marriage

There’s a story on this site that never, unfortunately, gets old. It’s about depressed men breaking up their relationships as a misguided way to get well and find fulfillment. The psychotherapist, David Wexler, has good ideas about how men can change the experience of their closest relationships without leaving. He looks at the problems of […]

Living with depressed partners can mean living without the feelings of love that are at the heart of every relationship. What is it about depression that could turn intimate companions into cold and blaming strangers? Readers ask about this over and over as their partners start blaming them for their own unhappiness and want out […]

Depression spreads through the closest relationships almost like a communicable disease. I learned the hard way that the illness didn’t happen to me alone. It happened to my children, my friends, and most of all to my wife. The pull of depression took me away from her and everyone else. I often felt I was […]

Many couples manage to survive depression with the help of marital therapy, even though most relationship therapies aren’t designed to deal with the added problem of a mood disorder. I’ve been doing a little research and have found that most therapy and counseling for couples doesn’t have a good track record. In fact, research links […]

Several readers have asked about the best ways to respond to warning signs and symptoms of depression in their partners. The illness tends to separate two people in many ways, so the question always arises: What can I, the well partner, do when the symptoms start to push us apart? I think the first thing […]

I remember years ago talking with a friend about his recent divorce and remarriage and mentioning the stressful time my wife and I had been having at that time. He bluntly suggested: Well, why don’t you leave? I told him I wouldn’t do that since I thought the problems were as much on my side […]