With respect, it doesn't always take two to tango, not when mental health issues are the primary cause of it. Yes, there are always two sides to every story (or even more). I've been reading up online the past few days and it best fits borderline personality disorder, one of the most difficult to treat, because to a sufferer the extreme emotions feel real. That is their reality.... the emotions. But the emotional responses seem all out of proportion to other people around them. The only way they can fix it is by acknowledging it and then working really hard with various strategies to help them think more clearly. But, of course, very few sufferers will seek help, or will just agree to to avoid losing you but not take it seriously at all. Rationality does not help.
There are lots of reasons why modern technology has exacerbated this issue. If you don't reply to a message within 5 minutes, or reply to someone else first who has a more urgent need for a response, then it is misunderstood as 'evidence' you are having an affair, or at the very least chatting with another woman. In my case, the TV guy accidentally left three CCTV channels on our television (!) and my wife was using this to monitor my behaviour when going down to collect gofood. It's bonkers. Funny but... totally mad.
At the beginning there was no aggression and the mild paranoia just seemed a bit 'quirky'. It got so much more extreme after marriage, such as the example above, as though that meant more control could be wielded. The very occasional meet-up with friends ends up with her calling after just one or two hours demanding a video chat in which she wants to see a full 360 degrees to check there are no females nearby (!) or accusations of talking to other women - the focus of her paranoia, based on a heightened sense of fear due to the disorder, but not linked to reality.
Or if she comes along it is more as if she is there to monitor me rather than socialise. No wonder she struggles to have friends - a red flag I missed earlier on. An ex-colleague's wife was like this but worse.... she actually poured beer over a female colleague of ours, just... for being female and therefore regarded as some kind of threat to her marriage. Again, how can you not feel a bit of compassion for such people who do not know what trust is and are living in a place far from reality? But when they start grabbing knives then.... it's another matter. And then their greatest fear does come true when you do leave them and end up dating someone else, and then they think they were right all along! They only see what their emotions allow them to see.
A black and white thinking is another key part of borderline personality disorder, with no grey in the middle. Of course, life is mostly complex and grey, not definitely A or B or 'if you want some time alone then surely you are with another woman' mentality. No ability to see nuance. I do feel sorry for people who lack this skill and just see everything in binary. The fact I changed my pin was understood as being evidence I had something to hide, rather than I simply wanted her to stop delving, searching, investigating.
Many folk I know here have spoken of girlfriends going through their phones, the idea of trust and personal privacy almost completely forgotten about or never even known. And jealousy seen as a positive attribute - that seems quite common here. Indeed I had all this once before several years ago. That particular woman got suddenly shocked when I asked to look at her phone messages after she had been going through mine! Eventually she agreed and it turned out there was some stuff on there that.... made her look rather bad, exactly the same things she was perhaps hoping to find on my phone but didn't! At that moment, I told her I wanted some time alone and that she should go home and I would speak to her a few days later.
She didn't take this advice and instead threatened to kill herself. I finally managed to convince her to leave, all the while thinking to myself 'definitely mad' and having that tingling feeling of utter fear and the sense she was 'dislocated' from what is reality for everyone else. It got worse. She waited for me to leave, and then followed me in a taxi to a cafe where I had arranged to have a few beers with friends to try to 'put things out of my mind'. She ended up getting thrown out of the cafe and that was the end of that. I was relieved to be 'free' and I never really had strong feelings for her but had been guilt-tripped into 'looking after her'. She is now married and I can only wish her husband the best of luck with that. No link to poverty in my experience - one was rich, one not so rich.
So, having had this a second time recently, presumably having failed to learn, I do have to think that I invite it somehow, or that perhaps a larger number of women here who are specifically interested in dating foreigners are more likely to have this paranoia and controlling behaviour than the general population at large. But this second time, the difference is both that I do care a huge amount about her welfare and we are married. But loving someone who grabs a knife or gets increasingly controlling and stuck in her distorted emotional reality is.... almost impossible and probably inadvisable.
I still haven't decided what to do yet personally as it is complicated being on a spouse visa here, no job at present, return to home country would cost a fortune, still waiting for 2nd jab. So I'm just thinking very carefully about the options from a hotel. It may take several more days to reach a conclusion. On the one hand it's awful to abandon someone with an illness to potentially make the same mistakes for the rest of their life, with increasingly diminishing returns in terms of relationships and perhaps a really sad end. But on the other, I don't want to be an abused 'doctor' instead of a husband. I should say that most of the time we have no problems at all, but these episodes are so bad and getting worse (firstly after marriage, and secondly during lockdown) that they end up with worse results each time. Such are the emotional extremes that these episodes are 'forgotten' within minutes (!) as she goes back to normal whilst I remain traumatized, thinking 'what on earth was that?'
But if someone won't trust you or listen to your advice, accuses you of things that are simply not true, goes completely mad if you do so much as look at a female flight attendant for example, then how the hell can it be resolved without behavioural therapy which is difficult to access here and not seen as necessary by many of the people who most need it?
