A letter to my OCD husband

I love you. I love that we have managed to make a home and a life together and keep it all going through the years. I love how we can always find common ground, debate and laugh together despite being from different countries and very different backgrounds. But I wish your borderline OCD/agoraphobia didn't run our lives.

I wish we could do the simple things that other couples do. I wish it wasn't a major undertaking to persuade you to come out to have dinner with our friends. I wish we could go for a walk without it being a major, highly stressful, expedition fraught with your explosions of temper. I wish it didn't always end in tears (mine), recriminations and promises (yours) that it won't happen again (it will). I wish all this didn't happen just because I have a bit of sand on my shoes when we get back in the car, or the dogs get muddy paws.

All my friends tell me how lucky I am to have a man who cleans and does his bit in the house. I know they're right; believe me, I've had enough experience of the alternative. I promise I'm not ungrateful but I can't help wishing I could put an empty teacup down without you sprinting into the room faster than Usain Bolt and bearing it away to the dishwasher like a burns victim to the operating theatre. I wish you would actually let me load the dishwasher, but you have established it as your exclusive domain, along with the hoover and the mop. No matter how well I do it, it will never be good enough.

Friends was at the peak of its popularity in the years after I finished university. In the shared house I lived in, we all took on the names of one of the characters according to our own personality traits. I was Monica. OCD, neat-freak Monica. And you call me untidy!

I wish you would acknowledge you have a problem and get some help, but you're from a generation of men who views therapy as failure. You tell me how controlling your mother is, but refuse to accept the effect she has had on your life and personality.

I wish I knew how to help you. I would love to see you relax and enjoy life; I dearly wish we could enjoy more of it together. I'm running out of ways to get you out of the house, I'm running our of excuses for why you had to stay home, and our friends are starting to think you don't like them. I have started to dread the weekends and the battles to make sure we don't just spent them sitting on the sofa. Worse, I dread the day when I run out of motivation to keep trying.