hopefornow

Thank you for being so kind. That sounds familiar, I’ll look for it. And I do agree, I think it is definitely mental health related. I’m just not sure if Heavenly Father knows that he needs some space or if it’s fully mental health. I just also know that I feel very impressed to stay with him and keep trying.

Sorry, but this is not what I am concerned about, and honestly quite rude. What I wrote in this post is the tiniest piece of the puzzle, hardly including his side of the story and exactly what he is dealing with. This was a big assumption to make off a little bit of information. This is exactly why I get afraid to post on these types of forums.

So my husband and I got married about 2 years ago, but since September of last year, we have been separated. My husband has been dealing with some difficult mental health issues and always felt he couldn’t bring it up with me because I struggle with my own mental health and he felt the need to protect me. It just kind of came to a head one day and he moved back home with his parents. It took me by complete shock and it was really hard. However, I’ve seen a lot of good out of this. A lot of personal growth for both of us, and even financial situations we wouldn’t have been able to handle had we not been separated. But still, we have not yet been able to work things out. We have both prayed and worked so hard on trying to fix our communication issues and help get us both into a better place mentally. I’m 10x better mentally than I was almost a year ago. And while we were still in therapy our communication did really improve. But my husband’s mental state has not changed much, although it is somewhat better. He is afraid to get on medication, so that’s not really helping. But even with all this it had seemed to be going really well and looking up until May, when he told me he was mentally and emotionally exhausted and couldn’t do it anymore. The thing is, he doesn’t want to get divorced. Neither do I. We both love each other very much. But he doesn’t see how we can fix things, and sometimes I fall into that frame of thinking too. But the thing that is most unsettling and stressful about this whole situation is that we get completely opposite revelation. What he has been feeling is that marriage is hard, but not meant to be this hard, and he needs to take a step back. Yet I am constantly told that I need to keep fighting and trying. Every time I get discouraged, an old friend says something so perfectly applicable to how I’m feeling, something they couldn’t possibly know, that encourages me to keep trying, or I read a scripture or article that humbled me and helps me to trust in God’s revelation that He has given to me. But it is terrifying to know how different our revelation is. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t help us progress, and it just hurts both of us because we have no idea what to do. How do we navigate this trial together when he feels he needs to stop trying and I feel that I need to keep going? Why would God send us such different revelations? Am I just crazy? If anyone has had a similar experience or has some advice, please let me know. I miss him, and I’m scared not knowing what’s going to happen. Also I always feel weird about asking things on here, so bear with me if I’m edging around things. If you need me to clarify just let me know.

I honestly don’t know how to start this, I’m not even sure why I’m here. I guess I’m just looking for some hope in this situation. So in the beginning of September, my husband asked me to call him after I got off work, and he told me he had left. We’d been married a little over a year at that point, and while it wasn’t perfect, I thought our marriage was solid and had potential to become even better with time and dedication. But unfortunately, behind everything that seemed great, my husband had been struggling terribly with depression. And he never felt like he could talk to me about it. And there’s a few contributing factors to that, my communication when he would open up to me would often leave him feeling bad for asking because I would express that I felt like I was a bad wife because I couldn’t help him more (I have some self esteem issues with that, and it’s kinda how my parents would communicate with me, so it’s a learned behavior that I've been trying to get out of for a while), or because he always felt like he needed to come to my rescue because I have depression and anxiety as well. And while it may have been really bad during the beginning of our relationship, I had felt like I had gotten more control over that part of my life since then. But regardless, this is about him. He admits that most of the fault there lies on him for just not communicating to me earlier how he felt, but all of those feelings eventually accumulated one day and he just broke and moved back in with his parents. It was a huge shock for me, and still is. Here’s the problem- We don’t want to get divorced. But we both see this situation so differently. He feels that he needs to work on himself right now and that he won’t be in a state to be in a relationship for a long time. He has said that when he prays, he gets the feeling that we’re meant to be together, but he can’t be with me right now or we aren’t meant to be together as a married couple. And he doesn’t want to do counseling, because he feels and has heard from other people that couples counseling is just us talking to each other while a therapist acts as the referee (which is probably sometimes the case, but not necessarily). On my side of things, however, after my pleadings with the Lord and visits to the temple and priesthood blessings, etc, all I can feel is that 1. Our marriage was not a mistake, 2. To not get divorced, but we do need this time to be separate and I to just be a friend and support to him, and 3. Just keep fighting. The first two things, I get for the most part. But I’m having such a hard time fighting and remaining hopeful. We still see each other a lot, we work at the same place, go to the same Star Wars role playing game every Friday, and have recently agreed to meet up at least to get food and chat once a week. But I can feel us drifting and that scares me to my core. He says he feels good just being friends for now, that he likes having my support. And I can see it helping him. And he still loves me, he still breaks down about how terrible he feels that all of this is happening, how he wishes he felt like he could come back but just doesn’t. And he’s being more honest with me than he’s ever been, which is nice. But I don’t want us to become “just friends”. We both had powerful feelings that we were meant to marry each other before we got married, I imagined a future together and he would get revelatory dreams of what our kids would look like and how happy they’d make us. Neither of us want to become just friends, but it seems like he’s resigned himself to that being the only option because he is so depressed, and I’m left to be the only one to carry all the hope. But I’m terrified. We’ve been apart for almost 2 months now and it just feels worse and worse. I feel like I’m losing hope more and more each day. And I can’t force him to come back, I dont want to. I want him to feel ready to, I don’t want to make him feel like he needs to hide his feelings again. I guess what I’m asking here is if anyone has gone through anything similar, and if it worked out, how it worked out. I get the feeling that if I hang on, we can work it out, but that depends on things I can’t control so much that I don’t know what to believe. So I guess if anyone has any advice or hope to give me, it would be really welcome.