Member-only story
“In Sickness and In Health”
I never knew how depression would rock my marriage
Why?
People ask me, “Why, after 43 years of marriage, did you get a divorce?” My automatic, canned response is that my husband had an affair, announced that he didn’t love me anymore, and walked out immediately.
All of that is true. He was the heartless bastard, and I was the innocent victim.
But with the passage of time, especially since our divorce a year ago, we have come to identify an intruder that had been omnipresent for years. As two therapists, we certainly had some appreciation of its toxicity, but not a deep recognition of the pinpoint destruction it could wreak on a couple and family.
There is no underestimating depression
Depression casts a wide net, capturing its sufferers as well as the people who care about them.
It hits victims in almost every area of functioning, turning them into ghosts and strangers to those closest to them.
The illness is so relentless that it makes many people exhausted from efforts that make little impact.
Depression is greedy, depriving loved ones of the companionship, intimacy, support and connection that once enriched and defined their lives.
It is a loss on many levels, with no promises of when, if and how a person will be restored.
It is a poison that spreads from the initial sufferer to his partners and family in a contagion of sorts. It renders people lonely, confused and helpless, unsure how to ease their loved one’s suffering.
But the suffering spreads and has deleterious effects on even the youngest members of a family. And that suffering can look very different from one person to another, depriving people of “the answer.”
My experience
I became depressed in my mid-thirties. On the surface, it looked like I “had it made.” I was happily married, the mother of a blessing of a child. I had earned my Ph.D., completed a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship, was settled into an Assistant Professorship. I was close with my extended family.
