My husband has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Even though he has a diagnosis he refuses to medicate himself and has told me I only want him on medication so he doesn’t scream at me all the time and so he isn’t on me “like white on rice”. He told me if I want him to take it I need to go back to the doctor and tell him to redo the prescription and go pick it up for him otherwise he doesn’t think his moods are an issue and I’m only looking for a way to “subdue” him.

Last night things came to a head in a big way. Our refrigerator stopped working. It’s old, we’ve had it for years so I told him we needed to get a new one. We have plenty of money so it’s no issue. Some how we went from having a lovely evening joking around etc to him absolutely losing it. It eventually came back to how it’s somehow my fault the 12 year old refrigerator no longer works. Then it turned into how I don’t do enough for him. I have a designated laundry day every week, we don’t have in home laundry so I have to drive to the laundromat. It’s usually an entire evening thing. He never ever does laundry so I do both of ours, including all of our work stuff. On Saturday night (which is usually my laundry night) I got invited to dinner with some friends so I went. So I did the laundry Sunday. He told me I should have done it Saturday regardless of what was going on and me skipping it for a day shows him how much I don’t love him. He also told me I was shitty wife for not cooking for him before I left and for spending money on dinner out because then he had to eat out also so I was the reason we’re wasting money.

My husband is OCD so no matter how well I clean the house or do anything it isn’t good enough. He wants me on my hands and knees with a tooth brush (his words) cleaning the toilets (which I obviously do daily just not with a tooth brush) and if I don’t clean them vigorously for two hours per toilet at a time “I may as well not have done the job at all”. When he comes home he inspects the house, every single room, to make sure I haven’t been “slacking or lazy” on my days off. He told me I should be getting up every single morning an hour before he gets up for work (so 4am) to make him a breakfast burrito from scratch like I do on the weekends because that’s what loving wives do. He actually told me that because I only have started making him lunch for work over the last two years that I don’t love him because I should have been doing it the whole time we were together. I asked him how that point is relevant and he said “well if I had been cheating on you our whole relationship but stopped the last two years could you let it go?” Like what?!

I asked him who he thought he was talking to like this and he responded with “my fucking lazy wife”. I am by no means lazy. Our house is absolutely immaculate and I work. I do 4 12 hour shifts per week so I’m home more than him and he thinks every second I have free I should be cleaning. He doesn’t think I should ever be tired because “I only work 4 days a week” so I’m not allowed to sleep in on weekends like him and should be doing housework. I have to stay up two hours after he goes to bed at night to clean up the messes he makes when he comes from work and eats dinner and to get his lunch ready for the next day. I have to make it very last thing I do at night (per his order) because he says if make it earlier in the evening the sandwich and other things i there are “disgusting” the next day, so I make at around midnight usually even though I get up at 6am. And it isn’t a simple lunch either. I have to chop all his vegetables a certain way and clean them over thoroughly or he loses it. It takes about 45 minutes to do it right. I have to make the sandwich “with love” or I get a call about how it’s not right and I obviously don’t care about him.

Last week I bought a bag of oranges. Unbeknownst to me there must have been a bad one in the bag. It happens, any rational person knows this. Unfortunately I never noticed. Two days later I’m cleaning and he finds it and LOSES HIS MIND that I’m not staying on top of cleaning the fruit and I’m filthy and disgusting. He took a video of the bad orange to use as evidence against me if we ever divorce to show how I was “never able to keep a home appropriately clean” which is a crock of s**t. I bought it like that!!!

Things escalated further last night with him telling me that I should be grateful that he doesn’t hit me because he wants to very badly sometimes. When I walked away crying when he said that he made fun of me and called me a child and when I didn’t react he screamed and tried to pull the physical counter off in our kitchen in a rage and when he couldn’t he took a knife that was left on the counter and hit a new pack of Oreos I had just bought with it 5 times cutting it and stabbing them and told me I made him do it because I get him so mad. He then said he wants to kill himself and it’ll be my fault if he does because I make his life so miserable. He then went right back to eating the fucking chili I made him for dinner that he requested. I quietly packed my bag and as soon as he went to bed I called his mom and told her to come stay and watch him because he was a danger to himself and I left to my sisters.

I’m so shaken today. I will be filing for divorce ASAP because I fear if I ever go back he’ll kill me. But I’m afraid he’ll be so mad when he gets served with the papers that he’ll hurt himself. 😩