Suicide threat is not a reason to stay in an unhappy marriage

Q: What do you do when you want out of the marriage but the other party keeps threatening (suicide) if you leave? Are you expected to stay in a marriage that you don't want to be in just so this person will not harm himself?

--D., Las Vegas

A: Yours is a question disturbingly more common than you might think.

Let me first respond by being deliberately facetious. I mean no disrespect, but I think it will make the point in spades:

Yes. Absolutely. Stay. It's your job as a wife to make sure your husband stays alive. A devoted wife takes full responsibility for her husband's willingness to live and his decision to do so. She cherishes his life even while he despises it. Trade your integrity, your authenticity, your every happiness -- whatever it takes to make sure he doesn't kill himself. Someday you'll thank him for taking this drastic stand and making you stay in this marriage. You'll see how much he loved you.

I mean, when you really step back and take your question to its logical conclusion, we quickly find our destination is pure absurdity, yes?

Which means you already know the answer to your question.

I am not without compassion for acute suicidal crisis. Thoughts of self-destruction are common during a time of grief and loss. Death of a loved one, the permanent, chronic consequences of trauma or illness, public humiliations, divorce -- these events predictably invite despair and its frequent companion, suicidal ideation (thoughts of suicide). People in such states certainly need and deserve competent intervention.

But my compassion includes accountability. In the end, the only person responsible for suicide is the person who is dead.

William Shakespeare has Juliet wake up from her strategic, self-induced coma to find Romeo dead by his own hand. Tragically, he did not receive the message of Frair Lawrence's carefully crafted plot to free the young lovers for a life together. So, in his grief, Romeo drinks poison and dies. Juliet, likewise in bereaved agony, kills herself with Romeo's dagger.

Wow, didn't they really, really love each other? It's beautiful, right? Sad, but beautiful.

Maybe. I'm not so sure. What if Juliet was about a year into in-depth therapy prior to all these happenings? A stronger, more solid, more well-differentiated version of Juliet would have awakened and, yes, would have been crushed near breathless by grief, would have died a thousand deaths in her heart and soul, might have wished herself not alive for many days.

But she wouldn't have completed suicide. In fact, at Romeo's funeral, mixed in with all her love for him and all her sorrow, she might well have paused at the funeral pallet, looked down at her dead soul mate and said, just under her breath, "Thou art an ass! A big goofball! Why didst thou give up so easily?"

The result of your husband's threat is you two are no longer mates; rather, you are both now hostages.

The threat speaks of something that has gone terribly wrong, both inside the threatening mate and with the marriage bond.

How should a wife feel if her husband says, "If you leave me, I'll kill YOU." Wouldn't she think that was creepy and evil and wrong -- absent real love? It is my prejudice that "If you leave me I'll kill myself" is the exact same comment, only with a different homicidal target. Murdering another, murdering oneself -- just a different movement of the same energy.

Suicidal pleas sound like pathos. They are actually hostility. Pure rage. At minimum, a grotesque manipulation. And love, if it is love, does not manipulate.

It is not OK to threaten to die -- or to kill -- to get what you need or want from interpersonal relationships.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling Wellness Center in Las Vegas and author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grif and Doing the Right Thing" (Stevens Press). His columns appear on Tuesdays and Sundays,. Questions or comments can be e-mailed to skalas@reviewjournal.com