First Relationship and Not Sure How to Understand It
I (26F) got out a 4 month relationship with someone (31M) with bipolar II a few weeks ago. It was my first boyfriend, and at the beginning, I thought I’d marry him (I know that’s crazy, for the record, we’re Mormon and it’s kind of normal culturally. He wanted to know what kind of ring I would like and start looking around but I wouldn’t send him pictures or anything because I am at least a bit more reasonable than some of my peers 😂).
When we first started dating he was so much more sensitive, aware, gentle, and kind than most of the men I knew. It honestly made me nervous because I felt like he was too in-tune with me and that it had the potential to become co-dependent. Like we could reach each other too well. At the beginning, I felt like we could talk about anything without any shame. I could tell him anything and I wanted to hear everything about him.
At this time he was taking OTC lithium and managing with supplements and dieting (lots of keto, etc) and appeared to me to be doing really well. Maybe 6 weeks in he decided to try prescription Lithium. He told me after he had decided and gotten the script but said it was because he thought he needed some more help if he was going to have a successful relationship with me. Shortly after he ended up adding Caplyta which he loved. I felt like when he was first on it, he could no longer see me at all. I think he was hypomanic. Basically he’d call me for however long he could and just talk and talk and I couldn’t get a word in edge wise. It was the first time I saw him do that. He would never ask about me and would go on and on about how incredible the medication was and how he felt so good. Eventually I tried to delicately tell him I was happy for him and if this is what he wants, I’ll be so glad he’s happy but that it just wasn’t working for me (this was about a week in, which was maybe too soon, but it was the longest week ever of just listening to him and feeling like I was nothing). He ended up halving the dose and he was a lot better but not quite the same as the guy I first met.
The first time I felt like he was really having a manic episode, I was flying out of state to visit friends. He called me and was telling me about some spiritual promptings he’d had that day. I was dubious but I didn’t feel it was my place to have an opinion until he told me that the second one (which involved walking into a meeting he had no business being in with people much higher than him) could not go wrong for him. He seemed frustrated that I wouldn’t tell him he should’ve followed it. And I told him God doesn’t really communicate with me in such “grandiose” ways trying to kind of flag it for him. The next day we talked and he told me about another spiritual experience he’d had the year before that was even more intense and out there. I have no opinion on the validity of that, it’s between him and God but it did make me nervous when he said it concerned his parents and when he told his therapist they were concerned, she allegedly told him not to worry about people who don’t understand his beautiful mind.
Anyway, that night he said he wanted to talk but ended up falling asleep, and the same thing the following day. On Monday I was flying back home and he called me while I was waiting for the plane to board. This was one of those times where he was just talking like a runaway train and I felt like there was nothing I could do. He was going on and on about Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons and Satan worship. In the time he called me they started boarding, got to my zone, I boarded with the last zone, put my bags up, and sat in my seat. And I remember distinctly there being two announcements on the intercom because he acted frustrated at being interrupted. By the time he stopped I didn’t know what to do. He had brought up so much, even if I could respond I didn’t know where I’d start. But by now I was two inches from a stranger with kids in the next row so I couldn’t exactly hold a conversation about PDFs in the setting. After a really long silence I told him we were going to push back and I needed to go.
The next day, he picked me up after school and I thought we had a really healthy and good conversation about the weekend where we established appropriate boundaries around how we would manage him being manic and spiritual promptings.
But then, two days later on Thursday we agreed to talk on the phone during his lunch. He ended up going to lunch about 45 mins late so I explained that I only had about 10 mins to talk while I walked from my car to a meeting. We were just mostly checking in but he mentioned multiple times that he had two big things to talk to me about. I told him repeatedly that it wasn’t a good time and that I was happy to meet up with him that night to go over them. As I’m finally ending the call (I’ve been pacing outside the office for the meeting for an extra 10 mins) he says, “well, they’re kind of bombs”. So, I tell him at this point that he better just say them. The first one was that he hadn’t felt like himself for 3 months, but then he also said for 3 weeks. 3 months was as long as I’d known him and 3 weeks was as long as he’d been on the caplyta. I told him ok and filed the discrepancy away for later that evening. The second one was that the night of our Epstein conversation he was laying in bed thinking about it and it made him think about a girl he used to date (she lives in Europe, they never met in person, just used to talk on the phone) and how she was so kind every time they called. And then the next day (Tuesday) he was in the sun, which he recognized can make him a little more hyped up, and he was feeling really drawn towards that girl. I asked him what that meant and he said that he felt like he should pursue her, like god was telling him to go down that road. But then, he said that day as he was praying it was me but he needed me to be kinder to him. (This was very directly in response to my response in the Epstein conversation. Which I do recognize was stonewalling and I should’ve spoken up sooner and I learned that I did have a pattern of getting overwhelmed and just shutting down and I tried to work on that). I told him I didn’t think it was fair to bring that up in the context of this other girl and that I didn’t want to cry in the hallway so I was going to go. Later in the afternoon I did agree to meet up with him that night at which point I told him we should take a break and he sobbed but agreed to do so for 4 days.
The fourth day, we met up, at a place he chose which was a much further distance for me but gave him more time to help a friend. It turns out it was still 26 mins way from where he was and subsequently he was about 35 mins late to meeting me. I ended up breaking up with him because he’d tweeted something really crass about women that day and it was all just too much. But, it didn’t last and I reached back out to him again 4 days later.
I’m sorry this is horribly long. The last kind of pertinent thing was that after a while of being back together and him constantly remarking that it was sooo much better than before we broke up, I finally asked what he meant (I thought it was pretty much the same, if anything maybe worse) and he told me “you’re so much more pleasant than you used to be”. And then didn’t want to talk about that comment because it was “making [me] spiral”, because I was acting happy with my neighbors at an event and when he showed up unplanned to join and then ended up going to a neighboring event and disappearing for an hour and then we went to talk about his comments and I wasn’t as happy as I was when I was with my neighbors. Later he brought this subject up again and told me that I was mean before and just hadn’t been since the kindness conversation (I was making a very concerted effort to never be cold to him after that, no matter how he made me feel).
And by the end of it, I just felt like I was just a warm body. He’d talk and talk and never care about me. One day he texted me, “Having a great day” meaning he was having a great day, no other messages from him.
When we finally broke up again, I cried for two weeks and was just so exhausted and then I realized I hadn’t felt like myself in months.
The problem is, I see the person I first met and I see who he is occasionally and his great family and I want to chock it all up to bipolar but that’s probably not fair. Have you seen behavior like this? My therapist basically assigns it all to bipolar (he has a close family member with the diagnosis so I tend to particularly trust him). Or is he just a jerk? How do you have patience with someone who never seems to see you? I’m not trying to get back together with him, I just don’t know how to wrap my brain around the whole experience. It’s so out of what I’m familiar with and the dynamics I’m used to.
At the end of the day, I feel like he’s really suffering and lives in so much fear and I just want so much more for him but I’m not sure what I could’ve done more.
And if you read this whole thing I really owe you one.