I am deeply conflicted about whether to separate from my husband of 20 years, yet I am deeply burnt out from supporting him. He arrived as a refugee, spoke little English at the time, is from a very different culture to mine and has, as yet, untreated ADHD and PTSD. After much coaxing he agreed to couples counselling but we have now exhausted two therapists to no avail.
If I decide to separate I know that I will be far more supported by friends and family than he will be.
He didn’t choose the life of pain he has endured and continues to experience. And that pain seems far greater than mine. Separating will add even more to that. I think about the whole “put the oxygen mask on yourself before others” philosophy but still, putting my needs before his feels selfish and unethical given my privilege over his. What should I do?
Eleanor says: If you want to leave, the fact that leaving would hurt him is not a reason to stay instead. It does not do anyone a kindness to stay in a relationship when we would privately prefer permission to leave.
There are two questions here. One is whether you owe him care and kindness. We both know you do, especially because of your 20-year history. A different question is whether you need to stay in the relationship to live up to that obligation.
It’s so easy to think the answer is yes. So many people stay because “it would be cruel to leave”. Convinced of how wretched life would be without us, we stay by telling ourselves that leaving would be too great a cruelty to a good person we once loved.
But if you already want to leave, staying would not be a kindness either. If you only stay because you feel you aren’t allowed to put your needs before his, the resulting relationship – the “care” and “kindness” you would give him by staying – is not actually a relationship between equals.
Pity can be a way of patronising a person. The other person thinks they’re in the same relationship that started out of mutual love and desire, when unbeknown to them they’ve become a kind of emotional ward. They think we are committed and in love, when in fact we’re proposing to share a future with them because we daren’t leave.
Of course, leaving might hurt him terribly in the short term. But not all things that hurt us are bad for us. More importantly, not all ways of sparing people pain are ways of doing what’s good for them.
He might completely untether. He might feel abandoned and lonely and rejected. Alternatively, a separation might be a cold-water shock he’s ultimately grateful for. It might push him to build networks of support that are his alone. It might turn out that when things hurt really badly, without the analgesic of a close romantic relationship, there’s nothing left to stop him treating the sources of his pain.
Just as you can imagine a brighter future for yourself outside this relationship, there might be better versions of life available for him after it, too – ones where the fact that he has suffered is not the glue holding his relationships together.
The point is that if – if – you already think that leaving would be best for you, then you don’t actually face a choice between whether to put your or his needs first. They might point in the same direction. Doing right by yourself and doing right by him might not be mutually exclusive choices after all.
