“Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse” is a column by Kai Cheng Thom to help you survive and thrive in a challenging world. Have a question? Email askkai@xtramagazine.com.
Dear Kai,
My partner has depression and is struggling with their mental health. I have similar mental health struggles, but I’ve been supporting them for the bulk of our relationship. Though they support me, too, I sometimes feel exhausted being someone else’s emotional caretaker, and then I feel guilty for feeling that way about someone I love. I’m struggling with how to ask for my needs to be met while understanding that my partner isn’t able to meet some of those needs. (For example, their sex drive has been extremely low and I’m considering having sex with someone else to get that need fulfilled—obviously with my partner’s consent.) Do you have any suggestions?
Quippy Endings Elude Me
Dear QUEEM,
Thank you for reaching out. I’m glad that you are thinking about your own needs. In this fragmented, capitalist world where mental health care and community support are often incredibly hard to access, it makes complete sense that dealing with your own struggles while also supporting your partner is exhausting. Even when the support is reciprocal, the truth is that you are still just two people, and it’s not possible for you to meet all of one another’s needs (and this would be true even if you weren’t dealing with mental health stuff). So my first suggestion is to invite you to be kind to yourself, QUEEM. Like all of us, you are only human, and that makes you perfectly imperfect.
Doing care work for someone you love and—especially someone you live with, if that happens to be the case for you, QUEEM—is a beautiful and noble act that can also lead us into tricky emotional territory. Typically, the context of an intimate relationship makes it tricky to set boundaries on care.
When are you in the caregiving role, and when do you get to be “just” a person enjoying your partner’s company? When are you “allowed” to say no to doing support work, and when would it be a dereliction of duty? Sometimes, the act of giving care becomes blurred with the experience of loving someone. We can forget that love between partners requires more than care work, that it needs fun, pleasure, novelty and growth to flourish.
Resentment often arises when we spend too much time in a caregiving role for someone without getting our own needs met—even when we have the most selfless of intentions. For most people, anger and frustration are instinctive responses to having our boundaries crossed, regardless of whether we’ve crossed our own boundaries in order to give to someone else.
As a result, we can end up feeling emotions that we don’t want to feel towards the people we care for, which is uncomfortable for everyone involved. On the flip side, the person receiving the care can also start to feel resentful, because no one wants to feel like a burden to the ones they love.
How do we exit the cycle of over-caring and resentment? I think you’ve already hit on one excellent strategy, QUEEM, which is to see if you can get some of your needs met elsewhere. There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and I believe that it also takes a village to support someone who is struggling with their mental health (we actually probably need villages to do a whole lot of important things, which is something that contemporary capitalist life denies most of us, but that is topic for another column).
So yes, if you and your partner are both okay with it, I think that you having sex with other people is a great idea. I wonder how your other emotional needs might also be shared among other people: Are there friends with whom you can check in on a regular basis? Do you have a therapist or counselor of your own? What about online or IRL groups where you can be surrounded by folks you’re not taking care of? Having a social web that can hold your needs and distribute them through a community can be a deeply powerful thing.
“It’s your responsibility to be clear about where you are at in a kind and honest way, and it’s your partner’s responsibility to receive that information as an important gift you are giving them.”
I would also suggest reclaiming time with your partner that is dedicated to non-caregiving activities; I imagine that both of you actually need and want time spent together outside of a caregiving dynamic. As I mentioned above, what about time for play? Romance? Sexual intimacy? Trying new things together? It might be helpful to discuss setting explicit boundaries around emotional labour-heavy conversations so that you both know that there are times ahead that will be free of the expectation to do support work and where you can just enjoy each other’s company.
For example, what if you made a rule that emotional processing/support discussions are off-limits after 8 p.m.? (The specific time is arbitrary, choose what works best for you.) What if you made Friday nights and Saturday mornings strictly for fun time or couple’s activity time? The goal here is for you both to get reacquainted with one another in a way that allows you to see all of the parts of each other that are so easily lost in the grind of surviving and getting through the day. A relationship is more than the individual needs of each person in it; the relationship itself needs to be tended, given time and space for growth. This may help keep you from burning out or slipping into the resentment zone.
Of course, to do any of this, you will need to have explicit conversations about your needs, which you’ve mentioned can be a challenge for you. How can you balance expressing your needs with compassion for the fact that your partner may not be able to meet them?
In some ways, I think you’ve answered your own question, QUEEM: expressing a need is not the same thing as demanding that someone else meet it. It’s okay to acknowledge that you are feeling exhausted or that you might need breaks from doing care work, as long as you’re not shaming or blaming your partner for their lack of capacity. It’s your responsibility to be clear about where you are at in a kind and honest way, and it’s your partner’s responsibility to receive that information as an important gift you are giving them. This is how the relationship can remain authentically loving and free of resentment.
Of course, these conversations are tricky, and your partner might feel sad or insecure about not being able to meet all your needs no matter how compassionate and kind you are. Here’s the thing: that’s also okay. Part of being in a relationship is learning to acknowledge all the ways that we aren’t everything to our partners all of the time. Accepting this can actually make the relationship stronger, because it means we can release the pressure of having to be perfect for one another all the time. We are free to love and be loved in all of our flaws.
You can support your partner in working through this by reassuring them that you do still love them, by pointing out all the things you appreciate about them and by offering to work together to come up with strategies and solutions. In doing so, you may actually strengthen your connection to each other because going deep into vulnerability in a safe and compassionate way builds trust and encourages intimacy.
Keep on pursuing your needs, QUEEM. They are so important and deeply worthwhile. In caring for yourself, you stand not only to improve your own well-being, but your capacity to continue supporting your partner in the long term as well. Care is funny that way; it so often needs to flow in a circle. Sometimes the best way to care for others is to care for ourselves.
Kai Cheng Thom is no longer a registered or practicing mental health professional. The opinions expressed in this column are not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content in this column, including, but not limited to, all text, graphics, videos and images, is for general information purposes only. This column, its author, Xtra (including its parent and affiliated companies, as well as their directors, officers, employees, successors and assigns) and any guest authors are not responsible for the accuracy of the information contained in this column or the outcome of following any information provided directly or indirectly from it.
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