We Tried to Stay Married Despite Mental Illness. Here's Why We Failed.

Depending on which source you look at, and the specific mental illness in question, a partner with a mental illness increases the risk of divorce by 20 to 90 percent. According to a multinational survey study, bipolar disorder specifically makes marriages 80 percent more likely to end.

After 12 years of marriage, my ex-wife and I failed to beat those odds. I’m writing this in hopes that some couples can see my mistakes and experience more success than we did.

We met in Japan, while both of us were there teaching English, and discovered we had grown up 90 miles apart. We knew the same locations, had the same favorite bookstore. We’d been to three of the same concerts and had one riot in common. People said it was meant to be.

Things went well for the first six years. We traveled together, indulged in our shared love of martial arts, high-energy music, and Dungeons & Dragons. We ran a business together. We adopted a son and did our best to raise him right and spoil the heck out of him. We had our share of fights, but overall it was a pretty nice time. Near the end of that sixth year, we had a biological son together.

Here’s the thing about bipolar disorder: It typically shows up either during puberty, or in a person’s mid-twenties. It’s hereditary, and my wife’s father had bipolar symptoms so severe he took medication under a court order, but we got married in our thirties so we figured she was in the clear. 

As it turns out, bipolar disorder also occasionally shows up immediately after a woman gives birth.

I became judgmental, even self-righteous. I was not the partner she needed in those moments.

About two weeks after our son was born, my wife experienced a manic episode where she went without sleep for three days. She ended up hospitalized for two weeks, and during that time received her diagnosis. At first, I was properly supportive. When she got her rest-of-her-life prescription, she was alarmed and a little embarrassed. I told her we knew both of us would end up on some medication or another, whether it was for high blood pressure or some other thing. I did double duty with our newborn so she could rest, and read, and build new skills. We moved from breastfeeding to bottles to ensure she got an uninterrupted sleep. 

Things fell apart over the next five years. Some of the specifics will remain between us, but I can share the mistakes I made and what I learned from them. 

When somebody gets diagnosed with a mental illness, it’s just like getting diagnosed with any other illness or injury. I wouldn’t ask a partner with a broken leg to join me running a marathon, and I wouldn’t think a partner with ALS just wasn’t trying hard enough. My ex-wife’s illness prevented her from fulfilling her role as a partner and a mother the same way she had before she was diagnosed, and I confess to my shame that I didn’t handle it well. Especially when her emotional regulation started affecting the kids, I became judgmental, even self-righteous. I was not the partner she needed in those moments. 

We fell into some unhealthy and unproductive patterns. When somebody gets a diagnosis — either for mental illness or something more visibly physical — they have two choices. They can use the specifics of the diagnosis to figure out how to make things work, or they can use the label of the diagnosis to let them off the hook for their accomplishments and welfare. The people in their support networks make a similar choice about whether or not to view that person as a human with a defined, treatable challenge. 

At the time, I viewed it as her failure. I saw her leaning into her symptoms instead of caring for our children or managing her career, and viewed it as a conscious choice. In retrospect, I can see how I enabled and infantilized her over those first few years, ultimately viewing her as a third child in my family rather than a co-adult, partner, and peer. 

I also failed to manage my self-care well. Because her symptoms peaked immediately after the arrival of our newborn, I took on the lion’s share of that task. I took care of our new arrival, worked my job, helped our oldest child with homework and coached his wrestling team, and managed the household chores. In the few spare hours I had available, I got some sleep. I missed out on social time, gym time, reading, and all of my recharge activities. 

Over a couple of years, that level of effort turned into exhaustion. The exhaustion became resentment, then anger, and slipped into contempt. Ask any marriage counselor what the biggest predictor of divorce is. They won’t tell you resentment, or substance abuse, or even infidelity. They’ll tell you things are over if one or both partners feel contempt for the other. 

And that’s the other big mistake we — I — made: We got help too late. By the time we sat down on a therapist’s couch, I was already checked out. We went through the motions, but I did not give it 100 percent. A marriage deserves full effort, and I could have given it in those first few years. But we didn’t start the real work until I was no longer, well, doing the work.

I wish I had better advice, but winning coaches rarely come from losing teams. The best I can hope for is that folks who read this can catch these missteps as they’re developing, and before they metastasize into something fatal to their relationship.