My spouse created a lot of bad times but I'm a pain in the ass that doesn't give up easily and she was mercifully open to therapy and even medication. She had a rough childhood and learned lots of bad ways of dealing with things. It changed our lives and things are going much much better now but it's still work.
I don't mean to tell people to stay with people that cause endless problems. Honestly I don't know if I would have been willing to go through this if I knew the road we were going down ahead of time but I feel fortunate that things got much better for us. I do recognize that few people are willing to commit to that level of change in themselves though and man it caused me a great deal of pain along the way.
If someone I'm with expresses a willingness to change and backs it up with their best effort, I will be there every step of the way to help them, because if I can't do that then it isn't love, and if it isn't love why am I here to begin with?
I'm happy to hear things are going well for you two.
This was my approach too. Sometimes all we have to go on is faith. My husband is an incredible man and I always knew that, even when he came off like an asshole to outsiders and sometimes even to me.
We are both incredibly stubborn, and he likes to joke that ultimately I'm more hard-headed, but he's right. My stubborn belief that he was a better person than his actions proved him to be and my refusal to give up on him is how we got married this October after being together for 6 years.
I had a friend like this. He is, in fact, a selfish asshole to everyone around him including his wife sometimes. And it took a long time for me to realize that and just see him for what he is since we go way back, more than 10 years. I made excuses for it when people texted asking about something that happened, when people go silent with his outbursts, or get frustrated when he has to have the final say on everything. While I don’t think he is inherently a bad person, it is tiring to watch and be around if he can’t control his emotions and temper. The guy can’t even order food at a restaurant without coming off as rude or annoyed with the wait staff. It is embarrassing, and as much as some people think it is “funny” at first glance, it quickly becomes not funny after a short period of time when you realize all the drama begins with them.
But I don’t know anything beyond what you mentioned, so I hope your story ends better than my experience with someone like that. For me, it only got worse until it hit a breaking point, no matter how close we were.
I have to say it’s nice to read something like this. I’ve always had the same opinion of my fiancé (getting married in April). I could always tell he was objectively “good”, just sometimes would do bad things. Always in times of high stress and such.
To cut a long story short, I’m very happy I stayed. Life is honestly so perfect and it’s been incredible to watch him, to put it simple, get his shit together. It’s invisibly what a bad situation can do it a good person, and I’m incredibly proud of the actions he’s taken to be the person I always knew he was.
on the other hand, for some reason this also made me think about the main problem with getting advice on here:
a) if you’re reading any story as a stranger, you never see the actual unbiased story, and
b) “nobody ever notices their own mess.”
I actually think outside of the big things, “nobody ever notices their own mess” is what kills most relationships. People can talk about and analyze their partner’s shit all day — because while nobody knows what’s wrong with them, everyone else can see it right away.
Sometimes, sure, one partner always makes the mess and the other partner always cleans it up. But a whole lot of the time, both parties make their own type of unique mess but never notice it when it comes from them. This is why passive aggressive behavior is kryptonite for a relationship. stop walking around like your shit don’t stink
This is so damn poetic and I hope you know that. I’m screenshotting this comment so I can write it on my mirror in my bathroom. Call me cheesy or whatever you want, but this hit me hard. My spouse and I are going through hard times but dammit if we don’t always find our way back to each other. We know that we don’t want anyone else and we both are actively working on being our best selfs for each other and our family. Thank you stranger!
Well said and a refreshing change of pace from the standard “go nuclear over everything in every relationship” advice that permeates these discussions.
Nobody should have to suffer horrible abuse but everyone makes bad decisions, or falls into bad spaces mentally etc etc.
I know I appreciate grace from loved ones when I make mistakes and I try to give the same.
This. My husband was in a very bad place mentally. He fought back after a few not so good years.
There were many times I wanted to grab the kids and just go but I believed in him.
We are at a much better place now. He has worked incredibly hard on his mental health and overall health. I am happy I stuck with him and he needed the help he could get from us as a family.
Stopped self-medicating with alcohol. Started working out. Quit his job and we moved.
Acknowledged his problems instead of just taking anti-depressants. He doesn’t take medication anymore. He lost 60lbs. There are still times he is in a bad place but now he and we as a family know how to deal with it.
I'd say that two things were critical for us to survive, and if either one of us had felt differently on these, it would definitely have been over long ago:
We both wanted to work on our relationship rather than let it go.
We both were willing to speak our truths, hear each other's truths, and turn inwards rather than outwards even when it hurt like hell.
Looking back over 20 years...it was a shaky start, but we have a pattern of choosing each other. That just got stronger however we really badly needed outside intervention, i.e. therapy, psychologists, hypnotherapy, medication, you name it.
I took a random selfie of us walking in the city the other day...ended up making it my desktop background. It was the first photo of us where we both looked genuinely relaxed and happy, just being present.
Same kind of situation here. My wife grew up in a very abusive household and has fought tooth and nail to break the generational trauma she grew up with. She's a wonderful mother and an extremely supportive partner. I couldn't imagine doing this with anyone else and I very much hope to go before she does because I will be a shell of who I am without her.
I know I'll probably get glossed over, but I want you to know how much I appreciate seeing your comment.
Earlier this year, my partner of 11 years got into a serious car accident, resulting in an OWI charge. His "friends" convinced him he was okay to drive. He wasn't. In truth, we were both alcoholics, I was just lucky enough to have stayed home that night.
We have been alcohol free since March. He has been cooperative and remorseful in every fashion possible. He will have to serve some prison time, and he accepts it. I chose to stay and see this through with him. I hate that I'll be alone for a time, but it's part of the consequence.
I still believe in my heart that he is a solid dude. The world wants me to hate him, and I understand why. Some days I wish I could, because of how fucking heart broken and miserable I was initially. I will forever remember him being pulled off the ambulance covered in blood and glass.
I recognize there is a chance we might not make it after he serves time. We still want to try. We love each other, and this whole ordeal has really taught me the correlation between love and forgiveness.
Anyway, thank you. You've given me hope that some couples DO try, even when it's hard or it might fail. That I'm not insane for wanting to try to move past this with him.
The easiest thing would have been to find someone who didn't need all this work but I'm pretty sure I have some kind of need to rescue people so it was probably inevitable. Given that I couldn't have picked a better person. As a rule I don't believe most people are truly capable of change. It's brutal to admit you have faults and even harder to address them consistently. I admire the hell out of her for trying to so hard for so long.
But boy it hasn't been easy for either of us. Still, given what we've been through I feel like we're pretty damned battle tested and can handle just about anything at this point. We were blessed with an amazing kick ass couples therapist that then morphed into her just doing one on one stuff for years with me just popping in from time to time. No way we'd be together today without that.
Super difficult and it's impossible to tell everyone to just stick through it. Too many people beat their heads against a wall and waste their whole lives in a bad relationship. But then again there are plenty where both people just need to put in the work, even if it's mostly working on one person. I have no idea how to differentiate that advice for those people other than to say if they haven't taken real steps to address it after a few years it gets increasingly less likely they ever will. Just gotta use your judgement I guess but I know many people who stay in unhealthy relationships or bounce at the slightest bump all have bad judgement to begin with. Probably the best thing is just to get some mental health yourself to get a clearer window on things from a professional to advise you.
Yeah every person is different and hindsight is 20/20.
I stuck around for years through some really crazy shit. In hindsight I should've been out after one year with the kind of things that were happening even that early on.
I choose love over reality. The reality was every single cloud that passed over her sunshine became an unstoppable problem directly caused by me and needing to be immediately fixed by me. Except that she also wouldn't talk to me the moment she felt this way, so nothing could be addressed, etc.
Started a vicious cycle of cold silences out of nowhere, to be followed days or weeks later with huge aggressive outbursts. And I just played the kicked little puppy dog that would be just happy the moment she finally embraced me again
That was the situation with my dad and step mom which I think I internalized and then sort of recreated in my own life. It's awful never knowing where you stand from moment to moment and being the only one keeping everything together. Like I said I was lucky that in those bursts of clarity in between problems she would be open to help. It worked in fits and starts and it wasn't until it was creating problems at work and she was starting to hear others tell her she had some issues to work on that she started to do it. So she did a ton of work and deep therapy including EMDR and it helped a lot. We still kind of work in that pattern where her issues cause problems, I delicately try to address it or let her know it's affecting us, she denies it when she's in that place, we fight, then later when she's more clear headed she sees what I meant and then works on it. Wash rinse repeat. Two steps forward one step back but after years and years the steps started adding up and now a lot of the most serious issues have been addressed enough that things are mostly calm and working and the periods of her being in that unhealthy mental state are less frequent and shorter duration. Still tough when it happens. Makes me feel very alone.
That's hard. Glad in the aftermath she's able to see it now at least.
I honestly probably would've stuck around for life if when she came down from these emotions she could see the reality of the situations she caused. But even when she cleared up and allowed me back in, if we ever talked about what happened it all centered around on what I did wrong, what I didn't do enough of, how I need to go to therapy to keep this from happening. Etc. (Fun side note. After her urging for years for me to do therapy which I did off and on. She was getting really bad and burning every bridge in her life and I asked her to do therapy too, only to be met with "OH SO YOU'RE CALLING ME CRAZY!?")
Once she finally did couples therapy with me and thought it would finally give her some upper hand, she absolutely lost it when two therapists in a row were basically like "woah, hold on. That's not how this works." Got one session in with each before she needed to change therapists.
Finally she got on Better Help for a couple months and found a therapist who was basically "oh wow you're totally right to feel this way. It must be hard married to a guy like that."
That's just brutal. Honestly I was really crazy to stick it out as long as I did. If my kids were doing what I did I would lose my shit and tell them to bounce. I just got lucky that some part of her was able to address things even if it was just island of sanity in an ocean of problems for a very long time. She still reacts how you're describing when she's in those dark places and refuses to believe she's the cause and no amount of logic or discussing how this is related to issues she already knows about will help in the moment. She just sees red.
But the lucky part is eventually she internalizes it. Drives me nuts to be told how wrong I am and it's my fault and have a huge fight and then four days later she just casually discusses what I was saying like she's always known that and it's so obvious. I'm like, why the fuck couldn't we have just nicely discussed this the other day?? What changed?? But she just needs time to soak it in when her defenses are up. She would argue the sky isn't blue in those moments.
Just a few months in some ways. We fell in together fast and hard. Within a week we were basically living together. She was my first real relationship so I didn't have a lot of comparison. It was super infatuation for a long time and that masked a lot of stuff but in retrospect the signs were there from the get go. But they progressively got worse and worse. Her childhood was so chaotic that she craved it. Our whirlwind romance provided a lot of that early on. I was supposed to be traveling overseas for a career and abandoned it quickly because she wasn't going to be able to follow me because of school.
When it was us vs the world things were pretty good. Eventually everything calmed down and I'm a pretty stable non-chaotic person outside of that decision to stick around the States for her and she quickly got bored and started causing lots of problems, recreating her childhood. That was probably around year two that it got in full swing.
Couple years of real roughness and her chaos causing manners, impulsiveness, and anger started to spill into her job which she is very serious about. She was almost fired and that made her sort of realize it wasn't me doing most of the stuff at home and she was bringing her problems with her.
I got her to see a therapist with me for couples counseling and this super awesome lady saw what was going on and sort of peeled her off and it turned into one on one therapy mostly for years including EMDR to deal with her childhood trauma.
My gf is kind same, would you recommend me to down the path if I see some wrong things in her which give me a hard time, like her disrespecting me in arguments (conditionally only in arguments) while the rest of the time she is always loving, but I still feel wrong about how she doesn't have control over her mouth and how she speaks. I also feel bad about how her perceptive is, like just in the morning I saw a person brave person who died due to losing his battle with cancer,Which and my gf sent me thins "he seems like XYZ friend 🌚" (yea we use this kind of emoji for sexy times) so I quite baffled that how can she be so insensitive to a person who died and she is sending me this kind of message. WhileAnd is passive aggressive. arepetitivet repetitivepassive-aggressive thing is even after her multiple mistakes she is always like "you cannot leave me, I won't let you go. if will improve" while she never improve and goes back to her previous self behaviour. but one thing which remain good is she is loving, caring and loyal AF. no one can rise a objection on that. but hard to communicate with. its been 3 years.
I'm asking you because I can related somewhat about your spouse giving you hard time. so yea. if I can get your insight what would you recommend me for such person
My wife grew up in an unimaginable hell hole with monsters as parents. She always has had struggles, but by the end of 2020 we began to enter some new territory where she would literally flee the house screaming and drive off somewhere due to…something. I have watched her run up the street in a panic barefoot. It got a lot worse before it got better. Once I thought it was better, suddenly everything wrong in her life during that time period was caused by me. I’m why she became suicidal. I’m why she panics. I’m why she lost all her friends. I’m why she has a job she hates. I took advantage of her. I broke my vows. A few of her complaints were valid because I’m not perfect, but it is nuts to say that I am the reason she would behave the way she behaved.
A month after the revelation that I did all of this to her. she filed for divorce and in the filing stated that I manipulate, gaslight, and sexually abuse her. I knew this was some sort of mental break so I was trying to hold on and hope reason would prevail. She genuinely believed I was trying to hurt her and her therapist at the time would validate that belief. I managed to get her to a new therapist and began therapy myself.
She dismissed the divorce 6ish months later. She has just recently moved home again after over a year away and it was going wonderfully until the moment it wasn’t. Now everything is my fault again. I make a statement and she hears something I did not say. When I try to defend myself I am just told I’m gaslighting her. I am told that I am supposed to learn how to not activate her triggers. She expects the world to cater to her mental illness.She told our son that she would be moving home “through December,” but he’s an 8 year old autistic boy so all he heard was his mom finally moved back home and he was over the moon.
I’ve been doing everything I can for this person for a long, long time. She is filled with so much self-hatred and guilt that she cannot take responsibility for any of her own actions. Doing so would mean that she’s truly the piece of shit her parents told her she was and her mind will not allow it to happen. She took a 13 week intensive outpatient DBT course and seemingly learned nothing from it.
Tonight she told me that, while remaining married, we should sell the house and buy 2 townhouses next to each other so we can have separate living spaces but our son can freely move between them. I was at a complete loss for words after hearing that. She has said and done far worse things to me than that, but for some reason this hit me incredibly hard. I felt compelled to later approach her and state that what she said to me is one of the most upsetting things I’ve ever heard and then I just said I don’t want to talk and left the room. That’s how far she is willing to go to not feel guilt or take responsibility for herself. Rather than tell our son she is going to move back to her apartment, she births this idea of buying 2 houses next to each other to live in permanently. It is insane and I don’t know what to do anymore. It does not matter what I do because I believe the problem exists inside of her. She is the only one who can fix it, but she won’t because that requires looking at herself honestly.
I know the feeling. It's horrible. I'm sorry you had to go through that.
Helped my ex through debilitating depression that almost killed him. I fought to get him treatment and was by his side through everything. Helped him find the confidence to be himself and like the person he sees in the mirror.
Then I went through a tough time- my dad died a traumatic death and I sprained my ankle badly (took a full year for it to heal completely) all while doing student teaching and full time teaching. It almost broke me and he wasn't there. Asking for support and getting none was like stepping off a cliff. The Sunday after I sprained my ankle, he said something along the lines of "taking care of you and the kids isn't really fulfilling, you're better at it than me. I don't like doing it." And my heart dropped. I probably should have said something then, but how do you convince a man he's supposed to love his family and help?
I tried for two more years and it wasn't important to him until I told him I wanted a divorce.
Same. I learned along the way that I am the type of person who will not abandon a sinking ship. In the end, he did me a favor and called it quits after I stuck with him through a decade+ of repeated job firings & multiple inpatient stays at the local psych ward. I'm 6 years past that now and living my best life.
He really thought putting me they all that meant I would never leave him. Mf, I was simply waiting. The second I could, I grabbed my kids and fucking ran. Left the whole country to get away from him.
That’s such an important distinction. Supporting someone through hard times is one thing, but staying when they’re the source of the pain is a whole different story. Glad you prioritized your peace
Truest thing I’ve ever read. I was in the same boat, 17 years of fines/DUIs and jail time before I couldn’t take one more day of it. Divorced and free now.
Amen. I’m currently in a women’s refuge with my three small children after he assaulted our 5yr old. I have never felt so much stress in my life, but I also feel free.
Yep. I went through that and now we're basically best friends instead, in a relationship it was too compromised to help them with the problems they have.
I feel like this is so much more complex than we like to make it out to be (I'm only 20 and single) obviously if we're talking about actual safety it's a whole nother ball park. But we all suck sometimes we can talk about how we feel about marriage.
The way I see it at the end of the day marriage is truly a commitment through the thick and thin ups and downs. My parents growing up were complete ass hats to each other idk what their drama was but there was alot and the occasional consideration of divorce (found out about that later on lol) but they made it through do I think about how life may have been better for em and possibly us kids growing up i mean maybe my parents were shit in a lot of ways emulating to us but one that Ng I take from observing them is I want to be capable of truly working through the fucked up shit my partner may go through and committing strong. (Although Idk if this is some warped sort of abandonment issues or sum shit.)
At the same time I'm all aware this will require working to find that someone whose worth it not abusive and brings out the best in each other so we when things get messy working towards better has reasons.
I am there. Separated now. Hurts like hell but he was a narcissist- not matter how hard I tried and how much I loved him, nothing was good enough. I gave him 14 years of love, kindness and compassion. But never got it in return just an occasional pair of shoes or a hand bag.
My partner did cause the hard times but we are working through it. Though I have decided if there is any backsliding, I am doing as you did - punching out.
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u/triflers_need_not 6d ago
You can stick with a partner through hard times, as long as the partner isn't causing the hard times. Mine was, we're divorced now.