Depression can have a devastating effect on close relationships. Sometimes depressed people blame themselves for their pain, sometimes they blame their partners. It’s shocking to see them turn into cold and blaming strangers. After years of affection and intimacy, depressed souls suddenly declare that they don’t feel love, even worse, that they have never loved their partners at all. Depressed partners may refuse to face the inner pain that’s wrecking their lives. Rather than seeking for help, they believe that it’s the existing relationship that is ruining them. Their answer is often to leave and find happiness elsewhere.
The specific effects of depression will differ in every relationship. Talking about inner pain, it is an unbearable pain that demands an explanation and must be escaped as quickly as possible. Since depression is a condition that can vary from day to day, that active side of pain can be the driving motive. But there is another dimension of depression that can lead to the idea of escape as the answer.
It’s the one that causes depressed partners to say they’re no longer in love and have never loved their partner. For me, it was a kind of deadness. Rather than an excess of painful emotion, it was the lack of pain, the lack of feeling, that was the undercurrent of all the surface turmoil.
I believed that the relationship that I was holing on, was becoming uncontrollably toxic. Neither did I have a peace of mind nor I was letting my partner have hers. It was excruciating to see my love put forward a smile, hiding all her sufferings and pain.
The Dragon in Gho 