Hi all, I can't believe this sub exists as it's perfect for what I'm dealing with right now. Here's a long vent from this intense downfall.

I've been with this girl, I'll call her Maddie, for just over 7 years. It's been a standard relationship for a long time, highs and lows with little inklings of depressive behavior from time to time but nothing substantial until the beginning of this year. We had everything except marriage together; house in a great neighborhood, incredible kid (2.5 now), dogs and cat, wonderful/giving family and friends and decent jobs to support it all. I don't think marriage would have been far off had this year not happened.

Cut to the beginning of this year and Maddie gets an identity theft scare at work when she's handed a packet for Unemployment Benefits under her SSN which she definitely did not sign up for. There were also a few suspicious charges to her card which her bank immediately denied. There's a few other things she claims to see as suspect so we go down the standard steps. She files a report claiming it's fraudulent, alerts banks and financial institutions of everything, changes her passwords. In my mind she's in the clear but this is just the beginning of the descent. She keeps claiming that "strange coincidences" are happening and she can't explain. I buy along for a while and calmly try to mitigate any worries and try to assure if anything happens, we will be ok and covered. Still not good enough.

A week or two later I'm sick at home with COVID and she's still getting worse. Her job tells her to stay home and even pays for a hotel room so she can still get work done while not being exposed to COVID. I'm sick at home with a toddler and she calls eventually asking if she should come home to help. I tell her to stay at the hotel, at least for the night, enjoy the mom's night away and let the sick boys deal. She comes home weeping and terrified at 530 AM stating that she saw a man outside of her hotel room. She claims that she recognized him from a picture she saw from the local police website of a wanted criminal for charges of cyber theft/etc. (I forget the exact charges). I try to calm her as best I can but it's only getting worse. I call the hotel and speak with a manager who goes over who may be checked into rooms near her and security footage: nothing substantial.

She descends further, and harder, to where she has her parents come up one weekend trying to convince them now. She then pulls me aside and basically begs me to let her go to an inpatient psych unit. At this point that seems like an enormous stretch to me, so I calmly convince her to make a Lifelock account, file police reports, update security system, change ALL of our passwords and update our wifi router/security setting, etc. to protect herself from whatever the hell she thinks is going on.

She's calm enough for about 2 days until that Monday night at the beginning of February she begs me to let her go to an inpatient psych unit. I reluctantly agree and follow her lead, my mom comes over and waits with her all night until she's checked in and safely inside. She's only there for a day and a half and I find out later it's because she believed that EVERYONE there was in on this conspiracy against her and she just said/did what she had to do to get out. At this point I'm just stunned and at a loss.

The next 2 months after that are hell. No sleeping, weeping and panic attacks, quits her job suddenly, intense paranoia and anger at me for not blindly believing the conspiracy, she hides hammers and knives all around the house that are within reach of our 2 year old, accusing my family members of being in on the conspiracy against her, trying to leave me dozens of times and then 30-45 min later coming back like nothing happened. She gets diagnosed BiPolar from her Psychiatrist and that makes her anger/sadness/everything worse from there on out. All the while I'm trying to raise an incredible kid.

This all leads up to the first weekend of April when I get a call from our PCP (I was the emergency contact for our local Dr, her therapist and her psychiatrist). He states, pretty urgently, that if this is still going on this intensely that she needs a voluntary inpatient stay NOW unless we want it to be involuntary and things get that much worse for her. I'm devastated but still trying to do right by her. We essentially have an intervention with myself, my mom and her parents trying to tell her how concerned we are for her and that we don't want her to be this unhappy anymore. It gets pretty ugly, tells her mother she's never speaking to her again and tells me she's never coming back to this house. I drive her to the hospital, while weeping, telling her how I knew she may decide to leave me over this but if this was how I could save her I was willing to do so. I emphasized how much I loved her and knew I couldn't fix what was going on but could not sit idle-by and watch her get worse and worse. She's staring daggers but part of that seems to get through, we sit in the ER for about 3 hours until Crisis comes and offers (what I believe to be) a middle ground. An intensive Outpatient Therapy at a beautiful, wooded area of the state where she can still be with her family but her days are spent on her. We accept, get packed up and head back home.

The second we get back home and our parents aren't around, she starts up IMMEDIATELY with the conspiracy and how they were all out to get her and how this was a horrendous idea. I just text my mom "I fucked up with this Outpatient attempt." and deal with that night the way I had been for months.

The next day our kid is asleep and I try to talk to her during his nap. She shares how much she's hurting, how she's confused and upset and doesn't know the right direction to go. I ask her if she's planning on doing the Outpatient stay and she just says "I don't think so." I reached my limit there and basically told her she NEEDED to work on herself or she wasn't going to do it in this house. I told her she couldn't fester here any longer and to go stay with her parents if she was refusing to do this at all. I regret using that phrase so fucking much.

She goes to the Outpatient facility on Monday morning, which was not done with her admission yet since the Crisis happened over the weekend, and she spiraled stating that "the hospital was wrong" and she wasn't in. She goes to her parents stating she had no place to live and getting even worse to the point where she begs them to take her to the hospital for another inpatient stay. They agree, they get the brunt of the ugly things she can say in those situations, but she eventually is admitted and transferred to a behavioral hospital the following day. She called me weeping at the ER and I talk her down for 45 minutes saying how much I love her and that this is an opportunity for healing/change. They basically tell her that she can sign up as voluntary for this stay or they will make it involuntary, her choice.

The 2 weeks she was in the hospital I really don't hear from her at all. I'm just hopeful she's working on herself and all of this. I tried calling multiple times but it was a LOCKED DOWN facility and they hung up on me a few times. I was only ever able to speak with someone in billing regarding payment and our insurance. She called 2 days before her discharge finally, stated she was staying with her parents afterwards and apologized for not calling more.

Discharge day comes and I'm at work. I get a text from my mom that Maddie is on her way to our house so she can see her son. I come home and she's still there, pretty cold towards me and does not say ANYTHING unless she has to. I make her dinner, let her play with our son, and eventually I put him down for bed. I expected her to be gone by this point from what she told me about staying at her parents but I come from our son's room and she's in bed, drugged up and all but passed out. I just tell her we will talk tomorrow.

The next morning I'm about to take our son to Daycare and he asks Mommy to do so. She gets very excited to do so, but I tell her she's not on the dropoff/pickup list (I took her off right before the hospital stay when things got intensely bad). I see that stare of daggers immediately. We get swept out the door and it's back to that same feeling. While I'm still at work, she leaves and texts that she's "unwelcome" and she's going away for a bit. She's gone for 3 days and I have no idea where she went or anything. That Friday she calls right before I leave for work and sadly asks if she can spend the day with our kid at her parents house. I tell her she can at our house, but that's it. She does not come see him or come back to the house.

I schedule a family meeting with her and her parents that Sunday to just try and find out what the hell happened 3 weeks prior. Everything is going calmly and smoothly until she asks her parents to give us a minute. She starts it with "I guess I should tell you about Cory." Those 3 days she was gone, SHE WENT TO THIS GUYS HOUSE SHE MET AT THE HOSPITAL AND FUCKED HIM. Devastation does not begin to describe it. I stay as civil as I can but leave immediately. Call her doctors and tell them to take me off as her emergency contact. Weep to my mother. Feel a sinking I haven't ever felt before. A mourning I guess. Schedule to see my own therapist and go over everything that Wednesday as I'm just at such a loss. Call off work and just weep and rage for a day while my son is at daycare. Start drinking more at night when I get 30 minutes to myself before starting it all over again the next day.

I weep every day and night and have no more fight. No more power-through. No more patience for being on the receiving end of all of this. No more urge to help. I'm the best dad I can be to our son but that's all the effort I can give. Even that I can barely muster depending on the hour. I've essentially been a single dad for about a month now and she's out fucking someone else. Devastation does not begin to describe it.

I don't know if this is a rant, a vent, a sad lonely dad reaching out for help or what. My family knows of this but no one else so I'm just isolated in this madness. I'm saddened but grateful that maybe there are others out there who can share understanding in some part of this horrid set of circumstances. I gave as much as I knew how to and this was my reward. I don't know if I'll ever recover from this but I have to keep going for my incredible son. Any advice, help, kind words or shoulders to continue to cry on would be so intensely appreciated.