Help me sort my head out

LegacyUser

This is a complicated one, so please bear with me.

OH and I are married, together nearly 10 years. Mid 30s, no kids, but the childless thing is very much by mutual choice and not through frustrated effort. As couples go, we have a very high level of mutual trust and tolerance, and we’re very close, best friends as well as husband and wife.

We’ve lived in a few different countries together, doing different jobs and skipping about from job to job at the same time as going from place to place. At one stage, I changed careers for him because he hated the job I did. It was an extremely high maintenance career job and he didn’t see much of me. I still lived in our house, but for one month in three I basically just slept there and spent the rest of the time at work. It wasn’t a well paid job, but I loved it. He hated it, and eventually I left it for the sake of our relationship. I tried to continue the career in different ways, but basically it never panned out and now I do something different.

The next thing we did together was plan a major relocation to the southern hemisphere. We moved hoping for a better life, and decided to move to a location near his family and it was a massive change. All of my family are in Ireland. For the first few months after we moved, we lived with his family. I hated it – utterly hated it, because his family members are an exceedingly difficult bunch with more drama than an afternoon soap opera. I had told him before we moved that I didn’t want to spend more than four weeks living with his family. However once we moved, OH’s job prospects didn’t pan out and he ended up unemployed, meaning we had to spend a lot longer living with his family. I offered repeatedly to foot the bill and afford both of our rents and bills in a small place (it isn't expensive in this country), but he refused to move out and we ended up staying at my in-laws. It was hellishly difficult for me. I was in a new country with no friends, trying to manage a new job and the ins and outs of my high maintenance in-laws. I am not a depressive or suicidal person, but after many months of it I began to understand very clearly why people self-harm. It was a very low time in my life.

Move forwards again – we move out of his family’s house, into our own place. OH gets an unexpected job in a new career. The career pays BIG money, however it takes up a lot of his time. Conscious of how hard it is to work a high maintenance job without support, I took a very supporting role, never whinging or moaning when he was working long hours, spending a lot of time on my own, trying to facilitate his work with little things like meals on the table, organising the housework myself, so on. I also took on managing a lot of his family drama so they came to me first and not him, leaving him alone to get on with his job. (Hasn't made me love his family any more though!) We got citizenship of the country we moved to. I changed my hours at work to have the same days off he has, and generally, after a time, our lives became very happy. Or rather, my life became very happy.

Himself, however, is battling depression that even the psychologist (yes, we have progressed to getting help – there's a history of depression and other disorders in his family so we recognised the need for help) – even the psychologist says the depression isn’t down to a single cause. The psychologist believes the OH is a very complex person, but he wants to prescribe the OH antidepressants to try and make progress in balancing his moods. The OH is highly functioning, still doing the job, still socialising if I organise a social night out, and we have shifted his family to arms length, enough to be polite without being too standoffish, and without suffering their constant presence in our lives so they're not driving either of us mad any more. However he is very down in himself and has terribly bleak moods. I just want him to be happy. He was initially fine with the concept of antidepressants.

Roll on a couple of weeks, and curve ball: the OH doesn’t want to take antidepressants. The OH wants to join the army.

Yep. You heard me. He’s applying to become an army officer. (He definitely doesn’t want to take antidepressants in case they interfere with his army application.)

I feel like I’ve been hit by a mac truck. I know that this is something he had a secret wish to do for many years, but I never thought he’d do it – sort of the way I’ve always wanted to give up working and run a cake shop, but I’m never doing it, that kind of thing. It’s not that he’s throwing away the big salary – we lived well on that for as long as it lasted and got a major head start in our lives, and I can treat that like a once-off lottery win.

It’s the time. Or more specifically, the time he’s going to spend away from me. I don't want to be on my own. I didn't come all this way so I could be on my own. I feel like I uprooted myself, left my family and friends, relocated and changed my entire life, and now he’s leaving me and I get to be completely alone, for months on end, with my support network in an opposing time zone. I Googled ‘being a military wife’ and was so horrified at the search results I went to the bathroom and threw up. I know that’s incredibly over-dramatic, but I think it was a combination of a fear of everything changing, and the sort of buzzing in my ears of this "I'm joining the army" news just when I feel I’ve settled. I also know most of the Google results I found are posted by the wives of ‘jarheads’, poor grunts right on the front line whose lives are in constant danger. There’s nothing to say my OH will be in that position. However, the picture these military wives paint is bleak, lonely and desperately idealistic – you can take the pain because you love the man. There seems to be a culture of sacrifice that borders on martyrdom – putting yourself second to his defence career all of the time and biting back the bitterness. I can’t even express to you how polar opposite I feel I am to the sort of woman who appears to be a military wife.

The problem is I haven’t seen OH as excited by anything in years. I have to wonder, is this the career that could be the making of him? Is this the piece that could fill in the blanks in his ‘complex’ personality, and allow him to be happy without the need for antidepressants? Of course it doesn’t help that I’d love to see him take the antidepressants for six months and then see if this life was enough for him at the end of that course, but I believe that a prescription for antidepressants on his medical record will screw up his chances of acceptance into the military.

Part of the problem could be that I don't know arse from breakfast when it comes to the military, and that ignorance could be strongly colouring my perspective. I do love my OH, very much. I very much want him to be happy. But I’m in total turmoil – I feel like I’m being abandoned so he can do what suits him, and when I feel like this, other, unjustified feelings roll into it like an avalanche – the feeling that I gave up that career job ‘for him’, moved south ‘for him’, adopted this life in the first place ‘for him’. These things aren’t true – I wanted to do all of the things I did, none of them were done under particular duress, but this army stuff is tipping the apple cart right over.

My head’s a mess. It’s more than me not wanting him to join the army. If that’s what he truly wants, I’ll support him. I suppose I just want him to not want to join the army. :-(

Faith

I'm sorry to hear all that. It sounds very, very difficult for you.

What triggered him to join the army? You said he's been thinking about it secretly for years, but what pushed him to do it now? Is it just a fear that it's now or never, given the antidepressants would inhibit his ability to join at a later date?

Secondly, you say you're in the Southern Hemisphere. I also know nothing about the military, but you don't hear much about Australia/New Zealand (I'm assuming it's that part of the world) being at war. Do you know what would be involved if he join? Would he be deployed somewhere? Chances are, the accounts of being a 'military wife' that you're reading are from the US, where they're actively at war.

I really don't know what to say that can help you though. Perhaps just try and learn more about having a husband in the military wherever you are, as opposed to other countries where their experiences would be different. Also try and get to the root of why he wants to do this - what he expects to get from it, how he thinks it will improve his life. Maybe if you understand his decision better, it will help you come to terms with it. Or he might realise that he has unrealistic expectations.

Finally, the emotions you're experiencing are perfectly normal, so don't obsess over them too much.

Spinach

Hi OP, I have a lot of sympathy with your situation. Just a few thoughts that occur to me.

Self-absorption or selfishness can be a symptom of depression. Also, impulsive, unrealistic plans or grandiose ideas often crop up with the manic phases of bipolar disorder/manic depression. You'll know better than I do if this is a factor in his particular illness.

Of course, if joining the army was always in the back of his mind, it doesn't mean it's part of his illness now that he's seriously thinking of doing it. But it might mean that there is no reasoning with him that this was not in your joint plan when you moved your lives down there... very difficult.

On the one hand, I think you can take some comfort in that the military almost certainly conduct their own tests of mental as well as physical fitness of applicants, and even if the medication itself is not in his records, that does not mean the symptoms themselves will not show up - they will surely find out if someone is not psychologically in a good place, or maybe if they are trying to join up for the "wrong" reasons (escaping his problems?)

However, even if he should be rejected, you still have the problem that he doesn't see the problem of "abandoning" you after everything you've done to support you both and build up the relationship. If he did get rejected on psychiatric grounds, just maybe it would give him the nudge he needs to take up the treatment.

Another thought is that, unfair as it is, for your own peace of mind you will have to think differently about everything you have put into the relationship so far. Try to train yourself to think that rather than "for him", all the choices you made were the best decisions you could have made at the time for YOURSELF - because you were deriving happiness from the relationship and had your own vested interests in it going well. The other way, only bitterness lies.

And finally, should he get accepted, it might be time to focus on yourself again and either open that cake shop, or return to that challenging career you once had. Look for the opportunities in being left with all this time and energy to yourself that you previously spent propping up him and his family!

How Strange

OP, from the tone of your post I'm getting the sense that you've constantly indulged your husband in whatever he wanted to do. That's not a bad thing but it's not necessarily good if you're the one always indulging and he's the one being indulged.

Have either of you done things in your relationship that benefited you rather than him?

Also, I have to say that the first thought that jumped into my head when I read he wanted to join the army after being diagnosed with depression was bipolar. I've no medical background but that was just my initial impression.

Personally I think your husband is acting like a selfish ass and you're being far too accomodating. Marriage is supposed to be about two people and not about one person making concessions to make the other person happy. Your husband seems to pursue happiness at the cost of your mutual relationship.

Cheap Thrills!

Spinach wrote: »

Also, impulsive, unrealistic plans or grandiose ideas often crop up with the manic phases of bipolar disorder/manic depression.

+1

Minute I read it I thought manic/hypomanic episode. Obviously am not a doctor but you should get him back to his own doc and assessed for bipolar.