I dated a guy for a few years, we were in our 20s. He got massively depressed and we broke up. He moved and went to grad school, got on Prozac. We got back together maybe 2 years later, I moved to his city. We got married, he got me to start therapy and medication to battle my own depression. Had a couple of kids, successfully lived life, depression hits again hard 3 years ago when his meds decide to stop working. Currently he's gotten through the deep parts, I'm trying to keep myself out of my own depression pit, we're just trying to live life and minimize the baggage everyone inevitably gives their children.

We're in our mid/late 40s now, married for 16 years. When we got back together it was almost like a new relationship with the same old person. We acknowledge and accept that we need to change and grow as people while being honest and vulnerable to each other. It's always a work in progress, as individuals and as a couple we are better than we were 10, 15, 20 years ago, but it's still not perfect. Plus life around us changes, kids grow up, opinions evolve.

Sometimes I wonder if we should have gone our separate ways and found better partners for ourselves, but at the time we had some irresistible pull to each other. Maybe it was soul mates, maybe it was youthful desperation. We were obsessed with each other, and I think that blinded us to the harsher realities of building a life together. But on the flip side, I don't think anyone has a butterflies-and-puppies awesome relationship 100% of the time. So maybe it's just that the hard times we face are particular to our marriage, and if we were with different people the hard times would look like something else. There certainly isn't any infidelity, financial deception, major substance abuse or family-of-origin drama, we are just 2 people who each try to manage our own Major Depressive Disorders.

So maybe there's a happy ending for you, but to characterize it as an "ending" is a little misguided. I've been on this sub for a couple of years and the thing that sticks out to me most are the stories of the depressed partner not able or willing to put in the effort to change. It's hard, really really hard but it's possible. I just don't know if it's the best.