u/Terrible-Soft-1156

Please be kind but tell it to me straight because I feel like I am losing my mind. My husband (29M) has diagnosed OCD, depression and anxiety. We have been together for five years. The past year and a half ish he’s really struggled with the depression which is entirely understandable as he experienced the loss of someone very close to him and has recently undergone the stress of a big career change. Through these times I’ve learned to just let him do and be as he needs to get by. This is usually just by him retreating, we don’t talk at all even though we share a house and I don’t ask to do anything out of the house of those days so he doesn’t feel pressure. I’ll cook a meal and leave it for him, get him coffee or his favourite snack and leave it so he knows I’m thinking of him but don’t want to pester. Basically, I worked hard in therapy to not feel rejection in his need to pull away, which regardless is very hard to experience from your partner, but I want him to feel loved when I know he’s going through something (I think at a minimum we just all deserve to be loved through our bad days). Where I start to slip and feel like I’m losing my mind is I genuinely make a conscious effort to meet his needs, but all I’ve gotten in return lately is anger and blame. It feels like I’m being set up to fail in certain situations just so that anger towards me is justified. For example, he briefly told me “next week we are getting lunch with my grandma” about a month ago, in the middle of a day when things were good and I said great let me know when and I’ll be there. He never told me what day it was, was in a depressive episode when it came up and he left the house to go meet her without saying anything to me even though I was home. I didn’t press him to tell me where he was going as I don’t (to let him do his own thing) and he then texts me 20 mins later saying “grandma was really disappointed you bailed on lunch with her.” Should I have asked? Am I in the wrong for feeling like I was set up to fail there? What am I supposed to do if I don’t know where you are going?

Some additional context: The depressive episodes will come on completely like a switch flip. We will be having fun together, laughing, enjoying ourselves, then the next minute he goes completely silent, avoids me and doesn’t talk to me. So naturally I start thinking about whether I did or said the wrong thing and ask if he’s okay and he always tells me he’s fine when he’s clearly not. Lately there’s been a lot of anger, he’ll slam doors, stomp around the house, today I came home to our coffee table in the backyard which he had clearly thrown and broke. I was not around when he did this otherwise I would have addressed it, but if I address things now when he’s already angry then we can’t have a productive conversation. I guess I just need to know, am I doing too much? Or not enough? We are best friends and don’t fight, but for some reason this just feels like a constant state of conflict. Please help.

My husband (29M) and I (27F) have been together for five years, married for two. In his early 20s he was diagnosed with OCD, depression, anxiety and PTSD. He was generally really good about going to therapy, making lifestyle adjustments and understanding that these things aren’t just going to “go away”, they will take a lifetime of management. He would slip into a depression a couple times a year, but really only for about 72 hours before he’d see the light at the end of the tunnel and come out of it. With practice of my own I learned to just let him be and do what he needs to do to get through (ie isolate, personal time, etc) without getting so scared that he was pulling away from me specifically. The past two years, however, things have changed. He lost his mother to cancer very quickly after her diagnosis and also has been dealing with a job that makes him miserable. The depressive episodes are coming much more frequently and for a longer period of time. Not only that, I could handle not much communication before, but now if he says anything at all, he is just more angry. This often deflects on to me with sharp comments and tone that he never ever speaks to me in normally. The thing is though, with having such little communication when he is withdrawn like this, it’s comments over text, not face to face. I try to just brush them off, talk to him as I would normally and go about our daily business but it’s becoming harder to not take it personally. Sometimes it really feels like he is setting me up to find something to be mad at me about and it’s really messing with my head. We are the best of friends, loving, laugh together, just enjoy being married to one another, but then this side comes out and it’s really discouraging. We rarely fight, but somehow if he’s depressed it feels like we are? Everyone always says, “it’s not really them” and I know that, I think of the depression as an alter ego that takes over, but it’s still hard. I love him more than anything in the world and wish it was as easy as loving the hurt out of him.

Received an R from USask today, really disappointed. Stats 155 LSAT, 3.95/4.0 GPA, strong sask connection. I applied there and UCalgary, received an R from them back in Feb so this is the end of the cycle for me. Good luck to everyone that got in!

My husband (29M) and I (28F) have been together for five years. I’ve put a lot of personal work into not being triggered by my husband isolating when he faces a depressive episode. He generally needs about three days to just put his head down and get through the other side (which typically looks like some long, quiet days at home). Before it would cause me immense anxiety feeling like everything is my fault, and as a result I would try to “fix” something that I simply couldn’t fix. With therapy and just practice, I’ve worked really hard to just let him be, process how he needs to process and come back. However, part of me just still can’t get past the feeling of him hating me whenever an episode arises. I see the pain behind his eyes and I know how much he loves me, truly, which is what kills me even more. We have a beautiful relationship. When a depressive episode comes on, particularly out of the blue it is such a helpless feeling. He’s just angry, doesn’t want to talk and is totally shut down. Anyone else out there feeling the same or experiencing the same?