Shutterstock
So imagine you’ve been seeing a man for a few months and things are going great. You like him, you like his friends, you like his moves in the bedroom. You wonder if he could be husband material. Then he sits you down and tells you that he has bipolar disorder. You’re ready to give him the boot and throw away that set of keys to your place that you’d made for him.
But don’t leave him.
As someone with bipolar disorder, I’m here to tell you what you need to know about dating someone like me, so you that can keep having a relationship with this wonderful guy.
1. People With Bipolar Are Mostly Just Like Everyone Else
OK, so we go to therapy and take medications every day, but so do half the people in New York City. If you date someone with bipolar and they’re doing well, they’ll pretty much be just like your last significant other: they’ll tease you when you snore, roll their eyes when you want to watch “The Haves and Have Nots,” and scramble you some eggs after sex — hopefully. The point is, people with mental illness work and play and live our lives just like so-called “normal” people. If you’re dating one of us, expect a lot of regular stuff in your relationship.
2. We Spend a lot of Time In Our Heads
You won’t know how much time we spend thinking and over-thinking something you said at dinner last Tuesday. If you knew, you’d probably break up with us. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t speak freely. We’ve been through all that therapy, and we’ve spent more than one session on learning how to regulate our emotions. So say what you mean and how you feel, and we’ll figure out how to react. Chances are, we either know how to handle it, or we’re working on it.
3. We’re Going to Need to Talk About Our Feelings
People with mood disorders — bipolar, depression, borderline personality, anxiety and others — have learned that holding in our feelings is bad. It makes us feel very intense negative feelings, usually about ourselves. And when we feel bad, we have bad thoughts and might want to do bad things, like polish off a whole bottle of liquor and call our ex, or get behind the wheel. To help make sure we don’t end up drunk-dialing someone, or worse, we have to make sure our feelings don’t get the better of us. So we have to talk. Be prepared for a lot of “when you did X, it made me feel like Y” and, if things get serious, an invitation to couples therapy.
4. People With Bipolar Get Very Manic and/or Very Depressed
If we fall off our treatment, or experience a traumatic event, or our meds stop working we could go into relapse. Don’t expect it to look like Dre on “Empire.” A manic episode feels like the most productive, most energetic time of life. We need less sleep. We’re more social, in an erratic sort of way. We seek out risky behavior that we’d never do in our right mind. A depressive episode, on the other hand, feels like walking through peanut butter. There’s sadness, the literal inability to pull ourselves out of bed, tearfulness, and a lack of concentration. If you date someone with bipolar disorder long enough, you might have to see them through an episode. But undesirable things happen to everyone, even people without a mental illness. Everyone you date and care about is bound to live through some bad stuff. A bipolar episode has treatment, things to make the person feel better. And it turns out that two aspects of treatment are support and companionship.which you would give to any significant other.
So don’t dump your dude just because he has a mood disorder. You could end up having a relationship with an emotionally in tune, self-aware man who talks about his feelings. And you have done worse.
Tracey Lloyd is the creator of the blog, My Polar Opposite.
