My husband and I were high school sweethearts. We got together in our freshman year of college, and moved in together during our Junior and Senior years. We've been together for 5 years, and married for 8 months. Lately, he has become distant. We've never experienced any problems before. He feels like he is a failure, and he thinks that I deny that I think he is a failure. He believes that if I leave for a month to give him time, he will get better. I told him I'm not leaving. He says he so desperately wants to fix what is wrong with him. He says he is experiencing emotional pain of having this inner conflict of wanting to be alone and not wanting to hurt me. I don't know what to do. Me leaving is not an option. Part of me feels like this is an immature approach to dealing with real life. We got married, we moved, he started a career. All of this has happened in the past 2 months. That's when things started to get weird. Any suggestions?

I think your husband may be overwhelmed, because my boyfriend acted the same way when he was in school and having a job at the same time. He told me that the stress of having to go to school and work, one right after the other, made spending time with me seem like a chore because I was disappointed when I couldn't spend time with him. He told me he missed "how it used to be," i.e. when he was single and he didn't have any responsibilities for another person. It did seem very immature to me, but he just wasn't used to it. Since getting married, moving in, AND starting a career are all big events within a short span of time, I'll bet that once he adjusts to his new life, he'll be able to focus his feelings on you again. The physical abuse, however, has never happened to me, though I can say that all of the stress made my boyfriend very irritable, and we fought a lot verbally. Try talking to him about it when he seems in a good mood, and see if there's any way you can relieve his stress without leaving.