I've never dated "normal" girls, as mainstream society would dictate them to be: that's not to say that I'm averse to dating people who are neurotypical but I think there's something to be said in people with mental illness tending to gravitate to partners that share the same problems.
Dating mentally ill people, as someone who has a mental illness, seems appealing. They empathise with your struggles, they can understand your past and help you (and themselves) in bettering one another. But the challenge in dating someone within the same bracket as you is that, when you're both at your lowest, your relationship can become detrimental to your overall mental health.
Now that I'm older, I certainly take offence to the term "crazy ex girlfriend". My partners were never "crazy". They were hurting. And in those moments where I couldn't help them, and where I was emotionally affected by their decisions and words, my friends were there to back my corner...but those friends didn't understand the dynamic that I was faced with.
Dating as a mentally ill person is horrendously isolating. Once one relationship has terminated, you carry that hurt and regret with you into the next one. You might feel like you have to alienate yourself from talking about how you feel, for fear that your new partner will react the same to the old one: you don't actually believe that they're going to be like your ex but learned behaviour dictates that they might be, so you feel a need to close off from it.
Then there's the heartbreaking scenarios in which you are open, you are loud about your experiences and how you deal with things, and then the other person continues to try and love you despite knowing you're hurting them. I used to believe that "love conquers everything" but, the sad truth is, it doesn't. You cannot love somebody's mental illness away, as much as you want to.
A problem I've been facing for the last few years is meeting new people, potential romantic partners, and making sure that my boundaries are set. Sometimes, I yearn for love more than I care for myself and wellbeing: that's a dangerous road to walk down, especially if you're in recovery. You have all of this emotion that you want to share with someone else, but that can become tiresome for them, which might translate as rejection to you.
I'm both blessed and cursed to be hyper-empathetic. I understand my affect on others, therefore I take precautions when going into something new. In doing that, however, I know I'm not being as honest as I should be: that's not to say I lie but it does mean that I am unwilling to be 100% truthful to others (an emotional scar carried on from childhood, unfortunately).
This doesn't just apply to romantic relationships. This is evident in purely sexual ones, platonic ones, even co-habitual ones. How we perceive others is inevitably tainted by the perception of ourselves, which may in fact be warped by depression, anxiety, ED or other variants of mental illness. It's hard to love others when you cannot love yourself, or if people in your past have demonstrated the ideology that maybe you, in your imperfect, mentally ill state, is unlovable.
I think there's an importance in understanding who you are before getting into a relationship. You don't have to love yourself, obviously, but I believe you have to know who you are in order to share that with somebody else. Heartbreak goes two ways: to refuse to acknowledge your own problems and affect on people in favour of producing love is to emotionally neglect whoever comes along next. It's selfish, in a way, to start dating without showing who and what you are because there might come a time where your partner realises and can't stand to be with you anymore: not because you're a bad person, but because they are not emotionally stable enough in themselves to support you.
I do often think I cannot be loved because of my mental illness but I objectively know that I am cared for by many people, and although I'm still single, I know there'll be a time where I won't be: I just have to continue to work on myself and eventually someone will come along and appreciate me for who I am, imperfection and all.
- K
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