When asked the secret to maintaining their long-term relationship, urban couple Joe Moskowitz and Kendall Gardner said the mental health problems for which they individually seek therapy are a perfect complement to one another.
“Joe’s a depressive,” Gardner explained. “So before I started dating him, his one-bedroom apartment was a dump. The sole piece of furniture was really more of a landing space for unwashed clothing, his bed sheets were covered in dog hair and he had half-read novels strewn about the floor. It’s like a woman had never been in there before.” Moskowitz added that, before Gardner, there in fact hadn’t been a woman in his apartment.
Gardner added, “But now we’ve gotten into a routine where at least every few weeks he’ll put the effort into tidying up. Because he knows how the disorganization can drive me crazy.”
“And Kendall has anxiety,” Moskowitz said. “Sometimes I observe that her worry strays too far from any factual basis. That’s where depressive realism becomes an asset. I can be like, ‘Baby, of course I still like you. It just seems like I don’t because right now I don’t like anything at all. But that will change in a bit and you’ll still be number one.’”
The couple says that across every domain of living, these opposite qualities create harmony and make better people out of both of them. Moskowitz’s indifference to social perception calms Gardner’s proclivity to read into things, just as Gardner’s excessive concern for maintaining social graces motivates Moskowitz to give a shit. She reports improved satisfaction with her coworkers after he kept saying “who cares” to each frivolous bit of office gossip-mongering. And his quarterly employee report improved from “satisfactory” to “somewhat above satisfactory,” citing a noticeable increase in initiative.
They caution, however, that destruction looms when the roles are switched. “When Kendall is depressed, she watches ‘Real Housewives’ all day long,” Moskowitz said.
“And when Joe is anxious, I’ll lose him to an obsessive rabbit hole of internet conspiracies,” Gardner retorted. “It’s important to first be true to yourself and the specific mental illness that makes you unique. If you lie about that, you’ll forever hide the beauty of letting someone else’s insanity make your soul better.”