u/tipstripes

My husband and I got married about 2 months ago after 10 years together. He has a history of depression and was diagnosed with bipolar II. He doesn’t take medication and has been seeing a therapist for about 3-4 years now. I have CPTSD from a difficult childhood with a parent with schizophrenia, but I am proud of myself, also in therapy, I have a steady career, friends and family who love me, and I try to see difficult life challenges as temporary and maneuverable. I don’t always love myself, but that’s what I work on in therapy.

My husband, however, suffers from deep (understandable) disillusionment with the world and the way people communicate passively and indirectly, and he doesn’t have structure in his day-to-day life aside from a weekly hobby that allows him physical exercise and an important community in boffer fighting 2-3 nights per week and a music project with a close friend. If he misses either of those things, it often completely tanks his mood for days at a time. He doesn’t need to have a regular job aside from seasonal work during the summer, so again, there is a lack of structure but his bills are paid.

I’m not the most emotionally mature person all the time, but I try to have a hopeful outlook. When my husband complains about the systems in the world that are incomprehensible, obtuse for no reason, unjust and overcomplicated, or when he sees people jump to conclusions when speaking, he gets incredibly frustrated, and his frustration, in turn, gets directed at me, and he will have very little patience for my attempts to get him to see a more hopeful spin on the situation, or if I try to empathize and explain how his frustration is understandable, but miss a detail on what he is feeling despair about, he’ll insist I don’t understand him and he feels utterly alone and like he is in a constant state of grieving. He doesn’t really trust his parents to understand anymore, and we have a community of loving friends, but they don’t get to see his more intense side like I do.

I just feel crazy; when we went out to dinner the other day, a waiter asked us if we wanted sparkling or still water, and when I answered still without asking my husband what he wanted, he told me he was incredibly hurt and was reminded of all the other times I was selfish that week (not sufficiently helping pick places to go to when he said he didn’t have the energy, being on my phone at dinner and then apologizing and overcompensating by announcing when I was using my phone throughout the week [in good faith, I swear]), but apologizing doesn’t help him because he doesn’t believe I’m considerate in those moments. Apologizing makes him feel worse, attempting to relate tends to backfire if I don’t perfectly capture his experience, and attempting to spin a more hopeful outlook often makes him feel more disillusioned. Those are the kinds of things that tend to help me when I feel down, so it’s hard to rewire my way of communicating. I don’t know how to help him yet with the tools in my toolbag that normally work for me.

Does anyone else have experience with this? How can I help him feel more at ease if I don’t want to take on the same despair he feels?

I am about to leave on a multi-week trip and chipped my front tooth while eating. My confidence really took a hit and I wanted it back to normal asap. My ortho wasn’t available and the office told me they couldn’t do composite fills and would need to speak with a dentist, so that’s what I did.

The dentist looked at my tooth, heard my Invisalign treatment journey, took a look at my trays and said it’d be no problem to fill the chip and continue my refinements, so we did that and I’m happy with the fill. My ortho, however, had sent a message a few days earlier and I didn’t see it in time, saying that it would be best to wait u til my refinements complete before getting the fill, and we would need to re-scan if I filled. Well, I’m heading out on a trip tomorrow and won’t be back for two weeks. The tray does feel a little snug, but not crazy.

Is this kind of disagreement between dentists and orthodontists normal? I’m just surprised the dentist was confident while the ortho was not.

I know it’s dumb, but I have been cruising on one credit card for well over a decade and now it’s time to get an additional one. Traveling to Europe in a couple weeks for about 2 weeks and I figured now is a good time to get one so that I can avoid foreign transaction fees and use ATMs without a fee minefield.

The tricky part is finding a card with the right perks; I don’t have any brand loyalty to hotels, airlines or retail chains, and I don’t have a car, but I love restaurants and shopping second-hand. Traveling doesn’t happen often and we tend to use my husband’s Delta Amex cc for our yearly holiday flights. What kind of card would folks recommend?