Coping, Friends & Family

Chronic Illness and Marriage

Chronic illness and marriage is such a complicated combination that it’s rare to see a healthy spouse’s perspective on their partner’s chronic illness. I read Living With a Husband’s Chronic Illness Has a Bad Effect on His Wife’s Health eager for insight. I didn’t like the insight I got.

I genuinely wanted to read what this woman had to say, to see her difficult experiences and uncomfortable thoughts laid bare. My immediate response? To get defensive and write a long post about it. The gist: “How unfair that she’s taking her husband’s illness out on him. Does she realize he may be watching too much TV because he can’t do anything else? And, yes, that includes folding the laundry while watching.”

Instead of posting my inflamed response, I re-read the article many times over the week. , the author, knows she’s being unfair, but she’s exhausted and burnt out. She knows her husband isn’t to blame, but she doesn’t know where else to direct her anger and resentment. (She may not know that it’s possible to be too sick to fold laundry. I expect not many people can understand that unless they’ve lived it.)

Writing this article took tremendous bravery. Lewis admitted ugly truths about herself and her thoughts and published it anyway. She wrote honestly about a topic so painful and verboten that few people are candid about it (especially in print).

Of course I don’t like what she had to say. I have a chronic illness that’s had a tremendous impact on my husband. I’ve heard the saddest stories about how chronic illness destroys relationships. There’s an oft-cited statistic that the lifetime divorce rate is 75% for people with chronic illness (the overall lifetime divorce rate is highly debated, but 42% seems to be a reasonable estimate.). There’s some question over whether this number is accurate, though experts agree that the divorce rate for the chronically ill is very high.

I’m working on an article for Migraine.com about managing migraine’s impact on a marriage. One of the suggestions is to talk about migraine’s affect on the relationship. I say, “The truth will probably hurt both of you. Talk about it anyway.” And then I read this article from a healthy caregiver and was hurt by truths from someone else’s relationship. This is emotionally fraught stuff.

I applaud for her courage and honesty. The difficulties of caring for a chronically ill spouse need to be acknowledged, even though many of those who are sick won’t like what we read.

Here are some resources for learning how to support a marriage in the face of chronic illness (I’ll add my Migraine.com piece when it’s published):

Feb. 17, 2015: 8 Tips to Manage Migraine’s Impact on Marriage is that Migraine.com post I mentioned I was working on. It is migraine-focused, but the ideas apply to most, if not all, illnesses.