Depression & Bipolar: A Love Story

I met my boyfriend, Jordan, over two years ago. We had just started studying the same course at the same university, and it wasn't long before I decided he could quite possibly be my favourite person in the world. He was always smiling, laughing—always up for a good time, and his door was never closed. We also bonded over music, playing, and writing together, and over the course of a year, we grew to become the sort of best friends that make people question whether something more is going on.

During our first year of friendship, I changed a lot as a person. Before coming to university, I was in a long term relationship, and when we both moved away to study we attempted long distance. Due to many reasons, this didn't work for us and we broke up. But it was my response to this breakup that changed me, not the breakup, itself. I took it incredibly hard, and as a result, I was diagnosed with depression, which, thinking about it now, makes a lot of sense. I'm an incredibly sensitive person and it doesn't take a great deal for me to enter a depressive state, but the one constant during that first year of me struggling to cope with my new diagnosis was Jordan. I knew from day one that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he had never been shy about talking to me about it. This was incredibly refreshing to me, as I had grown up being used to not talking to people about how I felt.

But talking to someone about your mental disorder and spending time with them while you experience the resulting symptoms are two vastly different things, and you can never prepare yourself for being there to witness someone at their lowest moments. I had certainly known about Jordan's low and high moments; he had described them to me in perfect details many times. But I'd never witnessed them the way I do now that we're a couple.

Ashamedly, I have to say that sometimes I feel like I'm in a relationship with bipolar disorder, not Jordan. It can become so overwhelming at times that it's hard to remember there's a person you love behind the mania and the depression. But what I've noticed is how incredibly easy it's been when you consider the fact that we are two people both struggling with debilitating mental illnesses, both completely dependent on the other for sanity and strength. I rely on Jordan to bring me back up when I feel like I can't do it myself, and he relies on me to calm him down when he's too high up, but that's exactly what makes it work; we balance each other out.

Now, I am by no means an expert on helping someone with bipolar disorder. I still don't know a lot about the illness, I just know a lot about Jordan's experiences of it and how it affects him. I know exactly what to do when his symptoms appear, and I know what to say when he doesn't. The same goes for him when he has to deal with me. But no matter how much experience we get in handling these situations, we're still learning. We still have moments where we make mistakes when all we're trying to do is help each other, and we still fight. Only our fights end in panic attacks, not screaming matches.

Despite this, even if Jordan had a panic attack every day for the rest of his life, I would stay. There is no symptom or side effect of bipolar disorder that would ever make me get up and leave. Because at the end of the day, I'm not in a relationship with the disorder, I'm in a relationship with my boyfriend, and he is in a relationship with me, not depression. I am not my depression, and he is not his bipolar. We are two individuals, both struggling with sometimes crippling mental illnesses, but together, we are a unit. Sure, a unit with some serious issues that mean we are going to spend half of our lives crying on the bathroom floor while the other one panics about how to handle the situation, but a unit, nonetheless.

Besides, it's more fun when you have to rebuild the unit a few times, especially if you're doing it together.