PSA: A woman should never be held responsible for her partner’s mental health

We all have a friend who has stayed with a boyfriend longer than she wanted to because she was concerned about his mental health.

Or maybe it's you. Maybe you're the one whose boyfriend has admitted to having suicidal thoughts but won't address them or seek help. Maybe you're the one who worries about how much your other half drinks or takes drugs when he's upset. Maybe you're the one who has tried to end a relationship, only to have your partner tell you he'll kill himself if you leave. Sometimes, guilt can keep relationships together far longer than actually being in love can. Even if someone falls out of love, they still know their partner inside out. Knowing someone's mind, their vulnerabilities and their demons, it's hard not to worry if they'd be OK in break-up. In relationships, we all play makeshift therapists to our other halves, listening and trying to make them feel better about what's upsetting them, what they struggle with. Who doesn't want to help the person they love through something? Often this is healthy but it can come to a point where one person is doing all of the emotional heavy lifting, especially when their partner would benefit from professional help but refuses to get any. It's a burden that no one should have to shoulder - and given the simple fact that men are typically slower to speak about their problems, it's one that disproportionately falls on women. It was inevitable that Ariana Grande was going to get dragged into the coverage of Mac Miller's death. She's one of the most famous ladies in the world and she used to go out with him until earlier this year. Her new, high profile relationship has been one of the biggest celebrity stories of the summer - she and Pete Davidson were engaged just months after she and Mac went their separate ways. In a world where celebrities' private lives are our personal soap opera, it might seem like this horrific young death is a part of that narrative. But it's not. Mac was open about his substance abuse for years, admitting that he'd been doing drugs since he was 15 and calling them "awesome" in a 2013 interview. As news of the tragedy broke on Friday night, I wondered how long it'd be before talk turned to Ariana. Sure enough, there it was the next morning - she's had to disable her Instagram comments over trolls blaming her for his death. It's a position she's been put in before. The singer was forced to defend herself when, shortly after she and Mac split, he was involved in a hit-and-run incident while drunk and his fans blamed it on her for "dumping" him. "Shaming/ blaming women for a man's inability to keep his shit together is a very major problem," she wrote in a note posted to Twitter.

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— Ariana Grande (@ArianaGrande) May 23, 2018

Whether a woman's partner explicitly threatens to hurt himself to manipulate her into staying with him or she just knows that he struggles with his mental health and worries about what effect a breakup might have on him, it's simply not her job to stay and try and 'fix' him. Ariana says so.