A little background.
We’ve been together 10 years.
He’s always been, in my opinion, depressed. From the time we started dating and we were doing a distance relationship during college he would call me crying in his car, depressed about school. This happened a lot.
Then when we lived together, he favored sitting on the computer as opposed to doing things, but still liked to go out for walks and such. It progressively got worse and it seemed TO ME that he shut down. He communicated with me less, he seemed to get more and more depressed, and as of lately (the last 6? months) he’s been coming home and grabbing the bottle of whisky, every night (or 90% of the time). Heck, when we were out of whisky, he grabbed the vodka and started drinking that straight.
He doesn’t get DRUNK every night (some nights but not every) but I’m guessing he’s doing it to take whatever edge he has, off.
Over the 10 years it’s been a struggle with money, places to live, a lot of arguing on and off (mostly 1-2 explosive fights a year).
Most of the blow up fights go as follows:
I’m upset with him for – not showing more affection, not being more loving, and not prioritizing our relationship and “us”, never saying “i love you”, and less importantly–not offering to help me around the house until I get so stressed (anxiety) I basically want to cry in bed.
He’s upset with me for – my spending habits, my bossy attitude, never wanting to do anything, and “treating him like an employee instead of a boyfriend”
I have done a lot to change things. I’ve gotten rid of things that I know he doesn’t like, I’ve sold many of my things I haven’t used that were stored in the attic to both help with finances and reduce the amount of “crap” we have in the attic.
I got a job to help with the mounds of debt (I had a job before–I started a business to try and make some more money and this takes many hours a week not including paperwork, I also am pretty much the person responsible for all of the house work on a 2500 sqft house as well as almost 1 acre of property - mowing, landscaping, dusting, vacuuming, dishes, and even minor repairs, etc), I stopped buying things and spending money – for the most part, I do like doing things outside the house and I’ve suggested many more things, and I have tried to not ask him for help/ask him for anything.
I thought things were going okay until he suddenly started drinking every night after work and acting more secluded and talking to me even less than he was before.
Then suddenly he said he thought maybe we should break up because he’s miserable and doesn’t know what to do or if anything in our relationship would change. He said he loves me and doesn’t want to break up, but just wants to feel better and doesn’t know how.
I told him I was shocked and this was random. He said he’s been feeling like this for awhile now and he’s just been trying to be “apathetic towards everything” and that’s not working either.
I suggested therapy AGAIN and he finally agreed to couples therapy. I told him I feel he has a problem with depression and I have some issues with anxiety and he doesn’t really think that he has depression problems he just thinks it’s situations that make him upset (IE, mounds of debt, crumbling house, etc).
So we go to therapy for the first session and they diagnose me with GAD and him with some situational depression. They wanted to work on our individual issues first before tackling the relationship.
The second session, for $110, was just how to close your eyes and focus on your breathing. An hour spent on that, and it wound up making him feel worse because that was the one thing he said about therapy that he was worried about-- it being “hokey”.
He now wants to find someone who can potentially prescribe medication or who can help better than “breathing” excises. He thinks that we should be discussing things that cause conflict/bad feelings and not just talking about ways to muffle the bad feelings.
I told him to give him a chance, a few more sessions to see where he’s going with this before we switch, but I’m willing to switch if he feels this isn’t working for him.
So back to now… I went away for 3 weeks to visit my mom and sister. This whole time I’ve been gone I have had to message him/contact him. Almost every day I’ve said good morning (text), then asked him how his day has been, then said goodnight and sweet dreams. I feel that communication is important and he has not once asked me how I was doing, how my time is going, etc. He will sometimes say good morning and goodnight in response to my message, but even after I ask how his day is and show that i’m interested in how he’s doing at work, etc, he still doesn’t ask anything about me or my day, etc. He shows no interest.
That really hurts my feelings. I told him that it did (nicely) and I told him I understood that he was probably busy but that it hurt my feelings when he didn’t have a second to ask me anything about my day, but has time to play scrabble online with a friend or play video games.
I’m not asking for an hour long conversation. But idk… even if it was once every other day or once every few days.
Does anyone have any input or advice to help and guide us in a direction we can take to make things better?
