I’m fucking depressed. I’m 24, I have two kids and I’m pregnant and things are honestly fine. But I have so many intrusive thoughts that just wreck me. About myself, my perception of reality, humanity as a whole just being shitty and disappointing. I feel like I’m extremely practical and grounded but also have an existential crisis on a weekly basis. So exhausting and just bothersome. Anyway. My husband travels a lot for work. And when he’s gone I feel like I can just… be. I don’t have to perform, I don’t have to worry about dragging him down, I don’t have to worry about being cheerful and I don’t have to worry about being polite or interested or if I want to lay on the couch all day. To be clear, I’m a very attentive mother and I genuinely love interacting with and cuddling my kids, so it’s not an issue of being available enough for them. They’re darlings.

But sometimes I just want more time. Sometimes I want to separate so I can just be left alone. So I can just do my thing. Marriage and romance is so disappointing, I feel like an island. We can’t relate to eachother at all, we don’t share anything in common. He’s emotionally dead and I’m an emotional mess 24/7 about any number of things.

We share a marriage counseling app because of scheduling and travel, but I’m going to cancel it because he never uses it because he’s so busy with work. Which I’m also over. It’s non stop calls when he’s home so he’s basically not even home, but they’re unavoidable, completely. He’s stated that if we did phone appointments he would probably just zone out watching a show or playing his phone games, which he does to disconnect because of the stress of his job.

There’s a lot of advantages to being married, but there’s nothing I love about it, it’s draining because I just want something, anything stimulating. There’s times I think I love him but really I’m just looking at a silver lining of a decent situation. I’m so burned out and there’s nothing either of us can do about it.

Anyway, has anyone had experience separating so that the depressed partner can have some time to work through things for myself?