Though they’re still stigmatised in many societies across the world, mental health conditions are prevalent, with over a billion people across the world – that’s one in eight – experiencing one at any given time.

That’s understandable, when you consider the world we live in, the relentless pressures on our lives, and the unforgiving nature of many of our careers and financial pressures.

So it goes without saying that there’s a good chance that, at some point in your relationship, either you or your partner – or both – will live with some kind of mental health condition, whether that’s a short term bout of stress or anxiety, or a lifelong struggle with something more complex.

In a strong partnership, this will be handled with empathy and compassion, in the same way as any other debilitating health condition would be.

But for the couple in this story, that is very much not the case.

Read on to find out how the wife ignored and became increasingly irritated by her husband’s mental health struggles, until it was too late.

AITA for divorcing my husband because he spent ten minutes in the car during a family emergency?

I have been married to my husband for two years.

He has a habit of sitting in the car for five or ten minutes before entering the house. I don’t know why he does it, but he talked about a past traumatic experience he had when he came home and caught his ex cheating on him.

Because of that he’d just spend few minutes in his car before he enters his home as response to his trauma.

Now I won’t say that he’s wrong in coping with what happened, but this has made me feel uneasy and it had caused many fights between us.

Let’s see why the wife is finding this problematic.

Even when we have guests he’ll sit outside before coming in, or when dinner is waiting on him and he’ll take ten minutes silently sitting in the car.

I have long been worried that something might come up and he wouldn’t respond properly. And it happened last week: my eight year old son (not my husband’s child) tripped and fell from the stairs and broke his ankle.

He was in so much pain, and I called my husband to come take him to the hospital.

He rushed out of work but then I called and called, and then I was stunned when I looked out the window and I saw him sitting outside the house in his car.

Uh-oh. Read on to find out how she responded.

I was both shocked and angry. I ran outside and I asked how long he was sitting in the car. He told me around eight minutes.

I asked why he didn’t come into the house immediately to help, and he said he would after two more minutes.

I was so mad and hurt but tried to rush him and he insisted he wouldn’t feel “comfortable” coming in until the ten minutes were up.

He told me to get my son ready to take him to the hospital, but I started screaming at him nonstop, telling him this was a family emergency and that he was out of his mind to behave like that.

Yikes! Let’s see how this continued to escalate.

It might not have been my best response, but I was shocked by his behavior and quite concerned because I’ve had this situation always stuck in the back of mind thinking what my husband would do if there was a family emergency.

I ended up taking my son by myself when my neighbor intervened and offered to take us.

We went to the hospital and later my husband came and tried to talk to me but I refused. I then went to stay with my mom and texted him to say that I wanted a divorce.

He tried to rationalize and justify what he’s done saying he could not help it and that he was nervous and wanted to help my son but felt stuck.

And things haven’t got any better from there.

I refused to reply to his messages, and days later his family literally harassed me saying I was making my husband’s trauma more severe and that I disrespected his boundaries by pushing his limits.

I feel lost and unable to think because of the whole ordeal. My family are with me on this, but they can be biased sometimes.

My husband is still trying to basically talk me out of divorce saying I’m making a huge deal out of it, but I feel like I no longer have trust in him especially when it comes to serious stuff like how cold he acted in a family emergency.

AITA?

It’s completely understandable that the woman was mad in that moment: after all, her son was in excruciating pain, and she needed to get him to the hospital. Those extra two minutes would’ve felt like a lifetime.

But it’s also clear that her husband is exhibiting a severe trauma response that has become a compulsion, with those ten minutes an important coping mechanism for him – and this will have only been exacerbated in the anxiety of the emergency.

She needs to be able to depend on her husband, and it’s clear that he needs help with his trauma. But he also needs compassion and support from his wife, and it is sad that in all the time leading up to this situation, when she was anxious about how he’d react to an emergency, she never actually tried to help or understand.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person agreed that the husband needed professional help.

While this Redditor thought that she should only divorce him if he refused to seek support.

However, others thought that the mom was far more the problem here.

The truth is, the mom has been a single parent and should be able to handle getting her own son to the hospital – though understandably she might want her husband there to support her too.

Clearly he wanted to help but his compulsion was so arresting that he felt like his world would crumble if he didn’t wait those last two minutes.

Though that can be difficult for someone without a mental health condition to understand, she is treating him like he was being lazy or selfish when, in reality, he likely felt that he was actually protecting his family by waiting until the ten minute mark.

Sure it’s unhelpful in an emergency, that’s why he needs help. But more than that, he needs a loving wife to support him – and the fact that she plays this off as a small thing that she’s not even sure about shows how little curiosity or care she’s shown him in the years they’ve been married. Instead, she just prophesied, and waited to be proved right.

How about a little empathy here?

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.