I Live With Unmedicated Bipolar Spouse
I'm a twenty-eight year old male who recently broke up with my thirty-eight year old girlfriend. I met her at work. We had been dating for about four months off and on. Our relationship was pretty rocky from the start. I treated her like a queen. I bought her flowers for no reason. I tried to participate in the activities she enjoyed. Her mother adored me. She had been in mostly abusive relationships. Her sometimes being the abuser by becoming violent. Everyone who knew her seemed pretty happy that she was finally seeing such a nice guy. Still she would become cold and distant at regular intervals. The closer I would get to her the further she would push me away. She would say cruel things to me (like we would never live together or that she would like to be with someone that she can sleep in the same bed with one day. I snore pretty badly) and then claim she was merely speaking her mind and that I was too sensitive. We live an hour and half away and she would routinely make plans to come to my place then blow me off telling me she just didn't feel like driving all the way to my house. This would obviously make me feel pretty hurt. When I pointed out how she was treating me we would fight. She would blow up make claims like I was being clingy and typically break up with me. After a few days she would tell me that I was right and we would get back together. This became so regular that I began to see a pattern forming. When she was up things were great and I couldn't have been happier. She was loving, attentive and sweet. She once made me turn around from walking away from her after we had been out so she could tell me that she loved me. When she was down she was cold, distant and irritable. She would seem to switch between the two about every two weeks with her up-swing normally during her period. This behavior seemed to be directed toward people she was close to. Mainly myself and her mother. To everyone else she pretended to be happy about everything. She had even admitted this to me once. I began reading up on bipolar disorder but her symptoms didn't quite fit. She really didn't get into deep depressions when she was down. I stumbled upon Cyclothymia which seemed to fit her symptoms more closely. We continued to fight and eventually we both became fed up with the situation. I still wasn't ready to give up on her though. I was in love with her and I was committed to make things work. I told her that I believed she suffered from a chemical imbalance and that if she wanted to continue the relationship that she needed to seek professional help. From what I had read of the disorder I knew that this approach probably wouldn't go well but I didn't know what else to do and I didn't feel that it was fair for her to pretend she didn't have a problem and leave me to deal with it by myself. She was insulted by this and became defensive. I tried pointing out her behaviors to her. The things she had done. Her erratic behavior. I quoted her from times when she had herself said that she needed to treat me better and couldn't understand why she didn't. None of this made any difference to her and she refused to seek help so we remained apart. She said she still wanted to be friends. I told her that I didn't feel that was possible. I feel that it wasn't right for her to have treated me so poorly and then expect us to be friends right away. I felt it was best for us to go back to being just co-workers. I again reinforced that I couldn't have anything to do with her until she sought help. This wasn't easy as we worked together. She made the situation worse by constantly trying to get my attention. She would "accidentally" call me and want to chat. She would start singing or drawing attention to herself whenever I would walk by. She would leave her housekeeping cart in the area where I was working instead of bringing it with her and then constantly come back to it. She once spent an hour staring at me from the staff lounge while I was helping one of my employees fix his truck on my lunch break. This was particularly odd because she always left on her break to walk her dog who she loves very much. I did my best to ignore all this and stick to my decision that we wouldn't be together unless she started seeing a psychiatrist. I was fired from my job two weeks ago. My termination had nothing to do with her. While she has mostly kept her distance she has continued her attention seeking to a lesser extent. She was having financial troubles so I had bought her a new Blackberry and put her on my phone plan while we were together. I wanted to make things a little easier for her and I wanted to be able to keep in touch with her throughout the day. After I was fired she deleted me from her Blackberry Messenger contacts knowing that my phone would alert me when she did. She had done this before. I hadn't initiated any contact with her and she had told me she would be returning the phone in a week. I don't feel she had any real reason to do this except as a means of trying to get me to speak to her. A few days ago she texted me asking for my mailing address