Jocko Underground: Is My Girlfriend Abusing Me?

This is the Jocko Underground Podcast, number 149. Sitting here with Echo Charles, we have some interesting and important questions from the troopers today, opening up with a little bit of a doozy. Little bit. Let's rock and roll.

Okay, first question. I think for the thing you do, the positive impact on my life for the last eight years is imaginable. I'm 32-year-old male and have been with my girlfriend for three years. The first year and a half was amazing and I thought for sure she was the girl I was going to marry. She's beautiful, driven, loyal, and we share so many important values. I knew she had mental health issues in the past, including bipolar and borderline personality disorder tendencies and self-harm.

It seemed she was keeping all that under control with regular therapy and coping mechanisms that she had learned. She was functional, successful, sweet, intelligent and loving person. Year and half ago, she moved in with me and things began to change. She stopped going to therapy because life got quote unquote too busy.

and she was doing so well. Her mental health issues began resurfacing and have escalated ever since. She is often still all the things I fell in love with her for, but now almost weekly she has a mental breakdown where she is unhappy with everything in her life, including me.

She sometimes screams at me, tells me she's done with me, and insults me. I try to take ownership and attempt to do what I can to make her feel better. Later she apologizes, feels guilty, calls herself crazy, tells me I'm the most understanding best guy ever, and can't wait for me to propose to her. I usually forgive her quickly. But then it happens again.

She thinks that if I propose, she will feel more secure and stop this pattern. But she also says she has always been like this and always will. But I can't accept that because she wasn't for the first year and a half. I've tried getting her back into therapy both individually and as a couple. Both therapists upset her and she quit. They made her feel worse about herself and like they were ganging up on her quote unquote.

I don't want to give up on her, but I can't live the rest of my life with someone yelling and insulting me. I'm not perfect, but I remain kind to her and do not yell back at her. And I try to make changes to help the thing she says she's unhappy with. What do you guys think? You're right. You can't live the rest of your life or the person yelling and insulting you. Well, actually, let me rephrase that. You can.

but it's going to be miserable. I'm fairly certain that one of, if not the most important decision that you're going to make in your life as a human is you're going to get married to.

This is a person you're going to be with for what 50 years, maybe 60 years, something like that. You got to deal with them every day. You got all kinds of little decisions we're making as a team. We got strategies and tactics. We're going to employ to live the go through the whole thing. Financial fitness. What's for dinner?

This woman has issues that you are going to bring into your world for the rest of your life. And that is very, that's not good. It's a

It's a nightmare, man, honestly. I have seen, like, this isn't gonna end well, right? And I feel very sorry. I'm sorry that, you know, I'm, is this cold? You know what I mean? Am I, I'm sorry that I'm a little bit cold and a little bit

like lacking empathy. But I'm going to tell you, this is not going to go well. All right. If there was something we could do, if there's some way we could get her help, I would like to help her out. Like, you know, but I can't help her out. You can't help her out. She needs like five years of uninterrupted squared away behavior before I would consider marrying her.

I actually wouldn't consider marrying her, but if you're, if you are so, if you are so like totally head over heels in love with her and you care about her so much,

Then I would say, yep, I definitely want to stick with you. I need five continuous straight years uninterrupted of you being a squared away awesome human. Then I'll start to date you as if we might get married in the future. And you're 32 years old, so the clock is ticking.

By the way, marriage is stressful for most people. Money, house, rent, jobs, throw kids into the mix because they're coming and what's going on with kids? Now you got this whole freaking thing. Kids are...

a huge disrupter of life, especially when you're young. I remember when my kids were babies, and I'm like, wow, this is stressful for me. I don't get stressed out about anything, but you have a sick kid or a screaming child. It's stressful for someone that's very good at dealing with stress.

I can't imagine if I'm someone that has bipolar and borderline personality disorder tendencies and self harm. You want a life partner that can and will help the situation. You don't want one that needs help.

that you don't want one that's going to drain resources. You want one that's going to add resources. And you know, this woman, she needs help. She needs protocols. She needs medicine. She needs a professional.

And so this is just a bad scenario, man. I feel for her. I'm sure it's very difficult for her. I'm sure that it's really hard and it sounds like she has a lot of potential when she's doing the right things. But when she's not doing the right things and now your life is destroyed because of it, it's just bad.

It's bad. So my advice here is wish her luck. Be very nice to her and move on. And like I said, if you really, really feel that this is the girl that you want to sacrifice your life for and possibly ruin your life and ruin the lives of your future children,

Uh, then I would require the minimum five years of totally normal behavior for her from her. And then I would, then I would put her in the mix for consideration. And I, I'm sorry that I'm being cold, but that's where we're at.

Yeah. Yeah. Feels like if you're trying to maximize a happy life with a, you know, life partner, wife, family, et cetera, this is not currently the ingredients for that. Red flag two is that it's getting like worse, like measurably worse in the relationship, you know, and then it's like, Oh yeah, let's get married. Yeah. Yeah. If she was like, Oh, you know, I used to have these issues and I was, you know, I had these problems in the past and, you know, then I

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