Staying Married Through Mental Illness: A Pastor and His Wife Talk

Key takeaways

• The vow covers sickness. Adam Mesa teaches that, apart from abuse and adultery, a spouse's mental illness is not a reason to leave a marriage.
• Responsibility and reality differ. As a pastor, Adam has talked with many people who checked out of a marriage because of a spouse's mental health, and he explains how that distance grows.
• No spouse is the savior. Ashley Mesa says her healing and joy did not come from her husband, even though his support mattered.
• Trauma can rewrite memory. Adam tells how a friend in crisis remembered a day completely differently from the way it happened.
• Mercy and justice both need an answer. Adam sees a public court case as a question about how gracious and how principled we are with people.

A court case that divided couples

Ashley had wanted to talk about the Lindsay Clancy trial for weeks. Adam kept saying no, because he could not see what it had to do with faith or marriage. Then he learned that couples were arguing over it, and that some were breaking up over their opinions.

Ashley described a mother who had struggled with postpartum depression, who saw therapists, went to counseling and took medication before the deaths of her three children. She also passed along a story she had seen online, without vouching for it, of a fiancé who ended an engagement over his partner's answer about the case. Adam said plainly that he knows little about the details and that his opinions would be uneducated ones. He called it a catastrophe, said it is terrible that children lost their lives, and said someone should be held accountable.

What interested him was why Christians care so much. In his view, the question has become an ethical and moral one. He did not think marriages should break up over it, and he did not think anyone knows enough to judge a partner by a view on a trial.

What the vow says about sickness

Ashley asked a direct question: at what point is it fair for a spouse to check out? Adam separated what a Christian is responsible for from what often happens. His answer on responsibility was firm. As long as a spouse is not being harmed and adultery has not broken the marriage vows, he said, "Mental health issues is not a reason to say, oh, I'm out of this marriage."

Ashley added that she counts mental instability as a sickness, which brings the vow of sickness and health into play. A husband or wife who promised to stay through illness has promised it for the kinds of illness that cannot be seen.

Why spouses check out

Adam did not pretend that people live up to this. As a pastor, he said, he has talked with probably hundreds of people who checked out of their marriage because of a spouse's mental health. He sees men struggle with chronic depression or anxiety and become isolated. He sees women struggle with postpartum depression or anxiety, often after having children.

He also said the distance grows over time. A spouse can love someone and still disconnect, he explained, and medication can leave a person numb and not present, which can make a husband or wife feel they are no longer living with the person they married. He does not call that a good excuse, but he said it is common.

Against that, he set the Christian calling. Adam said, "It's a choice every single day to choose to love your spouse in sickness and in health." When the world says to move on and believers fight for their marriage, he said, that is part of what makes them stand out.

No spouse can be the savior

Ashley spoke from her own experience. After the birth of their son Matthias she developed Graves' disease. Adam helped with the baby, with night feedings and with getting her up and down the stairs. She still knew that nothing he could do would change her health. She said her joy and her healing do not come from Adam, and that her stability could come from him only in the ordinary ways of work, home and food on the table.

She said the same about recovering from trauma in a past relationship. Adam could encourage and support her, and she felt it, but she had to decide that something needed to change. Ashley pointed to a mix-up here, saying that "we think that we need this savior mentality from somebody else, but in reality, it's what are you doing to help yourself?"

Adam raised a caution of his own. People who are sick or traumatized do not always reason the way they would at their best, and a spouse can be right there and still be unable to fix it. For the spouse who stays, that is a hard thing to accept.

When trauma rewrites memory

To show how trauma works, Adam told about a friend whose wife had an affair. The day the friend found out, Adam asked where he was. The friend said he was at a movie theater, alone. Adam went there, found him in a bathroom stall in the fetal position, crying, lifted him and carried him to his car. A few other friends came with him, and Adam drove his friend home.

About six months later, the friend told Adam he had not been there for him. He insisted that day never happened. He said he finished the movie and drove himself home. Adam put the other friends on speaker, and they described the day as Adam remembered it. As Adam described it, "to protect himself, he created an alternate version of what happened that day."

Adam drew a careful lesson. Because he has seen how trauma changes memory, he said that a person not remembering what they did is not by itself proof of anything. He did not claim to know what happened in the Clancy case. He applied it more widely: after a blowup in a marriage, couples often remember the argument differently, and we tend to keep what we want to remember.

Mercy, justice and grace between husband and wife

Adam describes himself as a letter-of-the-law person: you do the crime, you do the time. He also said that mental health has deteriorated in society and that it deserves a hearing. Underneath the court case, he said, the real conversation is "at what point does a person deserve mercy, and at what point does a person deserve justice?" He warned against turning the question into black and white, and said that people who are asked to take a side often lack the data to do so.

He then brought it home to marriage. Adam believes that God made men and women differently, and that each needs grace in different areas. When Ashley comes home worn out, he said, he does not tell her to man up, because her emotions move differently than his. When he needs time to rest or be with friends, he needs her to be open-handed about it.

What this means for you

If you are married to someone who struggles with depression, anxiety or the weight that can follow childbirth, the vow you made covers this season. Adam's counsel is to treat staying as a daily decision, not a feeling you wait for. Abuse and adultery are separate matters, which he named as exceptions.

If you are the one who is struggling, Ashley's words apply to you. Your spouse can support you, and still you may need to take the steps toward help yourself. And if you are tempted to judge a couple, or a stranger, from a headline, Adam's question is a fair one to ask yourself: how gracious are you with people's situations and their health?