My wife’s anxiety is crippling our marriage

I’m a long time Reddit consumer, first time poster. So I’m hoping I can get some guidance here.

Like the title says, my (38M) wife (35F) has anxiety that is taking over our marriage. We have been married for 16 years, we are high school sweethearts. I love my wife dearly, she is a loving, caring and generous person. I feel like I am a better person because of her, and can’t imagine where my life would be if I didn’t have her.

We got married very young and it has not always been easy, although we both always were able to remain in the marriage and work through any hardships. When we first got married, I was a very young man, barely an adult but trying to live an adult life, and I made mistakes along the way. I have never been unfaithful or abusive. My mistakes were mainly not being an emotionally strong spouse, not realizing when and how my wife needed emotional attention and not making the best decisions guiding us as a family. I think these things may have fostered slight feelings of resentment towards me and fanned the flame of mistrust and anxious feelings towards me. I don’t think that I am the full cause of her anxiety. She has had problems with keeping friends since before we dated. This has been an ongoing issue throughout our relationship - she makes a friend, then some issue arises, and I must take her side on whatever the issue is or else I’m not supportive of her. The same has been true with jobs. She’s had many jobs through the years, then she has an unresolvable issue with her boss or coworker and she “has” to quit. If I don’t fully agree I am the enemy. I am self employed in a service business and she hasn’t worked since 2021 now since I’m able to support us financially. She still doesn’t have very many friends and she can’t do much without me. She is very attached to me and little things like going to the store, post office, or running general errands are very hard for her to do without me. She has me make phone calls for her and take her to doctors appts. I sometimes work long hours and can get home late which makes her mad that I wasn’t there to help her with tasks throughout the day.

Since 2015 she has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She goes through extreme depressive periods where she can’t get out of bed, will barely eat, won’t take care of herself, etc. These times are extremely draining on me, if I don’t do and say the exact perfect thing, then I am the cause of everything that is wrong. She took meds for many years, which if I’m being honest now I think only made it worse. They helped for a short period of time, but after she became tolerant to whatever med she was on, the depression would come back 10x worse. Then she’d switch to another med, and the cycle would start over. Good for 5-6 months, then melt down again. I think these meds have had long lasting effects on her brain and hormones, and I sort of wish she never took them in the first place. The last few years she’s been very reflective on her bipolar and been doing good work to help herself. I’m very proud of her for this. Fast forward a bit and now she fully believes she has a health problem that no doctor can diagnose. She has fatigue, brain fog, nausea, aches. She constantly complains of “not feeling good” but despite going to countless doctors appointments and scans, they can’t find anything wrong with her. New mystery symptoms pop up weekly, one week it’s headaches, the next week it’s tingly fingers, the next it’s a weird pain in her teeth. This has been very hard on the relationship and, if I don’t fully agree with her that all her doctors are wrong and she has some mystery illness that is going to kill her, then I am the enemy. I don’t think she’s totally just making it up, but I truly feel that whatever is causing her to be sick could be whatever side effects years of taking different anti depressants can do to a person. Again, I can’t suggest this as an option because she says I am being dismissive of her feelings and not believing her.

Now most recently, her anxiety and mistrust of me has been growing. Despite me having never been unfaithful, or even slightly leaning that way, she says she feels like I would cheat on her because I’m around “hot” women all the time for work. To be clear, my wife is extremely attractive, she works out, eats healthy and our sex life is good. I’ve never once made her feel any other way. She’s always doubting that I love her, and she constantly makes comments that she’s not attractive enough. The mistrust is evolving into small ridiculous things, like never believing anything I say, always thinking I’m upset about something, or that something is wrong because I’ll stand up from my desk to go get something. She asks me 100 times a day if “I’m ok” and when I say yes of course, she doubts it and says that she think something IS wrong or I had a “look” or I made some kind of noise. When she insists that I’m upset about something even though I say I’m fine, she then says I have a “tone” when I’m defending myself. Another example is if we get food delivered, she’ll say “your sauce cup is in the bag”. When I reply with, “I didn’t order any sauce”, she’ll say hmmm, then go get the receipt to try to prove me wrong that I did in fact order it. When it’s not on the receipt she’ll then concede that they must have just thrown it in the bag and nobody ordered it. She can never just believe anything I say and always has to doubt or confirm it.

The last thing that led to me writing this post is a fight we just had tonight where I finally laid this all out and said I’m tired of her always telling me how I feel, assuming that I’m upset and her starting arguments for no reason. I told her that I am unhappy, our marriage is suffering and we have no reason to feel like this. We have a great comfortable life, and there’s no reason we should be arguing like this all the time. I told her I was tired of the cycle of doing this over and over for years, and that I want to go to couples counseling. When I told her that she froze up and could only keep saying back to me that I told her I was unhappy in our marriage and that I “wanted a divorce”. I never said that all. Just that I want to work on changing whatever is causing us to fight and her not trusting me. I don’t know if she’ll agree to therapy, so I don’t know where to go from here. Am I doing something wrong here? Help me Reddit.

TLDR: Been married for 16 years, my wife’s anxiety and mental illness is choking out what should be a very happy marriage.