I was in a long term relationship of 3.5 years with a guy that ended really badly, unexpectedly and hurtfully and just wanted some help understanding a few things ??especially with regards to the ways him developing depression might have affected his actions towards me as I??ve found it quite hard to accept his behavior after he developed the illness.
Basically, we were very in love but things went pretty wrong very fast and I was left confused and feeling betryed and let down. I know I have made mistakes and let "love" cause me to be less than sensible but I felt at the time it was the right thing to do.
Our relationship was quite a whirlwind and we fell very deeply in love and he asked me to move in with him after nine months of dating long distance. So it meant relocating and I had a very good job, which they thankfully agreed to let me continue to do from home once I moved ?? but at a cut salary. I had a child, so it was quite a big step but I felt the future was as a family together which is what he very much wanted.
We blended finances very quickly with him paying the rent on our house and me paying the bills and food. During the first two years of the relationship we earned roughly the same amount of money and a few things happened in his life which put us into debt ?? which we took on jointly and I was fine with.
Over that period, I was adjusting to living in a new place and not having friends and family around or a job outside the home, which to be honest was difficult on me but I couldn??t envisage life without him so it never occurred to me to feel negatively about any of this or feel any resentment.
In the last year, the small business I was working for went out of business very unexpectedly and I was left unemployed. Without my salary we didn??t have any money at all to live on at all and we spiralled into debt over a few months of trying to make ends meet.
I could not find other work anywhere that fit around childcare and living with him I didn??t qualify for any financial assistance and every job I could find locally would not have even really covered the cost of transport and childcare, so I decided to start up on my own going freelance.
We didn??t argue or fight over money, but I did feel that he was burying his head in the sand over it and the onus was on me to sort the problem out.
I was working crazy hours to try and bring in freelance contracts, and was also doing all the housework and childcare too and he sort of carried on like he was before.
He was in a relatively low paid job he was over-qualified for and I gently tried to get him to look at other jobs as he could have moved to a much better paid one but for whatever reason he wouldn??t.
I was making big cut backs, not going out, even stopped getting haircuts and started cutting my own hair and he was spending money on silly things like surprise weekends way for me or new sport equipment.
I was making budgets in Excel and he wasn??t sticking to them and didn??t even seem to really want to look at them or discuss it.
I was suggesting we downsize our home and his car and he didn??t want to do either.
I was a bit frustrated by feeling like he wasn??t taking it seriously, and was very stressed, but generally speaking I really loved him, we were happy with each other in every way except for this and so I figured he was obviously just not cut out for dealing with problems like this and I was fine with taking it on.
He then got depression which I think came about over a year of being in quite stressful debt and over a few months he stopped wanting to get out of bed or do anything and he stopped sleeping and started drinking heavily.
I was never really worried about our relationship because it was basically just unthinkable to me for us to be anything less than a team and I was determined to sort out the finances on my own and help him to get better.
Then his depression escapated to it being really very bad, he was suicidal and had to be signed off work, and then he left me!
And he said it was all my fault, blamed me and my job loss and supporting me and my child as the cause of his debt and depression and he went around telling everyone else this too.
I was just left really flabberghasted, because he'd asked me and DC to move in with him and I had given up a life to do that. I had supported him through his debt and his illness and accepted his inability to assist in tackling our financial problems and I would always hve been financially better off without him - yet he was somehow blaming me completely for a situation i was in because of him.
I have really found it hard to cope with the things he said and did while very depressed, in terms of the fact that he seemed quite aggressive towards me, very blaming towards me, very unreaonable, illogical, unwilling to discuss things fairly and I felt scapegoated completely. He was also really unkind, cold and told me he had stopped loving me after he got depression which hurt me a lot.
I understand the situation we were in was a ticking timebomb, that stresses like that put relationships under strain and if they are not strong enough the "crack" under the pressure and I can see mistakes I probably made in contributing to all of this but I suppose what really hurts me is how he was just so selfish and heartless and nasty to me. The depression has either really changed him, or I never knew him at all and i was wondering if anyone with experience of depression in a spouse or partner or perhaps with it themselves could tell me if this might have influenced his behvior and been a partial cause of why he was just....well...so horrible to me?
The week before he left he was telling me how wonderful I was, how he wnated to get married when we had the money, how he could never cope with life without me and the next minute every bad thing in his life was all my fault and he didn't love me anymore.