Smilie - you did nothing. Even if you completely failed as a husband this still wouldn't be about you. And you know you didn't completely fail, so stop eating the pain she's feeding you. WW is miserable, she is in a position to do what ever makes her happy. That includes but is not limited to ditching her MR and getting a new guy, ditching her old car and getting a new one, ditching her wardrobe, friends, family members, job. Whatever she thinks in that moment that will relive the pain she's feeling or fill the hole she has that's the path she'll take. Once again while all of the things she says and does seem personal everything she's doing has absolutely nothing to do with you. Even when she tries to frame you as the problem in the MR you need to remember that her brain and the people in her life need to make her illogical and emotionally driven actions seem logical. Logically if you're a shite H that was holding her back then everything she's doing is totally logical. But you aren't the issue. The gaping hole in her psyche is. You have to work on detaching. This will only break you if you allow it to.
CW, Steve, LH - As to unconditional love, there's no such thing. All love is conditional. If your child is a serial killer you're still going to love them but you're not going to love them the way you loved them as a baby. Love evolves and changes. You don't even have unconditional love with pets unless maybe you're the pet. (I dare you to tell me that love is unconditional for the human when you're scrubbing sh!t out of the carpet) We all have boundaries, lines, conditions. We all grow and change and so does our love. The hope is to have a love that fosters many iterations and can withstand all of those iterations. That's the closest to unconditional that we'll ever get.
As to the depression, I know for a fact my depression took a huge toll on my MR. It's made almost all of my relationships strained at one point or another. This most recent bout, which happened to be probably one of my worse since my teen years, nearly destroyed my MR for 2 reasons.
1) because my H was ill equipped to handle a relationship with a person who is mentally ill and is need of help, a person who is mentally ill and gets help but needs time to adjust to medication, CBT and regular talk therapy, and a person who's mental health is being exacerbated by grief and cPTSD due to prolonged interaction with the person who gave them cPTSD. He has to own that he didn't understand what was happening or how to be a good partner to someone suffering like that. Instead he became depressed as well and decided I personally was the problem. That is fault he could've easily addressed and it took us falling apart completely before he even began to understand that this is a failing.
2) was because I got help way too late. I knew I needed help. In reality looking back I probably should've been put in inpatient for a short period of time or intensive outpatient. I was not ok. But because I was functional both of us were able to pretend that it was fine and I was fine. But I lashed out in anger. My hygiene/personal upkeep wasn't the best. You couldn't like smell me at a distance or anything, but I wasn't exactly taking care of myself either. My friendships were taking a back seat because I didn't have the emotional energy required to be a friend but I was also isolating because you know depression. Which then led to my H thinking I was relying on him for all my needs which he unilaterally decided he was going to try to meet. Which led to resentment because he couldn't met them. Which led to more resentment because as soon as he felt bad about himself in the relationship he started checking out and it required me to do more heavy lifting in all aspects in our life. Which in turn made me all the more pessimistic about the world and him and our MR. And it was a downward spiral. I got worse, he got worse, we got worse.
Depression makes things incredibly complicated, and I often say I'm grateful that what happened happened even though I wish it could've been different. H's A woke me up, it pushed me to get deeply into treatment instead of just tiptoeing my way in. I knew if I didn't get a handle on what I was dealing with I wouldn't survive the A or my MR falling apart. That if I didn't focus entirely on saving myself the grief from everything would quickly eat me alive. Because of that I think there is merit to a partner having to walk away to stop the resentment cycle. To stop the cycle in general. I also think there's merit to no one, no one is required to stand by a partner who is abusive, addicted, or is refusing help for their mental health. That isn't conditional. That isn't a violation of vows. That's saving yourself and your kids before that partner takes the whole ship down with them.
