Hi King of Orange, I've put in a request to the admins that this thread become a support group for relationship troubles and IBD, as it sounds like that's what you're trying to achieve here.
The sub-forum for families and friends is to invite those supportive family members and friends to post here even if they don't have IBD themselves - I don't think we want to make a sub-forum inviting unsupportive people to come on here and post about us!
That could get ugly pretty quick, ha ha.
I definitely had relationship troubles with my husband the first year I was ill. He was unsupportive and just did not understand, and there were a few times where he hinted that he felt like I was either faking or doing it for attention, that I couldn't possibly be that ill all the time. It was definitely driving us apart to the point that I started to discreetly look at apartments online as I didn't think we'd be married much longer.
Things fortunately changed for us - he got kidney stones!
At first, he did the guy thing and hid his symptoms from me and everyone else. He had rather IBD-like symptoms at first as well, so he was afraid to tell me that he might have something similar to what I have. His symptoms were massive abdominal pain (in the LRQ no less, I'm presuming it was referred pain from the kidney) and vomiting that would come on out of nowhere. After a few episodes of that, he finally told me, and I took him to the ER when the next episode hit. They did CT and x-rays and determined it was kidney stones, not IBD. They told us that his largest stone was about 7 mm, and anything larger than 5 mm usually is too big to pass on its own - but then, inexplicably, they said they wanted to take a "wait and see" approach and see if his big stone would indeed pass on its own. (???)
So, 6 months passed and hubby had a lot of pain, a lot of vomiting, episodes that would come on out of nowhere, a lot of frustration and cancelled plans and feeling horrible. (Sound familiar?) Finally they decided to go in and zap the stone out with a laser (and the big stone turned out to be impacted, so there was no way it would have ever passed on its own, so he spent 6 months in pain for basically no reason). Still, hubby endured a taste of what I go through, and it's weird to say but our marriage was saved because of kidney stones.
He's so much more understanding now, he realizes that yes it really is possible to be ill and in pain all the time because he lived that for a bit. Now, when I tell him I'm not feeling well, rather than sigh and roll his eyes at me, he takes things seriously and asks what he can do to help. It's such a wonderful change from where we used to be before the kidney stones!
I realize this isn't super helpful as it's not like you can just magically give your partner kidney stones, but I wanted to express that it is possible for a troubled relationship to turn around if the other person is given an understanding of what chronic illness and chronic pain is really like. I just happened to get lucky that my hubby got kidney stones and that his doctors made him wait and suffer for 6 months. Even though it was probably horrible for him, it ended up being wonderful for us.