Dating Bi-polar: A Love Story

As subscribers to my newsletter will know, I recently went through a breakup. It was a great relationship that ultimately didn’t work out. I’m not going to get into all the salacious details of that (even I have to keep something private), but I did want to write a little bit about dating someone who is bi-polar. This comes from my non-bi-polar perspective. There are some great resources from those who have it to understand what the lived experience of it can be. The disorder is simple but insidious. The chemical imbalance in the brain basically leaves the sufferer without proper emotional and behavior regulation, so they cycle between Mania (a highly motivated state where they feel great and are ready to take on the whole world) and depression (not wanting to do anything, driving people away, etc.). Medication can do a great deal to mitigate this, although it never goes away, and it can’t be cured. That realization, early in a relationship, can be a stressful one. Medication does improve things. 

If you’re going to be partnered with someone with this sort of mental health condition, then you need to know one thing: they have to be taking their medication. It’s the first piece of advice that I saw when I began to look into it, and I pass it along to you, dear reader. Unmedicated bi-polar is simply unmanageable. The swings between depression and mania are crazy enough; they are exacerbated without any sort of medication. As with all medications for mental health, getting the right combination right takes time and patience. Sometimes, the combination that worked doesn’t work anymore, and the testing process starts over. Sometimes it even becomes a balance of what side effects they are willing to deal with. I was very lucky that I never had to beg my partner to take medication or believe in its effectiveness. They knew that they needed to stay on the meds, and that was never an issue for us. It can be an issue for others. 

When I first read the stories on r/bipolar I, read a bunch of horror stories about marriages and relationships that crumbled due to the disorder. I felt overwhelmed. But I was reassured that all was not lost. I kept reading. Obviously, those for those who have a happy relationship aren’t likely to post to such a forum. As I put it privately, “the disgruntled post on Reddit, the gruntled don’t post.” However, early in my research, I came across a thread that endeavored to do just that. The poster invited people to post about how and why their relationship works out despite the disorder. That helped give me hope, but those horror stories nagged in the back of my mind. The people I felt the worst for were those who had a bi-polar partner and had children. It was often left to the healthy partner to be the strong one all the time. It is said that being in love with a bipolar person is one of the most intense loving experiences that you can ever have. I can testify to that. I was brought out of my shell, and I was allowed to feel things and experiences that I hadn’t in a very long time. I liked being with someone for the first time in 10 years and having the chance to do a couple things. 

Bipolar is a struggle. It’s hard to want to do a thing….and be unable to do or to live on the roller coaster of mania and depression. For the bipolar person, a fast emotional switch is a normal state of being. For those of us who move more slowly, there can be feelings of emotional whiplash. I felt that often because something would happen, a disagreement would ensue, and whether I was in the right or wrong (and often both), I would be left with the emotional rollercoaster of getting to the bottom of the problem. Sometimes I handled it well with grace and ease, and other times, like any human, I would lash out in anger or other emotions of my own. That’s the trouble. When someone else is emotionally unstable, the most stable partner has to shoulder the burden of being the rock. 

But most importantly I was left with a terrible feeling that I simply was not up to the challenge of handling someone, even on medication, that struggled with this. Handling this mental health situation while also being in love with the person in question takes up a lot of brain space. It just does. There is a daily stress that comes with this sort of thing that no one really talks about. This is worse if there are other medical issues or poor medication that is not working. I had to handle both in my relationship. Thanks to chronic pain, there were days and moments where that became the focus and everything else had to drop away to handle that problem. Combining that with a mental issue means that when there were really good days, they were really good but when the bad days arrived they were the worst.  Ultimately, I couldn’t handle the day-to-day of it anymore. I don’t know what was wrong with me but I couldn’t handle it anymore. 

My first clue to this feeling was when someone asked me, “What is in this for you? What are you getting out of this? I worry because there are things I never hear from you.” That was when I realized that while I was giving a great deal I was not getting much in return. This is not to say that this is what happens in relationships with bi-polar people, far from it. However, in my particular case I was doing the giving and I couldn’t easily come up with a list of things that I was getting back for my hard effort. I was their rock but even the mountain has to shake from time to time. 

Dating a bipolar person is not impossible. There is no need to add that to a list of deal-breakers in a dating profile. There are some challenges ahead. The key is to make sure that the disorder is managed and there is a healthy relationship underneath everything. In my situation, the disorder was not being managed well but our relationship was operating fairly normally. We were able to navigate daily tasks like people who had been together for years. We issues were around the bigger stuff and I suppose that can be normal as well. Perhaps my emotional needs could have solved with different outlets. The fact that I had just moved to the area and had no friends of my own surely added to the problem. The nature of my work and how time-consuming it is to do what I do also was a barrier to success. On the other side, perhaps a change in medication would have made the difference. That is a story whose ending we will never know.