I have a couple of friends we’ll call “Alex” and “Kate.” They’re both good people who’ve helped me a lot through this dog of a year, so I owe them both a lot. They’re also unofficially engaged (no formal proposal yet) and are planning to get married within the next year. At least they were. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.
Alex joined the Navy this summer. He made it through boot camp with minimum difficulties and settled into real Navy life. As far as anyone knew, he was adjusting fine. Except he wasn’t: he attempted suicide a couple of weeks ago and has been in the base hospital ever since.
Kate, like the rest of us was shocked and understandably upset. “Why didn’t he SAY something?” has been a frequent spoken and mental refrain in our circle. I’m working through my own dark times right now, so I talked to Kate and tried to explain just how bad depression can be. I hoped that she would take this knowledge to heart and not put too much pressure on Alex right now.
As I was talking to her today, I asked if she had gotten hold of him on the phone (she’s been trying to call for a week). “I got through to him last night,” she replied.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“I went off on him.”
Fuck. The. What.
I asked her to 'splain. She told me that she told him that he needs to stay in the Navy (he wants out) because she doesn’t want to wait for him to get himself together on the outside. She wants to get married and have kids and she wants to have those kids with someone “stable.” I changed the subject very quickly so I wouldn’t slap the gold-plated shit out of her.
Here’s what I couldn’t/didn’t say to her:
Are you TRYING to destroy this man? He is fucking DEPRESSED. He’s lost and confused and you yell at him because your matrimonial and biological clocks are ticking? FUCK THAT NOISE. Do you want this relationship to end badly? Because after today’s conversation I’m pretty well convinced that it will end because you won’t get off your Princess Pedestal. So what if he’s not “stable?” Who the fuck is these days? It could be that he’s not cut out for military service, a lot of people aren’t. If you’re so concerned with doing what’s best for him and your relationship, wipe the dollar signs out of your eyes that his bonus put there! Fucking HELP the man or at least admit that you’re not willing to and end it now! He does not need your bitchy scorn, he needs your patience and support. If you can’t do that, then start looking for another sperm donor.
So… She needs to stay with him and be supportive of him until he breaks up with her? :dubious:
I suspect that it may have occurred to her that if he has attempted suicide once he may do it again. She might think that every day she might get a phone call informing her of another attempt or his actual suicide. Or she may wonder if in his depression he’ll take her (and any possible kids) out before killing himself. That might be what she meant by ‘stable’. Or think of it as a trust issue. He didn’t trust her enough to ‘SAY something’. Now she can’t trust him not to abandon her in the most permanent way.
This is not to say that the first thing she should have done when she finally was able to talk to him was ‘go off on him’. But she probably feels hurt and betrayed. (You probably do too, by both of them.) I’m not condoning her behaviour. But if you’re assigning blame, then ‘Alex’ deserves some as well.
She may have been lashing out. Or she may be a gold-plated cunt. It seems to me that they both need counseling. On the face of it it sounds as if ‘Alex’ might be better off without her, and she without him.
I have to agree that he’s betrayed her in a pretty fundamental way–not by developing depression, but by apparently hiding it from her and even now avoiding talking to her. Mental illness does not relieve you of your responsibilities.
What if he had a horrible degenerative disease, and throughout their courtship and planning for the future he’d hid it from her, and she only finds out when he’s finally rushed to the hospital that a life with him means a life of fighting that disease, of him needing the lion’s share of sympathy and support and attention, and that even with all that it’s a disease with a non-negiligible chance of killing him early? Wouldn’t she have the right to be pissed that this was hidden from her? Wouldn’t you forgive her some period of rage?
This doesn’t mean she is dealing with his behavior in a productive way, but if you know from experience that they are both basically good people, I’d assume that her bungling the situation and making a bad situation comes from the exact same source as his bungling the situation and making a bad situation worse–ignorance and heightened emotions, not selfishness or malice.
Keep in mind that one common symptom of severe depression is difficulty or inability to recognize just exactly what’s going wrong and how to communicate it.
I think that’s what’s going on here. He’s had severe insomnia for years which everyone thought was due to something else. Turns out it may have been depression rearing its ugly head. There’s some family issues involved as well which I can’t go into.
The reason it took her so long to get hold of him was that she had to peel off the layers of bureaucracy. Hey, when you deal with the military you’ve gotta expect that.
What’s pissing me off the most about Kate’s reaction is that she’s upset with Alex for messing up her Life Plan. Hey Kate, guess what. I had one of those too up until six months ago when my engagement blew up in my face. Rebuilding sucks. But you’ve got to do it in this world.
I’m going to talk to her tomorrow and recommend that she get some counseling as well. I’ve been thinking about doing that since I first heard the news. I’ve had to get myself to the headshrinker first, though (unrelated issues).
I know, but that doesn’t mean that her feelings of rage and betrayal are somehow a sign of pure selfishness. She isn’t handling it well, but in my experience handling it the other way–entirely removing from him all responsibility for his disease/treatment and taking that responsibility on herself–is not a healthy pattern to start, either: I’ve known lots of couples where one person has severe mental illness, and the ones where managing that mental illness was seen as primarily the ‘healthy’ partner’s job always seems to entire a downward spiral of co-dependency and, eventually, mutual resentment–the healthy partner because they are suppossed to somehow “fix” things, and the ill partner because they are consumed by their own suffering and feel powerless and emasculated (there needs to be a female equivilant for that word, since the sense is universal. I mean it universally.)
Again, not saying she’s handling it well. But almost no one handles mental illness well, and she needs proffessional guidence every bit as much as he does. It doesn’t make her a “selfish twat” or a “gold-planted twat” any more than his own mismanagement makes his a selfish bastard.
You have to forgive people their initial reactions in life. How many people, unexpectedly finding out they are going to be parents, react with horror and anger to see their life plans totally and unexpectedly changed? They often turn out to be great parents who love their kids. I’ve been asked for tough favors and flinched when asked because it wasn’t something I wanted to do, but after a flinch remembered my loyalties or my priorities or the larger picture, and come through–what matters more, the flinch or the favor? People sometimes mourn the loss of their dreams, and that isn’t a little thing, but then they pull themselves together and do what needs to be done. She thought her life with this guy was going to be one way, and it turns out it’s going to be radically, radically different. If it takes her a few weeks to suck that up, I don’t think that’s such a crime. If in six months she can’t get past it and is complicating his situation with her anger and resentment, then bitch. But a few weeks is human.
Wow. I feel like I’m being slapped in the face here. Have you ever been mentally ill? Do you know what it’s like to have the butcher knife in your hand and think about placing it against your neck?
If someone really wants to kill himself, he’s not going to stop and announce it so that it can be stopped. What the hell kind of mismanagement is he guilty of, exactly? Depression is HARD and isolates you from everyone, even those that you love and who love you the most.
If she thinks that he’s going to mess up her life, it’s best that she get out now. He doesn’t need that bullshit.
I don’t think so. If she had any feelings at all for the guy at all she’d have kept her damn mouth shut until she knew he was closer to normal. What a selfish bitch to blast him while he’s still in the hospital.
I get your point, but if I heard this from anyone, in any circumstance:
. . . which reads to me as “you need to stay in your career that you find miserable because I need to have kids now, and I will not have kids with someone who’s trying to ‘find’ himself,” I’d call her out as self-centered and ultimately uncaring about her partner.
His problems or concerns matter only insofar as they affect her imagining of when and under what conditions she’ll have kids.
He’s not guilty of mismanagement, or rather, he is–by not seeking treatment before it reached that point–but it’s a human, understandable thing to do when you are depressed. If in every way in the past he’s demonstrated that he’s considerate and understanding and thoughtful and that this is totally out of charecter, we assume it’s the disease. In the exact same way, if in every way in the course of the relationships she’s been loving and supportive and understanding, she deserves the benefit of the doubt that she reacted badly in a high-stress situation, that she screwed up out of ignorance and out of despair and not that it is revealing some sort of deep charecter flaw that was there all the time and no one noticed.
If she ought not write him off for being mentally ill, he–and his friends–ought not write her off for faltering in her intial reactions. Facing mental illness in loved ones, especially life partners, can be a devestating blow.
I guess I see things differently. If someone I loved and wanted to spend the rest of my life with was hospitalized for attempted suicide, I don’t think I’d be going off on them because they messed up my schedule for marriage and baby-making.
Yes, I understand she is upset. She’s had the rug jerked out from under her. But going off on someone - basically saying “get over it” - it not a sanctioned treatment for severe depression as far as I know.
Not Alex, for keeping it all from Kate, the Navy, and everyone.
Not Kate, for showing she cares so little for an obviously very sick man.
Not the Navy, for taking and keeping someone who had no business being there.
Of course it’s not sanctioned treatment. But if my husband were diagnosed with lung-cancer and I knew he was going to die in a year of something that was 100% not his fault, I suspect that early on there would still be some irrational, counter-productive yelling on my part that was as much focused on my loss, on my pain, on the suffering I was now doomed to go through, as it would be focused on him. I suspect that I’d be pretty irrational, and focused on things that were trivial in the big picture. I’d be a total mess. I hope I’d be a bigger person than that, that I’d be able to subsume myself and focus on him, but when it’s your life partner that’s in trouble you are in a really weird place–the person that you go to with your own pain and suffering and worries, the person you ARE selfish with is suddenly the person you are suppossed to be stoic and selfless towards. That’s a tricky adjustment, and often doesn’t go smoothly. If she’s always been a good person before, she deserves the benefit of the doubt for a while.