So I’ve met this girl, and we have been seeing each other for about three weeks. I guess we are quite into each other.
However, deep down I feel as if I am stringing her along because I am still managing my depression and I haven’t told her about it. I perceive that as a ‘deal breaker’, and the more I drag the more guilty I feel, but I feel a lot of fear about the 'talk;.
When is a good point in the relationship to talk about such things, be it a mental illness, bad financial condition, messy family problems and etc.?
Having The Talk can suck, but it’s also good to get things out in the open. It shows you’re honest about yourself and your growing relationship.
It gets easier to have The Talk as I get older and realize everyone has baggage. How we deal with it shapes our character. Stuff I though was “wrong” with me in my 20’s 'aint nothing with some of the screw ups I’ve made in my 30s. The longer you try to hold your issues in, I think you risk her picking up that there something you’re not telling her and start imagining what it could be.
I’ve gotten tired of dancing around issues before and had The Talk with girlfriends in the past (one had some legal problems). Wasn’t a deal breaker - I knew about her issues from the get go - but there were some basics I needed to know before we got more serious, since I was relocating. This was about the four month point. We eventually broke up, but later and for different reasons.
Good luck and leave her room to ask questions if she wants more info - don’t empty your entire closet for her in one sitting is my advice. And maybe watch Jersey Shore or Hoarders: Buried Alive together afterwards for some perspective on how relatively normal the both of you are.
ETA: just wanted to add, you don’t get to entirely decide what a “deal breaker” is - she gets a vote, too. Good luck.
I think the third date is the consensus for issues that would affect your sex life. If your depression doesn’t affect your sex life, three weeks to a month sounds like a reasonable time. She knows and likes you well enough not to run screaming, if she’s worth dating at all (and if she does run and scream, she doesn’t deserve you anyway). Tell her when you think the time is right.
Personally, I’d rather bring it up before my significant other would have unsupervised access to my medicine cabinet. Because once they do, they’re going to find out.
A piece of conflicting advice from me: don’t make it The Talk.
In the first few weeks I wanted to tell my girlfriend about my run-ins with the black dog, and one day she happened to mention a friend who was depressed. It was an opportunity for me to say “yeah, I’ve had that - it sucks” rather than the portentous “sit down, I need to tell you something”. And then I was able to tell her honestly about dealing with it, rather than making a huge deal out of it. I agree about not emptying the entire closet in one go though.
If it never comes up naturally, you could maybe bring up a celeb who’s openly been depressed and go from there.
Strangely, a few months after we started dating she herself got clinically depressed for the first time in her life - made me wonder if it was a virus she caught from me - and though it was obviously really tough and isolating for her, it helped her a bit that I understood what she was going through.
Yeah, I wrote it as The Talk mostly tongue-in-cheek. It’s always best to let it come up naturally, but letting one party sit on their big dark secret can cause troubles, too. It’s a balance and there’s no pat answer.
QFT. Had a girlfriend who had what looked like self-harm scars on her arm. Eventually I asked her about them and she made a lame excuse. She got extremely weird on me then eventually disappeared on me, leaving me pretty upset (I then discovered from the logs that she was obsessively stalking my website, day after day, then more than a year later she started texting me quotes from things I’d written). I learned just a couple of months ago from a mutual friend that her problems ran very, very deep and it was no surprise that I got hurt by her.
I don’t know if this might help but have you brought up the topic of mental health issues in a general chat way? Maybe if you can have a good intellectual conversation with her than maybe you can garner whether she is open and brave enough to hear that you are suffering from a few things yourself?
I agree with the posters above, make it a casual thing you bring up occassionally don’t make it “a thing” that will get in the way. Although it really depends what kind of person she is, I told my boyfriend on our first date that I was taking medication…for my mind and made it quite lighthearted and he took it well and was very understanding, she may just surprise you.
Get to know her more, talk about things more. If she’s into you and wants to see you after you’ve told her these things then she will be worth seeing if she reacts in a terrible way then you know she’s not the one for you.
By the way Crowbar, congrats on finding someone you like who likes you back - and good luck with it. I’m sure it’ll be fine. My girl wasn’t fazed by me having had depression, and we’ve been together for a year and a half now despite six months enduring her bout of desolation. Neither of us is suffering too badly at the moment, and we’re very much in love and happy indeed.
You don’t want to drop the news too soon, and you don’t want to wait too long. But with that said, the window is fairly large for you to have the talk. I had a great relationship this fall with a girl that was quickly shut down because we waited too long to have a discussion about religion. I’m an athiest, she isn’t. If we had had the talk just a few weeks earlier, we’d have avoided a great deal of heartbreak on both sides.
I suggest you do so before you guys start getting intimate, however long that might be (could be a week, could be a few months - it’s different for everyone). In other words - do it before the point where you’d really have regrets if you break up because she can’t handle the news.
The absolute latest to have the talk is when one or both are starting to have that “this might be the one” feeling and there is something that could really be a deal breaker. Both halves of that leave a lot of room for interpretation. What one person is afraid to reveal because they think it might be a deal breaker could be “part of what makes you you” to the other person.
I’d do it in de next week or so, and then it is good timing. If depression is a dealbreaker, then about one in five people on average are undatable. You thinking of you depression as a dealbreaker is more the depression talking then reality.
Also, remind yourself that your depression is more about how you feel on the inside. She wil deal with the outside. I have a mild depression for the past five years and my husband actually thinks of me as mostly sweet and cheerful. I see myself as, at best, bitterly caring " why do I have to take care of everything in this family dammit" and sarcastically caustic in my humor. So, which one of us is wrong, me or my husband?
if she reacts in a terrible way then you know she’s not the one for you.