In A Lonely Place
My marriage is over, but I can’t move on for fear that my wife will hurt herself. About six months ago, my wife started helping one of her friends who was having a bit of a break with reality. This was a bit of an odd situation because the friend was a previous boyfriend of hers. I do not believe she was cheating on me and felt that she thought of him as her child that she needed to protect.
Then, in September, this guy ended up doing something crazy that ended in with him dying. Ever since that moment, my wife has tumbled into a very dark place. She has never spent the night at our home since then and lives in the guy’s house, which the guy’s family has allowed. She has completely abandoned our relationship on top of that.
We have a two-year-old daughter and she has still been good for her. I mostly feel safe when she spends time with my daughter, but nonetheless she is unstable. A month or two after her ex’s passing, she tried to seriously hurt herself and was close to being successful. She spent a week in the hospital/psych ward, but none of that really helped.
She’s cripplingly depressed, but she’s in denial about being depressed. She talks about just up and leaving, even leaving our daughter, who I would still like to be in her life. My wife has always had mental issues because of a rough childhood and bad family life and our marriage was never great, but it was serviceable. I never felt all that comfortable in my marriage, always walking on eggshells for fear of setting her off, but we had good times too.
We got pregnant accidentally, and that’s why we got married, but I don’t think that was the right choice. I absolutely love my daughter more than anything, but I can no longer say I love my wife. It’s started to become more disturbing. Her attempt to hurt herself cost a lot of money and added on to our debt—debt that she’s never had any interest in trying to help solve.
As in, she has no interest in budgeting or not using credit cards. Now my financial situation continues to spiral out of control as she has quit working and basically just lives freely off the money I work hard for. Now that we’ve been separated for months we are on fairly cordial terms when she’s not in the depths of depression.
I have expressed that this may be for the best and we should get divorced, but that absolutely set her off into a deep depression. She thinks that everyone abandons her and I would just be another, but I too have been abandoned. I want to move on with my life and take control of my financial situation for my sake, and the sake of my daughter, but I’m afraid if I move down that path then it will get worse and worse with my wife.
I do not want that. I care for her. I feel bad for her. I wish I could help her. I just don’t know when, if ever, this situation will get less tenuous, and if by then it would be too late financially speaking. Except my closest friends and my parents, no one knows about any of this. I want to tell more people my situation, but I fear it makes me look like an inconsiderate jerk that I want to leave my wife in her time of depression and mourning.
But how long does that go on? Of course there’s no answer to that, but she completely abandoned our relationship and did not seek any comfort in me, which perhaps hurt the most. I feel stuck in time at the moment. Just trying to enjoy any time with my daughter and trying to get along in life as best as possible, but it is hard to not have the faintest clue what to do next.