Help evaluating LRT progress

[Olya]

This sounds more like my wife.

Well, then if there is a future for you two, here's my advice to you:

1. Always remember that she cannot change - she has been set this way since she was about 3 years old. She can make great strides at keeping a lid on her temper. Appreciate those strides. However, realize that there will come a time when she will blow her gasket. Don't accuse her of being disingenuous about her changes or blame her for going back on those changes. Neither of those things will be true.

2. Affection works best. The uglier and fierier she is, the more she needs it. (Obviously, she has to agree to work on the relationship before you can offer it.) I promise you, when outbursts happen, she's having an out-of-body experience where she watches a stranger standing in her skin and yelling at her husband. A hug, an "I love you," a "hush, it's okay" goes a long way to end that. Also, you'll be the hero.

I don't mean to be presumptuous at all, but have you ever wondered if he has some kind of mental thing going on? I know you mentioned the low testosterone issue and even that he may be crazy, but I don't know how serious you were in a clinical sense. I don't know much about the area, but things like disassociating himself don't really sound normal.

Crazy is just a word we throw out, and it can have many negative connotations... But yes, of course I have. Depression, midlife crisis, fear of abandonment. Sometimes he reminds me of a hunted animal. He just gets that look in his eyes.

You know what precipitated this latest desire to get a divorce? Really the same thing that precipitated the last one exactly 1 year ago: I told him I was feeling unhappy and neglected because I barely hear from him when I'm not at home during the week.

Suddenly, he is deeply unhappy living with me, he doesn't really love me, I have an idea of an ideal husband in my head that he cannot live up to, and I only drive home to get a "reprieve" from school (translation: not to see him specifically).

That's right! He'd rather divorce me than text me about how his day went!

When I get some time, I'm actually going to run down the midlife crisis list and check off everything that applies. It's so sad that it's almost funny.

I understand the frustration too of his refusal to receive proper medical treatment. My wife was actually diagnosed with something as a teenager, I can't remember what exactly right at this moment, maybe manic depression. She admits she could have a mood disorder and they run in her family. But, of course, she will not try to find out for sure or get help because it can't go on the military record. I am all for avoiding meds if you can and she has seemed to manage fairly well at this point if she does have something, but I have a fundamental problem with the way that military members are pushed to refuse seeing a doctor for fear of their careers.

Same. There is nothing that he can do. If he goes to counseling on post, it's not confidential. If he gets antidepressants or testosterone boosters, or both, he will be undeployable. I have offered to pay for off-post counseling the minute I start working. However, medications would still be out of the question because they would show up on a urine test. It is a system that encourages people to get more and more dysfunctional.

Sometimes, I think that my greatest sin against him is knowing him the way he was before all this happened. I can tell that he is never genuinely happy. He can't lie to me about it. That's why he prefers the company of people who either don't know him well enough to tell or don't care. I suspect that this is also why he avoids his mother.