My wife

This is going to be long. I'm sorry, for many reasons, that life has not been more concise for me.

As complete an accounting as I'm attempting for this to be, it will still be unfinished and incomplete, because there are more details than I am capable of remembering all at once. I haven't been writing things down as they occurred, or even telling a single other person about them -- classic slow-boiling frog scenario, I suppose. If you have questions, I'm eager to answer them to the best of my ability.

The purpose of me writing this here, now, is... I don't know. I think I just need to put this in writing, now. When I first started thinking about searching for a message board to write these things (A couple of weeks ago), I thought maybe I could get some advice out of it. Maybe I could find a way to stop my marriage from deteriorating, maybe I could find a way to help my wife seek some help. I think I'm coming to terms with how little I can do, now, but still -- PLEASE -- if you have any advice, or any particular guesses as to what's going on, any guesses on names to put to the symptoms I'll describe... I'd love to hear any response at all.

Back to the purpose of all this, I would like to say that I have no intention of making my wife the villain of the story. I don't want you to think that I'm blameless in all of this, because I've certainly made choices that I regret. This is just... life. It's messy and confusing and unbearable. It's not a story with a bad guy and a moral at the end. She has only ever done what she thought was right or helpful, with precious few exceptions.

I've been married for a bit over two years to my lovely wife. We'd been living together for four years, prior to that. I fully admit that we rushed into a committed relationship together as soon as we started dating, and I still don't regret doing so. I had a very lonely life and was depressed (I don't necessarily mean clinically depressed). She had just moved to the area recently, bravely coming to a big city nearly on her own (A mutual friend of ours, at the time, was living here as well and helped her secure a job) after living the entirety of her life in a small town 3.5 hours away. She'd had other relationships, none of which sound like they went well, and she didn't think she was interested in pursuing another one for awhile. Me? I was desperate for a relationship, haha. And had never had one before.

Things started off fantastically, even though occasionally we had very brief negative experiences that I never understood at the time. Our first Christmas together (Having dated for three months at that point; I met her family a week after dating, so yeah, she's VERY close with her family), we decided to spend it at her family's place (And always have since), but I made a stop at my sister's house first to drop off a present and say hi (We didn't see each other much. Nowadays, we do not see each other at all). Immediately when we left, my wife had a complete meltdown after having to make a difficult turn into (And then out of) a gas station for the journey, and literally screamed things into my face as I tried to help guide her out of the gas station to get back towards the freeway. How the gas station attendant was unintelligible (He had a mild accent), how she didn't need my help, how messed up the getting in and out to go the right direction was, how we were late getting to her parents' house, etc. Pretty miserable ride up there, needless to say. My first instinct was that I should get out of the car and bail on Christmas, but I was terrified to blow things with her and her family before even giving them a real chance yet. When she'd calmed down, I asked her to never scream at me again, because I found it unacceptable for our relationship. Entirely to her credit... she never has again! Not one time.

However, it's remained an issue (Lessening in typical intensity, over time) that she grows increasingly-agitated leading up to a trip home to her folks. Sometimes she gets full-blown pissed about my "timing", sometimes she simmers, sometimes she's just clearly agitated and antsy. She has a desk job where she can take off early whenever she wants to, and I have a manual labor job where I can only be off "early" if I physically complete the amount of work I have for the day -- this leaves me off "early" a lot, but around holidays and weekends it usually leaves me working "late". Being off early or late are concepts that don't even apply to my job; I simply always work until there's no more of the day's work to do. Regardless, if she does flare up (Usually she does not) over not leaving town as early as she'd like to, she always apologizes later. Apologies for ANY of her negative actions ALWAYS come remarkably swift, usually within the day but certainly well within two days.

She also has little love for my family. To an extent, I can understand this -- I've distanced myself from many of them as well, after all. Most of them are not considerate people, with strong religious convictions that eventually conflicted with my own take on life. My sisters are all stay-at-home moms who have babies until their bodies absolutely can't take it anymore (Leading to health problems, severely so in one case). My mom homeschooled us and we basically lived at church. However, they are kind, normal people whenever they're not being thoughtless. My brother is almost the exact same person as me, though older by ten years. He and his daughter are the only family I'm genuinely CLOSE with. My wife, on the other hand, focuses intently on how she perceives my sisters to make fun of her or look down on her when she's around. I've always chalked this up to them being thoughtless people, although I've never noticed an unusual interaction they've had with her. Regardless, nowadays I have no contact with my sisters.

Her family is adorable. She's the oldest of three siblings; her sister is blazingly smart and lives in a different big city, and her brother is a big petulant kid who still lives at home (At age 30) but is good-hearted at his core. I don't want to sidetrack onto her brother, but man, there's a lot going there that's sad to see. Their mom says (Behind his back) that he has some kind of autism (Undiagnosed, mind), but he acts pretty normal for a guy that's been spoiled to death by his mom for his entire life, never having to do one single thing he doesn't feel like doing. Never done laundry, or dishes, or vacuuming, or paid rent. He's had a job until a couple of months ago, and doesn't seem likely to ever try to find work again (He went to one interview and easily got the job, but refused it on the spot -- back just before he quit his current job). His parents are very sweet, the dad very old with some wrenchingly funny bad dad humor (He drives them all around; the mom and son essentially NEVER drive except to their own jobs) and the mom's always been very big-hearted and warm to me. She is 1000% the alpha in the family, though, and occasionally will quietly flip out in anger if something has her in a bad mood (It is never possible to tell what has her in the bad mood, although she commandeers all of the cooking and cleaning for herself and refuses to let anyone help in a meaningful way). It is no secret that she would love to wrap her children in her apron strings like mummies, and was distraught when my wife (And also her sister) moved away.

My wife moved away from her family home shortly after their house was burglarized. She'd lived in a small college town by herself while going to college, but that was her entire previous experience on her own (And during that time, she was nearly always going home for the weekend, having no college friends or any activities to keep her busy). She admits now that she no longer felt safe at home after the burglary, and that this is primarily what drove her to make such a drastic and unprecedented change in her life. Her mom was so upset that she stopped talking to her for a week or two.

There is little extended family on my wife's side (And, for comparison, my side has nephews and nieces and siblings bursting out of every seam). The only one that isn't a distant relative is the mom's sister... who I know very little about. Why?

She's crazy.

Not my words. I've literally never met her. She lives in their small town, left to her own devices, with no contact from any family. She apparently wanders around in a severely unkempt state, talking to herself, unable to recognize anyone in my wife's family that she happens upon in stores from time to time. She has never received an official diagnosis of any kind. They used to see her when she was living with her mother (My wife's grandmother), but that was twenty years ago and she seems to have always treated my mother-in-law and her children badly and lived in the house in a terrible state, so my wife's mom cut ties (Maybe when their mom passed). Now she only comes up as a joke that makes half of us deeply uncomfortable.

God, this isn't anywhere near helping me tell the story of my current relationship with my wife, even if it IS seemingly-necessary background information.

So, there I was, living comfortably with my not-yet-wife in my small apartment she'd moved into. I had everything I wanted. But she kept feeling... dissatisfied. That's fine, it's normal for people to have bigger goals than I do. She started talking about wanting to live in a house. This became an actual issue in our relationship, so when my brother decided to take a job in another state and asked if we wanted to rent his house, I jumped at the offer. Significant caveat: his daughter still lived at home and was taking college courses, and she would still live there at a significant discount to our rent. Now, I get along great with her, and have known her all her life. She hardly even lived "at home", because she's EXTREMELY active socially and has friends that she stays over at nearly all of the time. It's a nice big 3-bedroom house. She literally eats her own food because she's vegan and lactose-intolerant, whereas we are neither of those things. My wife seemed to jump at this chance right along with me, and had always seemed to get along fine with my brother and his daughter (Although I've always noticed that she's reserved/polite to them and never initiates any kind of contact with them).

Soon enough, we were living there, and something else came up as a relationship issue -- marriage. I thought that was fine and normal. Not really into the idea that marriage means anything more than the committed relationship living together we already had, but because it meant so much to her, I was happy to do it (Although as nervous on the wedding day as anyone else is, I expect). I flopped on the lame proposal but came back strong with a custom ring. I alienated most of my family for sure by not inviting kids and all of my extended family (So that the wedding wouldn't be 99% my family and 1% hers), although everyone had the tact to not mention it to me (Everyone did NOT have the tact to still attend, however. Or RSVP that they wouldn't be coming -- but that seems to be a general wedding problem, not specific to this situation). I took her last name because neither of us really liked mine (100% my choice, however. She woulda taken mine). Alienated even more of my family, not that we have been talking or seeing each other in a long time anyway. It's cool.

Did things get better after that? Um, no. More and more peculiar incidents with my wife keep happening, and I keep searching myself to find out what I'm doing wrong, or what I can do to help her feel better. She complains bitterly to me about the neighbor kids being in the driveway when she came home from work one time. She hates me for "not being on her side" (Other times for "not letting her just vent") by saying that they're just kids, and it's a shared driveway, and isn't the language she used kinda harsh? The neighbor dogs poop in our yard a couple of times. She freaks out that my brother had us sign a boilerplate rental agreement, instead of it just being a "family arrangement", and worries over it often. Near the end of our time there, she gets angry about my niece using her laundry supplies (Which she says she didn't do, but can't be sure that one of her friends didn't). She gets angry repeatedly about cleaning the house, citing that my niece never helps (She's... never home. Sometimes one day a week. And for the record, I am someone who was raised to do chores, and never stopped. I will ALWAYS help clean, even if it's at the in-laws' house).

She also wants a baby. That's news to me, as she claimed the opposite when we were starting out dating. I don't have strong feelings about it either way, other than being terrified of being a #######5 father like my dad, and feeling like I have nothing to provide a child with. We aren't people of means. We've always been on the verge of living paycheck-to-paycheck, just like most of the rest of this country has to. Anyway, we've also never used protection after moving in together, and I understand fully the responsibility that implies. I've never turned down the idea of having a baby, but she gets incensed or sad all the time that I'm not enthusiastic about it. After being together for years (Having sex quite often, throughout), she starts obsessively trying to bear a child. I don't think anything strange about this, because everyone always talks about biological clocks and such, and we're getting older. She buys handfuls of ovulation testers and pregnancy tests and sperm-friendly lube and whatnot. This kinda strains our usual sex life, just from the pressure of expectations. She goes a couple of times to fertility doctors to make sure there isn't a problem on her end. She refuses to entertain the idea that maybe I'M infertile, although I bring it up a few times and say I'll tag along next time she goes to a doctor about this and I can get my sperm checked out, a process that seems to be orders of magnitude more simple than determining if a woman is barren. She never went back to a doctor. I still haven't checked out my swimmers, because I've had more pressing concerns in other areas of our lives.

We moved out of the house into a condo the size of our original apartment. It's in a nice place, though, in a secluded part of the city that is nevertheless central to our jobs and the places we like to go. Instead of releasing all of the pressures of living in a house, though, it's somehow added more and more layers of anxiety and pressure on my wife's life. This condo is where I first thought that something MAJOR was wrong. That all of the somewhat-minor things began to coalesce in my mind into a huge warning sign.

My wife talks to her mom on the phone regularly. Several times a week. They're literally as close as WE are, to an embarrassing degree (I mean, seriously, how many moms know what their grown child's public hair looks like, and offers a strong opinion against it being shaved?). I don't think anything of it. Early one morning (I'm a night owl, my wife is a morning person), I start overhearing a phone conversation my wife is having while she's soaking in the bathtub. In it, she says conspiratorially that she thinks someone is messing with her products. Makeup, facewash, shampoo, etc. She says that her skin is getting damaged. She says that people follow her and give her weird looks. She says that she thinks my niece and her friends are behind it all. It's a long conversation, and I can only hear the half of it. Her mom doesn't seem to be doing anything but telling her to be careful and giving her safety advice. I'm not sure.

Well, this freaks me OOOOUT. As soon as she comes back into the bedroom, I tell her I heard everything, and we have a long and uncomfortable conversation where her takeaway is that I think she's nuts (I never say that word or anything like it, I just bring up the possibility of seeing a psychiatrist and make repeated assurances that I know my family very well, they do not intend her harm, and they have absolutely NO way of breaking into our condo), so she calls her sister in tears and asks if she thinks she's crazy. With no other information given, she gets the assurance that she's always been eminently reasonable.

This was the beginning of... how things are now. I think it happened over a year ago, now. At that time, she apparently hid a lot of things from me, fearing to upset our relationship. Nevertheless, she couldn't restrain herself from flipping completely out about seemingly-trivial security concerns.

First, it was the wifi password. She demanded that I change it, I saw no reason to change it, she wept and begged that I change it as a birthday present for her, that was all that she wanted, but her phone wifi connection was acting weird and sluggish and someone was messing with it so PLEASE just CHANGE it.

Then she bought a door sensor, that alerts our phones when the front door is opened. Again, this was something I HAD to set up or she wouldn't feel SAFE, and I rolled it into getting some fun home automation stuff that was mildly useful. Lights turn on if the door is opened, etc.

Then she demanded/begged/pleaded that I had to get some kind of security camera. There were a lot of thoughts on what kind of camera and where she most wanted it do be (At first, she wanted something on/in her car), but we settled one of those doorbell cameras.

Then she demanded/begged/pleaded that I had to get an indoor camera that wasn't connected to wifi, which she still believed could be compromised (Thanks to my dumb ass mentioning that, basically, wifi communication can be disrupted/jammed). I managed to find something cheap and motion-activated, but reliable.

I'll rewind in time a little. She's also been begging for us to move. Not just move, but to move to her home state... closer to her parents. I.e., she wants to move back to her tiny town. When this first came up, I was absolutely against moving to that town, but agreed to compromise and move to a town close to her sister. Her sister's been intending to move for a little while, now, and still hasn't nailed down a location... so this demand kinda morphed back into my wife just wanting to move back home, rather than continue to wait. Thanks to other reasons, I am extremely reluctant to blow up our life here just on the frankly-impossible chance that this specific change in location will prove to be the magical cure for what ails my wife. Most recently, my wife also threw out the idea of moving literally down the street here, which is quite doable (Also the absolute easiest possible move we could make)... but things have gotten so bad with her that there's simply no logical component to doing so. I'll get back to that, now.

My wife admitted some months back that her hands and face feel sticky and waxy constantly. This appears to be a large part of the reasoning that someone is messing with her stuff. For a brief while, she would point out things to me that she said were sticky... but stopped quickly, because I absolutely could not feel anything weird. When she was feeling at her lowest and most depressed, she would paw through her belongings on the bathroom floor and implore me to feel, say, a big soft makeup brush, with makeup dust flying off of it when she ran a finger through. It felt very soft and dry, just as it looked. She is incredibly down on herself and about life, and it's crushing the both of us. Before this particular stuff, she complained of a burning tongue/face/fingertips, and even mentioned it to a doctor but was apparently brushed off (Mind you, she is the LAST person to try to make a scene in public. She's incredibly quiet and reserved, when around ANYONE else. And she notably will NOT tell other people the entire truth about this stuff, besides the valiant attempts she makes to do so with her mom). I also didn't think much of it, until I realized it was connected to everything else. She stopped using our toothpaste and her toothbrush, which I also didn't realize was connected at the time because she covered it up by saying her dentist advised her to use a different toothbrush, and that she wasn't a fan of our toothpaste because she didn't feel like it really got her teeth clean.

Now she keeps thinking her stuff has been "messed with" on a regular basis, leading her to ever-tighter cycles of security, health complaints, and purchasing new products. It doesn't matter at all that I use the same things she does, although recently I told her she was free to use my toothbrush whenever she wanted to (And she took me up on the offer when she was briefly in a good mood, claiming that it seemed to help). A couple of times she's refused to drink tap water at home, even though that's near-exclusively what I drink (We don't have much else. She was bringing bottled water home, which yes, is a new development). That one seems off and on. We even have some water purifiers that she used to make us use, but we stopped doing it shortly after moving to the condo.

She started taking all of her products with her when she left the condo for work. Then she started a small lockbox which she maybe used once. Now she has a big toolbox-kinda-thing from her parents' house that she padlocks and always keeps her products in. Been a recent development with that, too: The other day, she noticed a scratch on top of her padlock, and that some paint has worn off the edge. It's a combination lock with cheap shiny paint on it, for reference. I guessed that, since the swinging point of the lock matched the path of the scratch, that she had accidentally scratched it herself. She immediately fell out of her good feelings into a pit of horror and despair and mistrust, telling her mother that the padlock was "gashed" (But sent a picture of the actual scratch as well), and demanding that I believe her that someone is messing with her stuff. I immediately put a matching scratch on the other side of the top of the lock, pointed out that she closes it with two hands in an awkward way (You can't see the top of the lock when trying to fasten it on this toolbox), and pointed out that the paint is rubbing off naturally where it is in contact with the rough-textured toolbox. No use. She hates me for not believing her.

In other news, sometimes she believes that my brother is behind all of this. Sometimes she believes that one of our new neighbors is behind it. She talks about how she just wishes she never would have reacted to any of it, so whoever's doing it wouldn't be getting the satisfaction of knowing they "got to her". One night she started imploring me to stop messing with her stuff. I mean, I don't blame her. If she followed any path of logic, eventually she reaches a place where either I'm behind it all, or she needs to get professional medical help. She's adamantly averse to either line of thinking, but most of all averse to being thought of as "weak" or "crazy". I've long since stopped having her around my friends and family, because she has so many stories now about how they hate her and how they say cruel jokes about her.

She has unpredictable highs and lows, but it's pretty much all low now. The highest she can get is to be full of regret and sadness. She's attempting to get a job in her hometown, now, and will move in with her parents (Alone) as soon as she secures one (Which is its own frustration, that I've been trying to support her through and help with). She thinks she can rebuild herself then, and only then.

Found out this morning that I was disinvited from Christmas a week ago. Found out on Thanksgiving (We celebrate alone, after having "real" Thanksgiving with her family the previous weekend so we can all make it, which we can't do in the middle of the week. Oh, on that weekend though, she kept hiding in the bedroom, and also told me tearfully that she didn't think we'd be together after these holidays) that she had applied for a job in her hometown and would be moving as soon as she got it (She didn't get it, though). Winter depression hasn't been going so well for me, haha. I am regularly blamed for everything by her, in-between her being sorry about everything and thinking that I'm not really being treated fairly in all this. I think her mom must think I'm a demon, by this point, but they've masterfully compartmentalized it all because we see her family at least once a month and they're still very pleasant to me.

My wife is not particularly skilled in communication, so I worry about how aware her mom actually is of what's going on. A couple months ago, they (That is to say, her mom, who wears all the pants there) legit had a relationship intervention talk with us (Well, with me, because I was the only one who didn't know about it in advance) when we were there. It was super awkward and mostly focused on if how SURE I was that my brother wasn't actually doing things to disrupt my wife's safety and peace of mind, but it was wrapped up in a serious talk about how our marriage was no longer a happy one, and they needed to know that their daughter was safe. It was not productive, but amicable. I don't blame them, because they know my wife a million times better than they know me, even after all this time.

I'm not sure what I'm doing now. I think I'm starting to worry about taking care of myself, finally. I've always kept hoping that there was more I could do for my wife if I could just find a way, but I've pleaded with her to seek out help so much that I have to keep rebuilding bridges to burn, and she's beyond over it. She's all but gone. I don't have a say in what she does, and have never tried to control her anyway. I've finally begun to try talking to her family about what's going on, out of concern for her. I was desperate for help and to have someone to talk to until pretty recently, and now I'm feeling that the battle is long over and lost. If I had any shot, surely I missed it. I never went behind her back to anyone, because of how that would look to her and because it could undermine the few relationships she has in life (She does not have friends. Our mutual friend turned out to be kinda #######5, and also moved). I haven't even told the people I'm closest to, for the same reasons and for the reason that she literally BLAMES THEM for so many things that just aren't reflective of reality.

So, there you go. That's most of the story, for sure. I don't know what else I can try to do to help her. I feel like I haven't done ANYTHING to help her. Our continued co-existence has become extremely painful and unpredictable, but I would still rather be with her than for her to feel alone. I don't know anything about psychology, and I'm bluntly truthful even when I try to be gentle and tactful. She refuses to try anything that would put her on the spot of having to divulge all of this information to a doctor. Last week, I kind of got her to agree to couples' counseling (Something we've done before, years ago, when I had no idea what was going on and she didn't either. It was unproductive), which I hoped could result in advise she would follow about doctors, but ever since she's been waffling HARD between reluctantly saying "OK, but I don't know why you want this NOW" and angrily implying (Without saying the actual words) that she definitely will not go. The last thing she agreed to was that I should just set up an appointment now despite her waffling. I don't expect her to follow through on this.

There's reasoning for that as well. She has never followed through on any advice in the last few months. She'll agree to things, agree to DO things, but she really just seems to be hoping that I'll forget about it and drop the subject. On the way up to the family Thanksgiving get-together, she started in on me about dropping our shared plan to join a plan with her mom's phone. Then while we were there, she and her mom had a conversation with me and her sister about phone tapping, how secure certain phones were, how are phones even tapped, my wife's been hearing strange noises on her phone and her mom backed her up about it, etc. We recommended that maybe her phone was broken, she has phone insurance and can just get a replacement, just drop by the phone store anytime. She never did. I guess we also managed to worry her further by saying that phone tapping typically is only gonna happen through the phone company, not her actual phone (The actual phone being easily verified as messed with or not at any Apple store, and by checking her apps).

OK, the end. Sorry about the book-sized post. It's a depressing situation, and we're both desperate and sad about it for... different reasons. I've warned her family that she might try to hurt herself if things don't just "get better" after moving back, because when she's at her lowest, she tells me she'd rather not have to be alive if she could choose between this and that. I don't have much contact with them, though, so as not to burn THEIR bridges with her. I won't be surprised when the day comes that she never trusts me again. I just wish things were different, and that I knew of anything to do, and that I even knew what was really happening. It's been hard not to get sucked into the baseless conspiracies that lack any shred of evidence, and all I have to show for it are family and friends I don't really talk to anymore anyway, and a wife that thinks I'm not supporting her. I don't have any further hopes or expectations; I know that this is the final chapter of our marriage, for better or worse, no matter how long this ends up being drawn out.

Stay safe, everyone. Thanks for listening.

Sounds like you've been on a tough ride. As it get stated ad nauseam around here - no one can diagnose anyone on this forum but it sounds like shes quite anxious paranoid. Is she anxious about things other than someone messing with her stuff?
It could be something medical, you mentioned her talking about burning fingertips and some other things. Problems with thyroid can cause pretty severe anxiety and other symptoms. Im not sharp on medical stuff this is just some ideas off the top of my head, she should be telling her doc.
Her aunt sounds like she has some mental thing going, genetics certainly has a big part when it comes to anxiety and mental health. Its really hard to help someone in that situation that wont go see a therapist, in the end thats really what she has to do but obviously theres no way to make her if she doesnt want to do it.
I could be off here but maybe check out the paranoid personality disorder forum and see if any of that rings and bells. Good luck man.

Hey Aryn,

Can not really offer much...

I am thinking some kind of paranoid or delusional disorder as well. But that is just my impression, not a professional fact. And it appears from your story that it is intensifying. The only way to really know, is if she sees a professional.

I would start a search for Paranoid Personality Disorder, perhaps you can find something of use there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_ ... y_disorder

Camber wrote:As it get stated ad nauseam around here - no one can diagnose anyone on this forum

It keeps being said because people keep doing it. Not saying you are, just responding to your reference.