HoneyOneSenior Contributor
Living with a Bipolar partner - How do you know when you've had enough?
When I first met my partner, 2 years ago... he would alternate between being amazing, a superhuman --- to being a complete mess.
At his best, he is caring, charming, excited, captivating.
At his worst, he would go on 2-week-long drinking binges. Pay women $$$ to spend a week with him in bed. He once sent me a video of him having sex with another woman. He would be admitted to the emergency department when he was so close to the end of it all. He has an assistant that would cover for him for any work commitments.
It was very early in our relationship, so it was quite clear his behaviour had nothing to do with me. He didn't even know me.
His family is tired of dealing with him. They live across the other side of Australia. They offer little emotional support and I have the feeling they would preferred it if he drunk himself to death.
Anyway, when I came along, he was motivated to start a fresh life. Eventually, I put the pieces together and got him diagnosed with Bipolar II in February 2020.
When he was first put on medication, the meds worked quite well. He was mostly stable with some down periods.
He set himself some personal goals, and he's blew them out of the water!
He has been more forthcoming with his emotions than he's ever been in his whole life. He's now in healthy weight range. And longtime aquaintences of his say they've never seen him look better. (Unfortunately he doesn't have any deeply connected friends.)
But over the last few months, there's been increasing friction between us. And by friction, I mean fights.
We've been in couples counselling, at his request, for most of our relationship. The first counsellor was dealling with the trainwreck of the start of our relationship. So that round of counselling didn't really make any progress.
We have a new counsellor, and she is much better. She asks probing questions, explains why triggers and habits are in effect and give us clear strategies to try.
However, I continue to find it very hard to get him to listen/understand my needs. When I feel like he's not listening, I get more upset and assertive with expressing my needs, he takes it as a critism then we end up in a fight.
He will always 'leave' the situation and me. And I have abandonment issues from my early childhood experience. So this leaves me feeling very vulnerable.
He's estranged from his two boys (18 and 20 yo) and it was Father's Day on Sunday.
He had already been getting more agitated over the last few weeks.
He would get irritated that I leave my tea cups around the place, yet his clothes are scattered everywhere.
He gets irritable if he's calendar isn't mostly full of things to do.
He's irratated that I've asked him for more space and time to focus on my business.
For the last few weeks, I've been saying to my partner I feel like he's controlling me.
He's taken up cooking in the last 6 months, now he does 98% of the cooking. Which at first pass, is amazing. But he will insist on me assigning a time we can both eat together, 3 meals a day. It feels more controlling than nurturing.
He wants to make every Friday night Pizza night, every Sunday morning Pancake morning.
He drove me to my hairdresser appointment and to a business meeting.
He says he's looking after me. And I know it must sound petty. But it actually feels controlling.
I realised last week, there doesn't seem to be any joy in anything we do. It all seems like work.
We've taken up spanish and ballroom dancing, two things I love, but they don't feel joyous.
On Saturday, I told him I wanted to go to the beach with the goal of working on my summer tan. It was 20 deg and windy. We were sitting at the cafe and he almost tries to force me to sunbake because that's what I said was my goal for the day.
Saturday was terrible. Then Sunday, being Father's Day was worse. He said some critical things to me. I went into the bedroom to journal about my feelings because he had cut me off twice when I tried to express them.
He follows me into the bedroom to ask me when I'm going for a run because he wants to go and eat pancakes.
Anyway, I just couldn't take the picking anymore and I got cranky. I told him how unpleasant the beach experience was for me.
I said next time I wouldn't invite him as I just wanted a few hours free of obligations. A few hours to have fun.
He said two things to me - He asked me to leave. And he asked me if I wanted him to start talking to someone else... which I picked up to mean, start seeing someone else.
He left, I stayed in our apartment.
With that comment about another 'someone', something he hadn't said to me before, I researched and saw he had a new 'friend' on the language app we use to learn Spanish. A very attractive, young, blond 'friend'.
With my abandonment issues, this made me see read.
When I interogated him about it, he said he had made friends with a few top point scorers on the app. This is factually incorrect. She wasn't a top scorer and there weren't any other 'friends' he'd connected with on the app.
Then his story changed to she must have connected with him. When I checked her profile she had a total of 12 friends, all of whom looked like people she would know. Not a random person across the globe.
So then I write to her, and ask her... how did they come to connect?
And I told him I emailed her to ask.
She responds quite promptly with a very similar story... 'she's not really sure. Maybe it was the time when she was being more 'social' on the app.' It just seemed too contrived. If feels like he bought her something nice or paid her cash to write that response to me.
Now he's gone to a hotel room and blocked me from contacting him.
I just rang the Sane support line and had a really insightful chat.
It was just explained to me that it's likely my partner's anxiety that makes him want to be with me all the time. Seems like my feeling of being controlled are justified, despite my partner's claims he is acting in my best interests.
The counsellor also explained to me that my partner DOES NOT have the right to debrief me on every thought in his head whenever he wants to. My partner thinks he does have that right and tells me he wants a partner who will listen to him always.
It feels to me that if I'm not available to him when he wants it, he will go and find another woman who will willingly oblige.
The advice is to set boundaries, find autonomy and independance. We would need to set a new dynamic, one that is balanced.
Interestly, I had expressed the same thoughts to my partner, but not so eloquently.
He can look to adjusting his meds, that might work.
I found he a great psychologist that he's only seen a handful of times. I could insist he sees her weekly, but if he doesn't want to open up, her assistance is limited.
Honestly, I don't know if it's worth the effort. I don't know if I can ever truely trust or rely on him.
How do you know if you can ever truely trust of rely on anyone, even if they don't have a mental illness?
Or should I just cut my losses and go. I'm 41 so it's an important time to make that decision.
I would really appreciate any life lessons on offer!
Thanks for reading!
