Big dreams flip flop

I am hoping to vent a little (oops, a lot!) about my situation and possibly to gain some advice about wading through a few issues that my husband and I are having in our marriage. I just joined today and I'm a little nervous about getting outside comments on our relationship but right now I feel like I have nowhere else to turn. I am completely open to comments and suggestions on my behaviour as well as my perception of my husband's. I am in the 25-30 age range and my husband falls into 30-35. We have been married close to 4 years and have known each other for over 8. We have been very close from day one. Never have I wanted to spend so much time with someone right off the bat and never have I had someone who felt the same about me. We clicked, we meshed...we still often do. One thing to mention about the dynamics of our relationship is that my husband deals with bipolar. I knew this when I met him, I love him. This has caused a few major fights along the way. His tendency is to recoil and build a giant wall between us when he's going through a depression. This can happen very suddenly and he cannot put words to his feelings until after he has come out of the depression. My tendency is to struggle through this process, wanting him to speak, wanting him to just say, "I'm depressed, I need to be alone" instead of getting quiet and agitated and often displacing these feelings. I know I need to change the way I act when he is depressed but it is proving to be very difficult for me. I find the sudden emotional disconnect very hard to process and I do the classic thing of trying to figure how to blame myself. I also sometimes get angry...the funny thing is that anger is the thing he responds to the most but I hate the person I see myself becomi ng as I get isolated more and more. I don't want to have to yell at my husband for him to be present. He has actually said that on occasion he needs me to do this, it kind of makes me feel sick. Another repeated behaviour that I have noticed is that he will often happily agree to something and then change his mind later only to claim that I forced him to or he only did it because I wanted him to. It's happens with plans big and small. For example we will make plans with friends and he will happily talk about how fun it's going to be all week and then the night of he will start saying he doesn't want to go or that he's only going cause I want to. This flip flopping behaviour rose to a new level last night and I find myself in the middle of a huge fight. A little backstory... I recently left a job that I had worked for about 5 years. I was going nowhere fast and I was extremely unhappy in that work environment. The last year I spent there was out of sheer necessity while my husband finished his schooling and entered into his chosen field. Now that he has a stable position he encouraged me to quit my unhappy job and find something that I found fulfilling. I accepted this offer and this support and I started a small side business to work on while I search for my calling. I am not delusional, and I know that I need to work so I have been looking for little filler jobs here and there but coming up short. I'm quickly realizing that although I have a post secondary education, I am not qualified for many of the available jobs I see. This is distressing and I know it has affected my mood. I have low energy right now and I need to kick start myself into action. My husband has been extremely supportive during this time. Well, last night my compassionate , supportive, helpful husband flipped a switch and left me blindsided. I brought up a question about my side business and my husband quickly began to interrogate me about how much money I think I can actually make, what my plans were, do I really think we can afford to put any money into my business right now? I became immediately defensive and asked where all this was suddenly coming from and he eventually admitted that he had been talking to his step mother about it and she didn't think I could make it in my newly chosen field...and apparently he was now full of doubt. I was livid! These things are our business! How dare he talk about this to his mom before he ever said a word to me?? The last thing he has said to me about my business was, "you have to spend money to make money!" and now he was coming to me with this out of the blue?? The fight, as they say, was on. We both said things I'm sure we regret. I slept in the spare bedroom and he was gone to work when I woke up. Now I'm dreading the time when he gets back. Should I go out and leave him to be by himself for a while before he gets home? Should I stay home and get ready for round two? I don't know what to do but I'm going crazy watching the clock and waiting for it to all start up again... Bare in mind that I do not want to trigger another round of depression. I cannot deal with that on top of this.

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