I feel so lost... I've posted my story around the boards a few times, but it always feels like my situation is too unique to fit into any of the normal categories.

To recap, my husband decided about a month ago that he was no longer willing to make this marriage work. He was clearly depressed, and since he's bipolar, everyone who knew him immediately became concerned that this dissatisfaction with our marriage was a big sign that a bad depresison was coming on. He had all the warning signs... Too many to really list, but needless to say I convinced myself, as did his mother and my own mother, that the problem wasn't the marriage, but his untreated bipolar disorder. We hustled him into counseling, which he went to willingly, and I started seeing my own therapist in hopes of getting a better grasp on how to work in a relationship with someone with that level of mental illness.

Well, it wasn't so simple. A few weeks after he said he wanted me to "set him free", he decided to move out. He took the opportunity to move all his stuff out while I was out of town. By this time we'd been through all the initial drama and meltdowns and whatnot, so I let him move out. We saw each other a couple days a week, he was still clearly miserable, I felt horrible. Then we didn't talk for 4 days... At day three, I called to check up on him, but he never returned my phone call. I was already worried that he might be contemplating suicide, so I was frantic... I ended up calling his cell phone at 3 AM over and over, just trying to get him to pick up so I'd know he was alive. He just turned the cell phone off after the first two times I called.

A day or so later, I decided to check the internet history on the web browser he uses and found out one tiny piece of information that he neglected to mention: He had begun seeing an ex-girlfriend last month, right before he started asking for a divorce. I calmly confronted him about it and he told me that nothing had happened, that she was involved in a relationship and that he felt bad about sneaking around behind my back like that. I believed him.

Yesterday, however, I flat out asked him if he wanted this marriage to work and he said no, he didn't. He felt we got married "to the wrong people". He didn't want to be in a relationship where he felt emptiness and was reduced to cheating on me to try to fulfill that. I then asked him if he'd already had another woman lined up. He said yes. I asked who. He said "who do you think?"

So, we've only been separated for a little over a week, but he's already been spending time with the ex-girlfriend. He said they haven't had sex... Big deal! He's still having an affair! And that time he didn't answer my 3 AM phone calls? He admitted to ignoring my calls because he was with her.

But that's beside the point. I finally decided last night that I couldn't keep running around in these circles... I decided to grant him his divorce. Called an attorney and everything. Settled who gets what with him, and began looking forward to the future.

But now I'm having serious doubts. I just don't know what to do! How are you supposed to "marriage build" with a spouse who isn't interested in keeping the marriage intact? I have needs that haven't been met in a looooong time, and he admits that he's been doing a poor job of meeting those needs. But he just doesn't see how he can make this marriage work when he feels it's so wrong.

I feel like we never gave this marriage a real shot... We've only been married for a year. I'll admit that I was happy for most of that year, until this summer when things got really hectic and I went back to school fulltime while trying to manage a job, and we drifted apart. I always believed that we were going to pull through this tough time, because every couple hits a rough patch every now and then. A part of me still wants to believe that... But I feel like I have two choices:

1) Stand by him and let him work this stuff out, in the meantime putting my whole life on hold in hopes that he'll snap out of it and realize he wants to be married to me (which is a long shot at this point)

2) Divorce him and cut my losses.

I mean, not only am I dealing with a mentally ill person, but one that doesn't want to put in the necessary effort to make this marriage work, or even to save it. I seriously don't think he wants a divorce... I think it scares him that I'm doing this, and he's worried if it's the right thing to do, just like I am. But he's got this OW, someone from the past, someone he's been hung up on for years now, long before he met me, and he's gotten her on a gigantic pedistal right now and it's too tempting. He thinks she's the One. Whether he always will, I don't know.

I'm just so confused and heartbroken. I really feel like the best option for me is to divorce him, only because I can't sit there and let him have an affair just to see if it changes his mind about me. A part of me even thinks, well, divorce him and maybe in a few years he'll be emotionally stable enough to try to work it out for real. I mean, it wouldn't be the first time a couple divorced only to remarry one another. Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to stop everything and wait around until he wakes up and smells the coffee. I'm going on with my life, school, friends, living it to the fullest each day.

Even though divorce goes against everything I believe, I just feel like it's the only option that is healthy for *me*, no matter how unhealthy it feels right now. I read through the MB website and other "save your marriage" books and websites and they all pretty much say there's not a whole lot you can do if your spouse doesn't want to work it out, too. And so that's where I am: Stuck between a rock and hard place.

<small>[ September 24, 2004, 03:39 AM: Message edited by: Sarahbellem ]</small>

HI
I have never faced dealing with someone with bipolar so I do not know what advice to give you. But I am here and there a not a lot of us around at this time of day ans I just wnat to send you hugs and support. I am so sorry for the situation you find yourself in.

My advice would be to take some time out for you. Get some sleep, eat some good food. Go out with your friends. See a counseler to help yo with what you are feeling. See a doctor if you are having trouble sleeping or you are feeling depressed.

Read all you can of this site. I have seen posts here from poters who have had spouses with Bipolar. Maybe put that in your title of your post to draw them out.

You don't have to make such an important decision about your life overnight. Take you time. Think about it. You are probably in a pretty emotional state right now so soon into all of theis. Not the best time to make such an important decision. Someone gave me this advice early on and it proved to be a godsend to me. It gave me permission to just feel what I was feeling without feeling compelled to snap into action.

Anyway, I am sure someone with some more specific advice to your situation will be along in the meantime
hugs
C&S

I knew the divorce was more or less innevitable, so I started my own plan of action. I've moved to the next city over to be closer to school and I'm basically starting fresh. I see my friends more now than I have in a long time. I keep busy to the best of my ability. I force myself to be active and pursue the things that are important to me, hobbies, etc. I'm seeing a therapist, but admittedly I've only been to one session so far and that was when I thought that the marriage still could be saved. Things have changed so drastically in the last 48 hours.

So, I'm not wallowing over here waiting for H to realize the error of his ways. I didn't want to make the decision for the divorce, because I'm not the one who wanted it, but I just couldn't keep hanging myself out there to be an emotional punching bag like that. I knew that my husband wouldn't flat out ask for a divorce, but would pussyfoot around the issue, continuing to see this OW on the side and tell me all the while our marriage was a big mistake, blah blah blah. But he would never initiate a divorce, and I cannot see myself hanging on for dear life if he's so damn sure he doesn't want to be married to me. So, I decided to hell with it and started the process. I can't say this decision would ever be made in the right frame of mind... Believe me, I've spent the last month weighing the alternatives, trying different tactics, reading book after book about marriage, but it just comes down to having to protect myself from his emotional problems or whatever it is that got us into this mess.

But at the same time I'm so confused. I don't want the divorce, but here I am getting one. I want to make the marriage work, but he doesn't. I really see no point in doing all the gymnastics to save this marriage if he doesn't want it. And in this situation, I do not want to stay married to someone who is having an affair on me, just out of the desperate hope that he's going to wake up from the "fog" at some point.

What makes it so much harder is that he's so unfailingly nice and sincere... I mean, in some ways it would be easier if he'd just flat out reject me, but he's so quiet and gentle it just kills me. Yet, I haven't had my needs met in what seems like forever... If ever. I don't know if I bought into a pack of lies and just deluded myself that he was the one I could spend my life with, or what.

I know I'm not perfect, but I'm was a damn good partner to him the four years we were together. He, however, has been so hung up on this OW, since before we even met, that it's all he can do. He obsesses about her constantly. He's a musician and wrote a song about her last year, after he first got in contact with her (right before our wedding, which he subsequently tried to call off because of his rekindled feelings for her), and he would sit down in the kitchen and play that song over and over. I have been living with this OW the whole time we've been together, but she's been a figment of his imagination. Now that she's really back in his life, he is compelled to find out if she's really the One, at the expense of our marriage. And he's totally convinced that we are not right for each other.

Maybe so. I figure I've been in love more than once and found love again after I was rejected, so the odds are in my favor that I'll find it at least once more after this. Right now a part of me wants him so badly, but it wants an idea of him that doesn't exist anymore. It wants the person who loved me enough at one point to want to be with me no matter what, but that person is dead.

He says he respects me, that he knows I'll do great things with my life, but that he HAS to see where this relationship with the OW takes him. There's just no way around it, and I have no choice but to step aside and let him self destruct. Divorce is my way of protecting myself, I guess. I don't think it's the kind of decision you can make in a rational frame of mind... Or maybe that's just it: I am in a rational frame of mind, and I'm still hurting at the same time.

I don't know if this post makes any sense... I just wish there were some sure signs to go by that I could lock into. Talk about being in a fog! My husband's fog is so thick, it's overtaken my life, too!