Crazy Love

Dear Phyllis Naylor,
let me start by saying I work as a librarian and I recently stumbled upon your book “Crazy Love” and I really connected to it because I am in the same position that you were in. I’m 24 years old and My husband who I love is also a paranoid schizophrenic and I’ve been going through the same things you did with going from one hospital to another and having him put on medications so when I read your book it was like reading my own story but having someone write it for me. I understand you divorced your husband and married a very nice man, but how did you get the courage to do it? Sometimes I want to get away from my husband but growing up, I always said when I get married I’m going to stay with my husband through thick and thin because that’s what you do when you really love someone but right now I’m tired of this and don’t know how much more I can take. I feel guilty for thinking that. I keep remembering we both vowed to each other through sickness and health and promised to love each other and that we’d love each other forever. I guess my views on marriage are too romantic and unrealistic but that’s whats keeping me with him apart from the fact that I do love him. How do I stop feeling guilty? aren’t I breaking my vows by divorcing him?

I know exactly how you are feeling right now, and it seemed a horrible decision to make.  Like you, I vowed to stay with him and try to help him no matter what, and for three years I did.  But I was going into debt trying to pay his hospital bills, developing health problems of my own, fueled by my anxiety.  But I finally realized that if we didn’t separate I would become ill; and his remark to me one day that the high priced doctors were caring for him were in on the plot to kill him, convinced me that he was getting nothing out of being in this expensive hospital.  I know that they have far better drugs these days than they did back then, but I also realized that my husband’s suspicions of those who were trying to kill him were now turning on me, and I was afraid to sleep at night.  Once he left and went back to his parents, then called me halfway across the country to say he was coming back to me, would I meet him at the airport, I finally had the courage to say no, reminding him of the many many times he begged to live with me again, and how soon he was suspicious once again when he came back.

You never get over this but you eventually realize that if  you don’t consider your own health, two people will be sick, not just one.  I hope you have some supportive friends and family to help you through this.  I heard from several psychiatrists who read my book years later, who wrote to tell me that I made the right decision, that they had worried so, in reading the book, that I would stay.