We've been together ten years, married for just over two. We love each other deeply and get along well, but 2020 has been difficult for us. My wife has always had generalized anxiety disorder but had a great deal of difficulty seeking therapy or medication for it (only just starting to consider the latter yesterday after months of sustained tension and fighting). For my part, I went through therapy for a couple of months about the issues outlined in this post but had to stop because I couldn't afford it and because individual counseling for me could only do so much about issues related to someone else.
Much of her anxiety is related to health and wellness; she obsessively Googles, she constantly asks whether a bump or mark is something worse, and so on. COVID has made it worse, to the point where we get everything delivered and do not leave the house under any circumstances. (She even insists on masks when we go to take the trash or get packages from the lobby of our apartment building, both 30-second tasks that still cause her hours of anticipatory stress.)
We're both work from home full time now, in a small two-bedroom apartment with few opportunities for space or boundaries, which is really wreaking havoc on our dynamic. Even when things are good, they get bad on a dime because she gets worried about something that's happened forever ago, or we're preparing to do in the future. (Household tasks, including trash, dishes, and laundry, are constantly put off because it stresses her out to think about doing them. Keep in mind that this is even when I do them, which is much of the time.)
At this point, her hands are papier-mache (red, rough, covered in exzema) from insisting on washing aggressively for 20+ seconds at a time multiple times. She also aggressively manages and controls my behavior, from handwashing to asking frequent questions about whether I touched a package we've quarantined for 1-2 days, even accidentally. I'm not allowed to see close friends and neighbors, even masked and distanced -- or rather, I'm technically *allowed* to but I can tell it's under extreme duress and that she'll be worried I caught something for the rest of the day.** She's convinced that airborne and surface transmission are Enough of a Thing to not even risk, which is why we can't touch objects or walk through spaces our neighbors in our small apartment building may have walked through at some point without a mask.
Her thought process is to get to 100% no risk of COVID, no matter the cost to our sense of happiness and well-being.
Even when I follow the agreed-upon rules for COVID prevention, and beyond just to make her feel better, it feels like most things I do require her to ask 20 questions to follow up with me anyway, just to make sure everything is okay. Often, the questions are so overwhelming in their frequency or fastidious in their detail that I don't know how to answer them, which just fuels her paranoia that I've touched something that was conceivably touched by someone who could have had COVID days ago.
I feel neither trusted nor respected as a result, and that I've got more of a supervisor than a spouse. I feel as though I've been incredibly patient these last nine months, but that patience is admittedly wearing very thin, to the point where it's harder and harder to entertain all of these requests and questions and demands.
It was stressful even two months in, but nine months into it I'm truly reaching my limits. I've expressed thoughts of self-harm to her, and I'm exhausted all the time. I'm terrified of asking for things I want/need for fear of making her stressed at the prospect of the miniscule risk it'll take for me to do it.
The frustrating part of all of this is that she's acutely aware of how unreasonable her behavior is, but she literally can't control it. She'll follow me around to ask me a million questions, or I'll feel her eyes on me, we fight or I ask her to please give me space, then she comes back later and says she's sorry. But I just wish it didn't happen in the first place, you know? I try to be as calm, patient and clear as I can about what her behavior is doing to us, and how I'm feeling, but she'll either deeply internalize it into her being 'the bad guy', or agree with me but say it's out of her control.
I'm really hurting and I don't know what to do. It's affected my mood, diet and sense of well-being greatly. Especially with the prospect of more months until we could conceivably get vaccinated.
Does anyone else have these similar experiences? Am I being unreasonable for wanting to advocate for myself? Are there any strategies or tactics I can use to get through the next few months without major psychological damage?
Tl;dr - wife is becoming stiflingly anxious and controlling about COVID behaviors to the point where I feel extremely trapped in our home and our marriage, and I'd love some advice on how to get through it.
**This part makes me feel particularly gaslit, considering just last month she felt comfortable enough having us drive cross-country to spend a week over Thanksgiving with her family. (No COVID cases from it, last we checked, so bullet dodged there, but it was something I didn't feel comfortable doing.)
Submitted December 23, 2020 at 10:20AM by throwawayjd184 https://ift.tt/3mL21hS
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