it for myself, I'd be happy to understand it better if only to serve my friends or children eventually.

> People's characters don't usually change or improve.

I wish you were wrong, but this does seem to generally be true. There are exceptions of course, but it seems inadvisable to ever hope for it to happen. It takes incredible work, and it's work that a lot of people don't have the knowledge or tools to understand or work with. Personal growth is perhaps one of the greater challenges in life.

Anyway, thanks for the discourse. I appreciate the advice. I should make apoint to look out for myself more when I sense gaslighting is occurring.

When it is under control, life is great. When it's not, it's not. We've been through many meds and doctors and therapists.

We're in a decently stable place right now, but there's always a fear in the back of my mind "but for how long". Her previous meds worked for years and then just... Stopped. There was also the "fun" 6 months where she decided she didn't need then anymore - spoilers, she did.

We're currently quarantining because we both caught COVID over Christmas. We've both been sick for a solid week at this point and the cracks are kind of showing.

All this is to say you're not alone, and there are others. Hold in there.

Addendum: I’ve looked for like online support for people in this sort of relationship and come up largely short. I looked at BetterHelp but couldn’t really justify the cost. If anyone has any recommendations, I’d love to hear it.

The last time was different though. In her seventies, her body couldn’t take the strain again. And now she’s in a long term care facility for dementia, probably for the rest of her life — fortunately close for her husband. Moral of the story: if you want to go off your meds, make sure a doctor is keeping an eye on you. No matter how good the good times feel.

It took me years to get to real stability and meds still suck. The only reason I haven’t gone off my meds is I’m both high-functioning and very used to managing chronic medical problems. I know how to work with my Psychiatrist to manage my own medical care and decide what is and isn’t acceptable to me.

It might just not work with bipolar. If bipolar person go manic, then reckless behavior, overconfidence, and unlimited optimism may beat any moral of this kind.

For sociological reasons that bear discussion, there is very little support for men in this situation. You may need to depend heavily on strong, close friends and family members. There is rarely a village to support a modern marriage.

Do not isolate yourself.

A relationship can be good or bad or some kind of stable compromise. When things go sour, one has to take a hard look at the risk to oneself in trying to personally support another person whom the psychiatric field may or may not be able to help. Then there is also the sunken cost of marriage, with home, children, and economic risks.

If I may offer a final personal observation... by the time you feel you are hurt by the situation, you have been hurting for a long time and worse than you realised.

Sincere best wishes to you!

I had a similar thing happen with my long time girlfriend, 5+ years. She had a rough childhood and covid measures eventually made her suicidal as we graduated college. Eventually she got treatment, and is doing better (yay!).

This is all great other than the meds have now evened her out too much. She’s a totally different person and antidepressants have some side effects that have effected us.

Even if the meds are good for you, and they probably are, it was difficult to adjust to a whole new person after so long. I could even see either the side effects or who she is now ending our relationship.

We’re working on it, but i think in part the meds messed with our dynamic.

I assume part of this is the typical effect that she now has almost no libido

I'm surprised by how many people go trough the same. This seems to be more widespread that one would assume.

[0] There's an argument to be made for depressive realism that would say I'm pointing out how things really are, but I'm not going to make it because there's also thousands of years of philosophy that makes a compelling argument for reality not being so easy to pin down anyway.

[1] It occurs to me that the seemingly increasing rate of depression in a lot of developed nations may be due, like almost all of society's ills, to advertising. Advertising confronts us constantly trying to get us to do things we don't want to do, namely spending money on shit we don't need, and so we develop a defense mechanism. That mechanism takes the form of a contrarian inner voice that argues against the bullshit advertisement telling you you'll be happy if only you buy whatever it is it is selling, but the contrarian voice doesn't have an off switch and recognizes all the little sales pitches of every day life as a threat too.

I think we're in agreement that a depressed person generally doesn't want to be cheered up and won't be receptive to it, so you can be positive as much as you want and it won't do much.

I've been on both sides of this, and as the depressed person it seems most helpful to remember that I need to put in the extra effort to try to be positive especially when I don't want to. And as the partner it's helpful to remember that you need to create some separation so you don't get too pulled in and then are unable to help in any way.

Psychologist has been fighting such social stigmas for decades.

I'd also add that (again maybe just for me) it's a way more helpful way to view it. It helps me recognize when I need to just go through the motions of being positive until I can get back to doing it naturally. It usually feels a lot better in the moment to focus on the negatives but somewhere in my head I know that's not going to help me.

> But if you lose your own mental health you’re pretty much done.

Happened to me. I started the relationship with zeal and willingness to help. I wished to make a difference, yet it can be incredibly taxing one one's emotions. You can very much be affected yourself.

> But if you lose your own mental health you’re pretty much done.

I sometimes feel I am at the edge of this then somehow I do some work I am happy with, see a friend, ride a bike or go for a swim and I am back from the edge. The gas-lighting is sometimes so surreal I am speechless.

This paragraph reminded me of the advice given regarding oxygen masks on planes. If you can't breathe, you're of no use to anyone, so sort out your own mask before helping others, etc. The fact they have to keep reminding us of this, though, is perhaps a demonstration that this doesn't come naturally to many.

That understates what happened. She started wishing the dog would just go die.

That finally brought home to her that her thinking had dramatically changed and that it wasn't just situational, e.g. it wasn't that I was lazy. This is incredibly specific to our situation and I'm sure it doesn't help anyone else.

But the takeaway for us was that she had a come-to-Jesus moment that made her realize this was her problem, and she needed outside help. She did not realize she had clinical depression until that moment.

It helped that I was in graduate school and had a very supportive set of people around me. They valued me and let me know it.

As stated elsewhere on this thread - there aren't a lot of support options available for men in this situation.

Making someone "see the problem" is missing the point entirely. Firstly because often, people with depression are fully aware of how they are treating people. They simply can't help it.

Your role as a partner is to love and support them. You also, however, need to prioritize your own mental health and happiness. There is an extremely common relationship 'trap,' one I've lived through. You are in a relationship that is causing you personal distress and unhappiness -- but your love of the other person makes you feel trapped. You can see how much they are struggling, and can't bear to hurt them -- often because you are afraid of what may happen if you leave.

When you love someone with a debilitating illness, mental or otherwise, you need to decide whether you can accept the other person as they are. If you can, then you have to do that, and choose to stay with the person precisely as they are -- while having and enforcing healthy boundaries. If you cannot -- and often times there are extremely good and valid reasons why you cannot -- then you owe it to both of you to discuss this and potentially end the relationship. Sometimes such a conversation can be the spark of change for the other person, but often times it isn't, and that's okay. Staying in a relationship that is making you miserable is doing no one any benefit.

It's a supreme challenge with depression, but you cannot allow the depression your partner experiences to affect your own emotional health. The best tool for this is something called "loving detachment." I'd recommend you read about it, and about the concept of co-dependency in general(*). It was a life saver for me.

The worst relationship mistake you can make (after the obvious choices like affairs or so on) is being in a relationship with a mirage. Too many people have a false ideal of their partner -- their partner after they've been "cured" or "fixed" or "realized the problem" or "got clean" or whatever. You cannot have "you must change" as a condition of the relationship. Either the person will change or they won't, but staying in a relationship where you expect the other person will change is controlling and damaging. Are you in love with the person? Or with a made-up vision of the person you have in your head? Remember that love is unconditional.

The best thing I did in my relationship was spend a year (I'm not exaggerating) thinking about the realities of the situation, the options I had, the way my life could end up whether I stayed or leaved, and so on. It was an extremely difficult time and required the help of therapists, both personally and as a couple. In order to do this properly you need to admit divorce as a possible end -- and I don't mean the empty threats of divorce many of us make. For instance, the hardest session I ever had was when my personal therapist pushed me to walk through a concrete plan for leaving. Where would I go? Who would I tell? How would we split up our possessions? And so on. Making the possibility real is extremely important. In order to not feel trapped, you need to fully believe that leaving is an option.

In the end, the decision I made for myself was that I could accept my wife as she was. Almost immediately my mental wellbeing improved drastically. I no longer felt trapped. My wife's depression did not magically become cured, but I learned how to detach from it and be a good partner while protecting my own health.

In the years since, my improved wellbeing and happiness has slowly but surely helped turn the relationship around. Her depression is still not cured, but now I know how to be a good partner for her, which has in fact helped her to a large degree. She now trusts me as someone she can turn to for help, rather than viewing me as someone who was taking her mental health personally (which I was definitely doing). In the end, this is thing most spouses don't want to realize -- it's you that has to change, not your partner with depression, whether that means leaving the relationship because it can't and won't work, or learning to love them as they are.

(*) It can be really easy for spouses to take suggestions like this personally. I know I did. Being called co-dependent by the couples therapist felt like a full scale assault. How dare he say that I'M the one with a problem!! Doesn't he know what I've BEEN through?? What I was missing is that he was telling me that to help me. Learning about co-dependency -- and how to overcome it -- was the most liberating thing I've ever felt.

Do you have any resources that you'd care to recommend? I've found it challenging to find good resources. I find recommendations like the one in this article, "just listen", to be profoundly unhelpful.

I've got a lot of empathy for people in relationships like this. It's not easy and even though there's help and medication, it still ends up being an up hill battle.

I myself have been struggling with Dysthymia since my teenage years so you can imagine how fun that experience was with her.

I tried everything with her to change her outlook on certain things, find ways to distract her mind, finding coping mechanism etc. Nothing worked, though I think she might not have wanted to get better in a sense. Having 5+ hour long arguments every day about things that weren't logical finally broke me. My Dysthymia turned into full on depression. For months I'd tell her that I'm going to bed praying I wouldn't wake up - hoping that she'd find better ways for managing things... I just eventually tapped out and had to leave.

So yeah, I have loads of empathy for people in similar situations. Just remember that you can leave. If you've done all you've could, no one will blame you. Some people just aren't meant to be in relationships or need a lot of help before getting into one.

Marriage means you share your spouse's life and well-being. Often for better, sometimes for worse.

Your situation sounds like the textbook description of depression as caused by "mental distortions" from proponents of CBT. Did your wife consult a CBT practitioner, and did this help?

I am in no way trying to say I know the solution to your (past) problems, but CBT is sometimes described in a bit too enthusiastic terms by its proponents, and your story sounds like an opportunity to get anecdotal evidence on how much it might actually work in practice. In particular TEAM-CBT proponents claim to be able to cure depression in a session (and then continue to accompany the person through the innevitable relapses). I love their very data-oriented approach, but find it too good to be 100% true.

It helped me a lot, in particular in dealing with thoughts something like what the OP's partner apparently had. It has great strategies for first recognizing, and then dealing with such thoughts. They're not "just feel better" ideas, they're specific things to do which help.

Highly recommended.