Thank you all for your advice. It's nice to hear a bunch of different perspectives on the issue.

We've talked a lot about it since then. A lot of it does actually stem from an issue she had with a previous cat. She feels like she's "cheating" on her cat who passed away when she was in high school by loving my cats (and even sometimes loving me). She was really close to that cat. They were practically inseparable, from what I hear, and before what was supposed to be a routine operation, she didn't get a chance to say goodbye to her cat.

Sometimes, just seeing a cat will trigger her into memories of her cat, and understandably, it hits her hard.

The issue at hand is her being able to deal with things in general, which I guess should be a different post. She's been having an increasingly hard time dealing with just about anything. We run into conflicts when I become exhausted and feel unable to do certain things as well. Just today, we ran out of coffee in the apartment (TRAGEDY). For reasons of social anxiety and exhaustion, she didn't want to go, and for reasons of exhaustion myself, I didn't want to go, and it just blew up. Granted, I think we're both just tired and cranky at this point, but just a small example.

I do have fears that this will ultimately become a problem. My patience is just about endless. If it stays that way, we'll be totally fine. If it doesn't though, I have worries.

Please try not to take the previous example as the only sort of thing that comes up... it's just the most recent one. The question I guess is... does anyone know any coping tools I might be able to help her with? I think we both could benefit from it. So many things are triggers which get her into an emotional state where she can't do anything, and I am needed to do lots of things for her to help her become stable again. This is fine normally, but if a random day hits where I just don't have a whole lot of energy... there are problems.