A non-romantic obsession from June 15, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I am lucky enough to have a wonderful, sweet, and generous man in my life. We have been together for two years and, being in our early 30s, a potential for marriage is on both our minds. The problem is that he has obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that dictates most of his actions. When we first met, he was doing all right. He told me about it and I was fine with it, mostly because I hadn’t seen the effects of his condition on his life. In the past six months, he has been spiraling down into the depths of this disorder, and for a time, would not come near me. I can’t begin to tell you how painful it was to be so thoroughly rejected by such a loving person. It got so bad that we did not see each other for a month. When I told him that I wanted to break up, he finally started in a therapy program (including medication). Maybe this is selfish of me, but I am not sure if I can handle this condition in my life. I promised that I would not leave him until he was stable again and we could talk about it. The reality is that his “minor” mental illness is a very difficult thing to deal with and I am not sure that I would want to commit myself to it for the rest of my life. It might help him deal with the condition, but I don’t think that his anxiety will ever go away. I feel so guilty about wanting to leave him and there is a part of me that believes that I’ll never meet anyone as wonderful as he can be again. Is this stupid? Am I wrong?

— Miki

BG’s response after the jump

Mind Hacks recently featured a highly amusing husband and wife rating chart from the 1930s, invented by marriage counselor George W. Crane, MD, Ph.D. How it works: your spouse earns merit or demerit points based on his or her behaviors and characteristics. Some (“Snores”) are things we can still relate to, while the rest offer a curious peek into the norms and expectations of that era (demerits for a husband who “talks of efficiency of his stenographer or other women” or a wife who “fails to sew on buttons or darn socks regularly”).

Crane aimed to be “scientific” in the development of this test; true to form, according to the American Psychological Association, he started the Scientific Marriage Foundation, which took a “scientific” approach to marriage and claimed to have set up more than 5,000 marriages.

I wonder what a modern version of this questionnaire would look like. Demerits for “brings laptop to bed”?