My partner is always low and I can't cope

Your partner has been low for a long time. Not a bad week: months, or years, with better patches that never quite hold. You have read about it, adjusted around it, cancelled things, carried the house, learned to come home and check the weather of them before you say anything. Lately you have started to notice something in yourself that you do not like: resentment, exhaustion, a wish to be anywhere else. And then guilt, because they cannot help it, and what kind of person leaves someone who is struggling.

This page leaves what your partner has unnamed, because naming it is neither its job nor yours. Its subject is what you are carrying, and what you are allowed to put down.

What tends to be going on

Two questions, folded into one. The first is whether your partner is unwell. The second is how your partner treats you. Living with a long stretch of someone being low makes these feel like the same question, because everything they do seems explained by the first. They are separate. Plenty of people in deep difficulty are still kind, still try, still take the help they can and say thank you. Some are not, and the low mood becomes the reason nothing is ever their fault, why your needs always wait, why you must not be upset because it will make them worse. The first is a wellbeing problem you can face together. The second is a pattern in the relationship, and the illness has become its cover.

The carer's slide. Nobody decides to become a carer. You pick up one thing, then another, and after a couple of years you are running a household and a person and your own life has thinned to the width of a corridor. Friends have stopped asking. You have stopped mentioning your own bad days because theirs are always worse. The people who do this work recognise the slide, and the first thing they say is that the carer's health is a legitimate concern in its own right.

What you can and cannot carry. You can love someone, make the GP appointment with them, sit in the waiting room, keep the house going for a period. You cannot be their treatment. You cannot be the only reason they get up, and a relationship in which you are has become unsafe for both of you in a slow way.

Help that exists. Your partner can see their GP, and in England can refer themselves to NHS talking therapies without one. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland route through the GP. You can go to a GP on your own account to ask what help there is for someone living with this. Carers' organisations and the Samaritans (116 123, 24 hours) are for you as well as them.

Your own side. Are you contributing to the weather? Walking on eggshells can shade into contempt, and people who are low notice contempt before anything else. It is worth asking whether you still speak to them as an adult.

What this might mean for you

Separate the two questions on paper. Column one: what they are going through. Column two: how they treat you, this month. If column two is mostly fine, you are tired and you need help carrying. If column two has things in it that would not be acceptable from a well person, the low mood does not make them acceptable, and you are allowed to say so.

Decide what you will do and for how long, and say it. "I will come to the GP with you. I will not keep cancelling my own life indefinitely." A line you hold is kinder than a silence you resent.

Get help for yourself first, if you can only do one thing. A carer who is well has choices. A carer who is not has none.

Notice whether "I can't cope" has quietly become "I want to leave". Those are different sentences and you are allowed to say either.

One next step

When your partner is unwell goes through the two questions properly, including what tends to happen when help is offered and refused. What this has cost you looks at the version of your life that has thinned. Lines that hold is about saying what you can do and keeping to it. The assessment will place what you describe without naming anything for either of you.

If you or your partner are struggling to cope tonight, the Samaritans are 116 123, free and 24 hours. If the low mood has ever come with threats or fear, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247 and the Men's Advice Line is 0808 801 0327. Pressing Escape twice leaves this site at once.