This post might be long but stay with me. I’d love your advice, especially if you have one of these illnesses or experience a relationship with someone with this illness.
My (f33) husband (m38) has bipolar, bpd &adhd. We’ve been together for about 10 years, married for 5. We have 2 kids together just for a background. We’ve always had challenges from day one, but I got pregnant pretty early into our relationship so I was always motivated to make it work for the sake of my kids.
Even aside from all of the toxicity from the past, my husband puts himself and his interests first. People with bpd/adhd/bipolar go through different waves of obsessions basically like addiction and he’s currently obsessed with investing money into nfts on Twitter and spends all of his free time and money we don’t have doing this and is heavily active in Twitter groups about nfts. He’s on his phone 24/7. He stays up for days at a time so I’m up all hours of the night worried about him and when he’ll go to bed.
He’s extremely verbally abusive. If I tell him how I feel, I’m told to shut the **ck up or called names or I’m told I’m just craving attention and I picked the worst time to bring up how I feel. There is literally never time that’s not a bad time for me to talk about how I feel to him just an FYI. He’ll also call me names if I attempt to say how I feel. Even if I approach an argument very gently and kindly like “babe, I really just want to talk to you about something that’s been upsetting me. I feel like we need to work more on communication in our marriage,” he’ll still find a way to say that’s me attacking him and to get the f away from him. There is ZERO conflict and resolution. There’s no comfort or kindness and I’m often told I need to just be normal and get over it, I’m just looking for a fight.
He does not lift a finger around the house at all. Says he will, but doesn’t. If I ask for help doing dishes for example, he’ll complain, start complaining about it for hours and maybe he will start to do them but won’t finish. If something is broke and he says he’ll fix it I’ll have to wait months. For context, we both work full time jobs, we both work hard and do well at them but we still struggle financially as we don’t make a ton but we get by so financial stress does come to play.
He’s jealous and controlling to an extent. If I’m doing better at my job than he is at his, he makes fun of me. He doesn’t want me to do certain things that he should be allowed to do like go to a bar with friends, etc. Naturally I’ve turned into a home body and a shell of myself.
I’ve been asking him to go to couples counseling with me specifically to work on our communication and honestly for me, I’m hoping we can point out that the nft thing has gotten totally out of control. He finally agreed to go after a bad fight but he says he absolutely doesn’t want to. I just need to be normal. The therapist we want to see is his old therapist who has seen us once or twice in the past and at this point, I don’t care who we see, I just want help. Of course he hasn’t made any real attempt to get in touch with her and she hasn’t returned my call (I’m assuming because he was her patient and not me). Keep in mind he’s on his phone constantly for Twitter but it’s been weeks since he’s contacted this therapist “for me.”
My advice is, how do I handle this? At this point, I know I should probably divorce. I’m clearly not a priority, I’m clearly being abused and he clearly has no intention on working on himself. I want to try everything I can to make this work because our kids adore the both of us and honestly, with his mental illness I worry about what he’d do if I tried to divorce and financially it would he a huge struggle. (Side note, I have my own therapist, so I am trying to get help on my end)
Can anyone with mental illness weigh in on how I can get through to him?
Or maybe someone else who has dealt with this can help me stay strong and just pull the plug.. I’m at my wits end, I’m so unhappy and I just want to cry all of the time. I have so much love to give. I work hard, I try to be a great mom, I feel like I have so much to offer someone and I’m wasting what should be the best time of my life just miserable and withering away because of my husband. I’ve never been depressed until I met my husband. I have always had the need to try to help people and I blame myself for doing this in this case. And to be clear, I’m willing to move past the issues we have had if he “came to his senses” and really tried, but I just don’t see that happening and I feel like I can’t do this anymore.
Any advice is so helpful. Thanks in advance.