Thread: Concerned about wife's mental health, think she may have PMDD and other issues.

I'm looking to confirm my diagnosis or seek alternative opinions on what I'm experiencing with my wife, and to get general advice on how to proceed. I'm not sure how much of our problems are to be expected from our tumultuous past, how much is psychological dysfunction on her part (or mine) and how much is physiological (such as PMDD or other physical issue). Maybe if I lay it out, some one will have some insight.

I've been married to my wife ("Cindy") for 1 1/2 years, and we have two children (3 1/2 and 1 1/2).

Our past before marriage was rocky. We met at a party in 2000. She was with her husband of about 10 years and I had just started seeing some one a month earlier. We all got very inebriated at the party, her husband suggested swapping, my new girlfriend was up for it, and so was I (my girlfriend and I had already had a talk about how she had just gotten out of a 6 year relationship and she did not want anything serious with me, so it was just fun and games).

After that night, my girlfriend and I would "party" with Cindy and her husband about once a month for 2 years. During that time, my girlfriend and I grew more serious, then grew apart and eventually she dumped me in 2002.

After about six months, I asked another woman out ("Jan"), who was from the same circle of friends. Cindy heard about that and called me, and at that time declared that she'd been in love with me since we first got together. I was stunned. I thought she and her husband made a great couple, he was one of my best friends, and I thought what we were doing was purely physical. I had truly never thought of her that way. I rejected her firmly, telling her I did not love her.

Needless to say, this strained my relationship with Cindy and her husband. I heard they had agreed to work on their marriage for a year to see if they could save it and, if not, get a divorce. However, I did not talk to them during that year. I did, however, have a relationship with Jan for about a year and a half.

In early 2004, I heard from a mutual friend that Cindy and her husband were still married. Since over a year had passed, I figured they had worked things out. I do not recall how it happened, but somehow I reopened communications with them, to see if we could bury the past and resume our friendship. They agreed and we began hanging out again socially.

About a month later, Jan and I broke up amicably, neither of us feeling the other was "right." Shortly after that, when I saw Cindy and her husband, she pulled me aside and said she still loved me. Honestly, I thought this was an immature crush and nothing more. Anyway, a month or two later, she told me her and her husband were separating and it was not about me, but they had grown apart. However, she wanted to try a relationship with me because she was sure I'd realize we were right for each other. Her husband said he did not mind. Being single, I agreed. We planned a weeklong get together.

Honestly, I was convinced that if she spent a week with me one-on-one, she would see the light, and she would realize we were totally wrong with each other. She'd see the other sides of me apart from how I behave at parties and social events, and she's see we did not relate well. I figured this week might undo her crush and allow her to fix her relationship with her husband and, at the same time, allow us to go back to just being friends.

Well, to my great surprise, she seemed a lot different when we were together that week. We talked about different things, wanting children, and spirituality, and she was a lot more spiritual and less shallow than I'd thought from our past years of socializing. We had a lot in common and at some point during that week, I felt she was the "one." I fell for her harder than for anyone in my life. I felt like this was meant to be.

At that time, we were living in different cities about 300 miles apart, and I did not want a long distance separation to hamper our relationship. She insisted she did not want to move, so I decided to sell my house and move to her city. I was self-employed at the time, so that was not an issue. I brought up getting an apartment, but she invited me to move into the apartment she'd moved to (when she moved out of the place she had shared with her husband). It was small, but I figured that would be an opportunity to downsize my material possessions.

Within about 3-4 months, I had sold my house. I packed up a huge rental truck and drove to her city. Most of my stuff went into storage and I moved the rest into her apartment. The next morning, before I had even returned the rental truck, she came to me and said, "we need to talk." She explained she felt crowded in her apartment, and she liked the idea of living independently after 13 years of marriage. So she wanted me to find my own place, though we could still date.

I felt like the world had crashed and burned around me. She was kicking me out before I'd even returned my rental truck? You've got to be kidding. No human on the planet could be that insensitive. Any person on the planet would either have told me BEFORE I sold my house and moved, that they were having second thoughts, or they would bite their tongue and give living together an honest try for a couple months, if only out of a sense of obligation. I mean, no one can tell the future. Who knows but maybe she would find that living with me was a dream come true and all her concerns about living independently would melt away? She did not know what I was like as a roommate. But she, out of everyone on the planet, did not have the basic decency and consideration to try living with me after all I had given up to come live with her.

I am a great believer in faith and in the notion that our expectations dictate our realities. I was convinced that if she had simply had CONFIDENCE that living with me would be great, it would have been. But because she chose to doubt and worry that it would not work out, she created that reality.

I was in a new city with no documented job which presented some problem finding a place of my own that was up to my standards. It took me three months and, during that time, I did stay with her. But it was rough. We fought a lot. I was depressed a lot. I alternated between hating her and trying to convince her to see the err of her ways, what her lack of faith in us was costing, that she had basically sabotaged our relationship with her thoughtlessness and lack of consideration. For her part, she did not enjoy my company and said how it validated her concern about her living together. To me, this added insult to injury because obviously I would not have BEEN such bad company BUT FOR her kicking me to the curb the day I arrived in town ready to start my life with her. So it was unfair of her to assume our dynamic would have been the same if she'd kept her mouth shut. How she could not see that simple truth, I have no idea.

Anyway, after three months I moved out. I was still trying to maintain a relationship to her. I had no house, no job, no social life except her, and my friends and family were all saying, "I told you so," since they'd cautioned me about moving so fast and following my heart. I felt like if I somehow salvaged our relationship, I could vindicate my move and I desperately did not want to think of the consequences if that did not happen. I also had gone 15 years within finding some one I thought was the "one" until her, and I felt like if I gave up on her, I could go another 15 years before finding that again, and that was just too depressing. So, as much as I resented her, I also pursued her.

I was conflicted, and I'm sure she picked up on it. Anyway, a month or two after I moved out, she formally broke up with me. She also said she was going to try working on her marriage again because she did not want to throw away the 13 years they'd had together if she could salvage it (so much for her wanting "independence," I thought. I also wished she'd had a similar concern about throwing away her relationship with me when I first moved to town).

For my part, I started going out, creating a social network, dating a few people, but nothing serious. Cindy was still the person I knew best in the area and we still talked. She was not able to work things out with her husband, and she came to my place every so often to bring mail or something, and we would usually hook up. It became sort of a friends with benefits situation, only we were not really friends. It went on that way for about a year and a half.

In 2006, I was feeling ready to move on to a new phase. I planned to move to a new city 300 miles away (not the same place I'd come from). That would finally sever my ties to Cindy. Cindy, for her part, seemed fine with that. However, she came by my place one night for what I figured was a basic booty-call, and we got to talking about our disappointments over our relationship. I confessed part of me still thought what we had was fixable. Basically, I knew what I'd felt before she dashed me on the rocks, and it felt real, and I had blind faith that, since that was real, it must still exist, it was just buried beneath a ton of garbage and if the garbage was gotten rid of, the love would still be there. I'm not sure exactly what her views were on it. However, we were both 37, and the topic of kids came up, and we kind of agreed we might be each other's last chance for kids.

Somehow, that night, we came to an agreement to have sex without birth control, to put our relationship in the hands of fate and, if she got pregnant, we would both give everything we had to working out our relationship and, if we could not, we'd co-parent. I know, it's nutty, but it was also my last chance with her.

As luck would have it, she got pregnant. I cancelled my plans to move and, instead, I began looking for a job with insurance benefits and a high salary (giving up the freedom of being self-employed). We tried being a couple for a few weeks, but then we had an argument and she broke it off again, insisting we would co-parent. As a child of divorced parents, I hated that idea. I felt we owed it to our child to give our relationship a better try than she was doing. I tried taking her to a marriage counselor to work on our relationship, but she was very hostile to the idea and refused.

Anyway, we did go to a birthing class together and I was in the delivery room when our son was born. She said that after seeing me holding him, she decided we should be together after all. That was early 2007.

Immediately after deciding we should be together after all, Cindy was saying, "I love you" to me. That felt weird. I mean, we'd been broken up for the last 2 1/2 years, except for a few weeks after she found out she was pregnant. In fact, I'd gotten pretty much over her before she got pregnant, though I was still open to a reconciliation as evidenced by my having unprotected sex with her. I mean, at the time our son was born, did I love her? No, I probably would not use that word. I would say that I used to love her, but that my feelings of hurt and betrayal had numbed me. So, if the love was there, I could not feel it. I'd been on a rollercoaster ride with her and it was hard to let myself feel anything toward her. How long would we be together before the next time she decided that she wanted to be independent after all?

I did believe I could love her again, with time, with rebuilding trust. But it would not happen overnight. But she said, "I love you," and I could tell she wanted me to say it to, so I did, even though I was not feeling it.

We moved in together shortly after our son was born. Shortly after we moved in together, I tried being honest with her, explaining to her that while we were in a relationship and we had a son, my feelings toward her were guarded and I was not feeling "love" toward her like I did toward my son, and that I thought we needed to view this as a time of rebuilding our love for one another. Big mistake. She went on some rage about how we should not even be together if I did not know that I loved her and wanted to be with her forever. Basically, a "now or never" speech. I thought that was incredibly thoughtless and self-destructive. Like cutting off your nose to spite your face, "I want to be with you forever, and unless you agree right now, I am breaking up with you." It makes no sense.

Well, the argument blew over as most do and I avoided saying anything in the future to indicate I was not feeling "love" for her. But I still did not trust her. The very fact she would dash any hope of a relationship over me asking for time to rebuild our trust, made me distrust her even more. I felt she had an irrational position, and how can you trust an irrational person? By definition, an irrational person will do things that do not make sense, whether they are hurt themselves or their loved ones. By definition, an irrational person is not trustworthy.

Anyway, despite this, most of the time we got along very well. I do not "brood" on things and I'm very laid back. As long as she was not screaming in my face in anger over some perceived slight, I felt pretty good about our relationship and I enjoyed being a father and that was my main focus. I also wanted another child. My brother has always been my best friend largely because we are close in age. Cindy agreed, so we tried to have a second child when our son was about 10 months, and we succeeded right away and had a daughter in early 2009. Around the same time, we moved into a house. Also, Cindy had been working part time, but after our daughter was born, she became a full time homemaker.

Shortly after our daughter was born, we also got married in a small ceremony. Cindy's divorce had dragged on for years because she and her husband kept filing the wrong paperwork and finally they paid some one to do it right and that was finalized shortly before our daughter was born and we were married shortly after.

We've been married for about a year and a half. I'd like to say we've had a year and a half of growth on our relationship, but that's not really the case. About once a month -- probably since we moved in together after my son was born -- Cindy has gone into some huge screaming rage over something trivial -- a dirty dish, for example -- swearing in front of the kids until they cry, threatening to break up, screaming obscenities loudly enough for the neighbors to hear, etc. Most of the time, these screaming fits turn into rants about Jan, and my sex life with Jan. Jan was the woman I dated after I first rejected Cindy. Anyway, Cindy would scream and cry about how I chose Jan over her back in 2002. To me, this was completely irrational. How do I deal with it if my wife and mother of my children cannot get over the fact that I initially rejected her 7 years earlier?

If Cindy was just recalling her heartache at the time and was upset over that, it might not be so irrational. But she does not stop there. She gets really evil and starts demanding that I answer graphic questions about my sex life with Jan. She uses the most vulgar language possible, and she's very loud. It does not matter if our children are in the room, or are crying. And its "my" fault our children are crying and screaming at her to stop because I was the one who decided to date Jan instead of her.

Not all her screaming rages lead to her ranting about Jan, but most do. Anyway, about six months after we began living together in 2007, I started to notice that these rages happened about once a month. I paid more attention and saw that these rages always happened a few days before she started her period. After that, I sort of wrote it off to PMS and figured I'd just try to tread lightly that time of the month. Since then I've avoided big blow outs some months, but not others. And sometimes they get so ugly, I feel myself giving up on the marriage, like I just want the kids to turn 18 so I can divorce her (because I still want to stay together for the kids until they are grown).

Basically, it feels to me that whatever progress we make on the relationship, on our love, on building trust, gets dashed and broken and stomped into dust about once a month and I feel back at square one in terms of our relationship. Then we built trust for another few weeks, then it gets dashed again. It has been 3 and a half years since we got back together for the last time (when our son was born) and I feel the exact same way toward her as I did back then -- guarded but hopeful. Well, hopeful when she isn't screaming obscenities and ranting about Jan. I feel like we'd be alot further along -- back to complete, unreserved, whole-hearted, sappy, romantic love -- but for her irrational rages and monthly threats to break up the family.

Some of these rages include her breaking dishes or children's toys, whatever is handy. She does not care about the kids screaming or the neighbors hearing. She really has lost all control when she is in this state of mind. However, these rages always lasted less than a day and then she would apologize, until the last time.

The last rage was 2 weeks ago, and it was the worst yet. For the first time, it did not seem connected to her period because it was about a week and a half before her period. Also for the first time, she was physically abusive towards me, hitting me. Also, for the first time, sleeping did not "fix" it. She took a nap and woke up and started screaming at me about Jan. Then she went to bed at night and got up the next morning and her first words were to start screaming about Jan. She wound up taking a few xanax and staying unconscious that day. The next morning, she started in again about me and Jan. That's when I called her mother and insisted she fly out immediately to stay with us and help watch the kids, as I viewed my wife as unstable and unsafe. Her mother spoke to Cindy and Cindy screamed at her mother about me and Jan. After speaking to her daughter for two hours, Cindy's mother agreed she was irrational and caught the next flight to stay with us.

I had been thinking my wife's rages were PMS, but since the last rage did not fit, time-wise, I'd been reconsidering that and I had begun to suspect a serious psychological disorder. However, I also came onto the internet to research, and it appears to me she may have PMDD along with some other psychological issues.

My wife insists, even when not having her period, that I'm the problemm, not her. That I do not do enough to help around the house. I'm out of the house working 60 hours a week and, when home, I cook, do dishes, give the kids baths, change diapers. I've also told her I'm always willing to do anything that needs doing from taking out the trash to grocery shoping if she tells me -- I've never said no when she asks me to do something -- but she gets mad that I do not think of everything myself, and if she has to remind me, she'd rather do it herself. Anyway, I do not think the problem is that I do not do enough.

She also fears seeing a therapist because she says I will use the therapy to take custody of the children from her if we ever divorce. This worries me because it means, on some level, she believes a therapist WOULD diagnose her with a serious problem if he/she saw her. If some one tells me I need therapy and I disagree, I say, "Bring it on, I'll prove you are wrong." Her fear speaks volumes about her own recognition that she DOES have issues, whether we will admit it to me or not. And I am angry that she apparently KNOWS she has a problem and she is willing to risk our marriage and the health of our children (emotional, and maybe even physical) rather than seek help.

She also blames her rage on difficulty having orgasms. She said this was true since she first became sexually active, that she felt "shut off" and like an object for men's pleasure, though she used to be able to masturbate easily to orgams. With her last husband, they got to the point where she was able to orgasm about a third of the time. With me, it has always been less than that, but we've been together less time, we've had infants to care for basically throughout our relationship, and there's a lot of baggage in our relationship. Also, she says she now finds it nearly impossible to masturbate to orgasm, which tells me there's a problem besides me. Basically, she feels sexually numb. I have suggested sex therapy for years -- even going back to when we first dated six years earlier and I first learned she felt sexually numb -- so this pre-dates the children, and the rollercoaster ride our relationship has been on. But somehow it's my fault this problem persists. She has the shortsighted view this makes our sex life lopsided because I get all the pleasure I want and she does not. However, I am not at all satisfied with my sex life with her. Sex with a non-responsive partner is like masturbation and is a two dimensional experience that I find much less satisfying than being with an orgasmic partner. Intercourse becomes a chore trying to "unlock the mystery" of what will get her off, and then feeling guilty when I fail. How is that a great sex life for me? It isn't. Despite this, I've always been faithful when we've been together, including the last 3 1/2 years.

This orgasm problems is all the time, not just during her period, so I do not see it as connected to PMS or PMDD, but I really do not know what it is. I mean, if she cannot even orgasm when she masturbates, it seems like it is not about me and it is more about her and some issues going on with her. I have no idea if it's physiological or psychological.

Last night, I tried to talk to my wife about seeing a therapist. She refuses, saying I'm the one who needs therapy. I responded that, while I may very well need therapy (who doesn't?) I am not the one breaking toys and dishes and hitting the other person and screaming obscenities in front of the children, so maybe her issues are a bit more pressing than mine. She disagreed. However, she did agree to see a couple's therapist.

Well, that's where we are now. If anyone makes it through all that, I'm curious what this looks like to an outsider, what issues come up whether related to PMS, PMDD, or just marital relations in general. Oh, by the way, my wife denies having any PMS. Is that normal? It seems from my online browsing that women with this level of PMS recognize it, at least when they are not on their period. For Cindy to be in complete denial over this seems, itself, to be a psychological problem.

Thanks,

LA-husband