Dating a man with depression?

Post Reply New Topic

I know a man with diagnosed depression and we've recently started dating.
He is also very extroverted and likes to hang out in large groups of people and he doesn't get tired from that!
I am introverted and have social anxiety.
So far i've never gone with him to hang out with friends and i've told him I can't stand groups of people.
He wants to introduce me to his friends though if we keep dating.
I also wonder how i'd be able to handle his depression when it's bad.
I am hyper-empathetic so when someone close to me is at a low I feel the same thing they feel.
I don't know how to handle that or how to be supportive when I also have to deal with what i'm feeling through them and try to separate my emotions from theirs.
I wonder if anyone else like this has tried to date someone with depression and did it work?

The Voice of Experience...

• He will be too busy socializing during his “manic” phase to pay much attention to you.

• He will be too deep into himself during his “depressive” phase to support you emotionally.

• He will otherwise be too concerned with just getting through his days to treat you as anything but his personal support system.

• He may even start blaming you for everything that goes wrong in his life. I.e., “If it wasn’t for you, I could have been a success!”

Break it off as soon as you can.

I'm aware that can happen. I've dated a man with mental illness before.
I've known this guy for quite some time before we've started dating though.
He's never come off that way but i've never seen him in a depressie state (I think).
Even when he's been very social out with friends he's texted me at the same time.
And makes time for me when he's busy.
But of course I don't know if things will stay that way.
Just sucks because I like him.

Be firm with your bundaries.
Care for yourself first.
Take time to examine your own feelings and needs. They are important and you need to stand for them.

A tendency to fall for mentally ill people may be related to tendency to codependence. Don't fall into that trap.

Can you expand on this? I'm curious to know how it works.

I don't fall for them on purpose.
I've just never in my life managed to attract someone without mental illness.
The ones I attract without it I feel no chemistry with. I've tried to no avail.
I never know they have mental illness until they choose to tell me.
I didn't know when I met him. He's not exactly the depression stereotype,
he's a very happy and fun person when you meet him.
I don't have the energy to be someones private therapist/girlfriend.
As long as he won't ask that of me it's fine.
I can be supportive if he doesn't ask me to "save" him.
I don't know if he'll do that though. I don't know how he thinks.
I was hoping someone could share personal experience.

I might not be precise enough but - while codependency was originally described as a specific relationship to an addict, it can work with other dysfunctions as well.
It's a specific kind of entanglement where one wants to help but unconciously they does everything to perpetuate the dysfunction because they needs the dysfunction for their own emotional needs.
It's a trap.


I'm glad at least on the concious level you want things to be healthy.
Keep your boundaries firm.
Care for yourself.
Best wishes!

Yeah, I can identify with that. On the one hand, obviously it could prove a toxic recipe for disaster, but on the other hand, it could just indicate a positive (or at any rate, not necessarily unhealthy) affinity between two persons with deep emotions. Many people with limited or zero personal experience of mental illness I find insufferably shallow and unemotional and naïve and oversimplistic. Why would I want to date someone like that?!
Yes, well, I am a man who used to suffer uncontrollable and very selfish and very demanding depression, allied to crippling self-esteem issues and a shedload of other stuff there's no need to wibble on about here. I still do suffer from depression, but many of the associated issues have since been addressed, and I know now how to handle my depression myself; I also know, in fact, that nobody else can possibly know how to handle it as well as I do. So I would not have recommended you to get involved with someone like the me who existed in the 1990s. But my last few girlfriends, in the present century, do not seem to have been troubled by my depressions. One of them was actually a psychotherapist (strange but true) and slightly put out that I didn't "let her in" and share my depressed thoughts with her more!

If you don't yet know whether this guy will ask you to "save" him, and you don't yet know how he thinks, and meanwhile you do know you like him, then surely it's worth pursuing it until you know him better and can be more certain of whether or not his depression is of a kind he can handle himself (or with the help of his therapist) without expecting or needing more help from you than you can give.

Just my twopennyworth, as formerly the kind of man I might have advised a woman to avoid!

I think the idea you should have to immediately cease dating or anything just because of the diagnoses is a bit extreme. It is very possible for a person to manage their depression...it takes effort but its not impossible. Certainly watch out for yourself(like you should in any new relationship) but it is quite possible things would work out.

Kind of depends on where is is at with managing that depression, if he's taking it out on people and just blaming everyone and everything around him for his misery without doing any self reflection or making any efforts to see what they can improve. Then I would be more inclined to agree it would be best to break things off. But from the description you gave that does not seem to be the case.

Thanks for sharing your experience.
He's told me he can't stand feeling lonley, that makes his depression worse.
I wonder if he'll still be able to accept the space I need sometimes.
I don't know if its common with depression to not want to be alone?
Does being alone with your thoughts worsen your symptoms and can that be improved somehow?

Hummm. Must admit I'm not altogether liking the sound of this.
So do I. But I don't think there's actually a law that prohibits you from raising that as a question directly with him. Maybe not quite yet; but maybe pretty soon.
Depends partly to what extent the depression is interconnected with insecurity, diminished sense of self, and issues of that kind. Now, when I'm depressed, I know the safest and most effective remedy can be reclusion and solitude until the depression passes. When I was younger, I wanted my girlfriend to be with me and somehow kiss it better, like your mother does when you're 3 years old and you've hurt your hand. This is both unrealistic and unfair on the girlfriend. When I was 26, it destroyed one of the most promising relationships I've ever had. I'm older and wiser and more able to stand on my own two feet now but, twenty years after the event, not a day goes by without my regretting the way my infantile insecurity wrecked that relationship.
It certainly did, back then. Now, being alone almost always helps me to calm down and focus on dealing with them and fighting my way through them. But I've had enormous amounts of extremely intensive psychotherapy, and smoked enormous amounts of dope, since the younger days to which I'm referring. I know now that the answer lies within me, and is not going to be handed to me on a plate by someone else. Back then, I naïvely expected my girlfriend would be a nymphomaniac and also have a plate with The Answer on it, which she would hand to me as often as required. There's no denying that sex itself can be an antidepressant (I believe this applies to any gender), but for my depression I wanted more than just that from my girlfriend, when I was younger and understood myself less well. It kind of depends how far along the path to dealing with his own problems himself this man is, I think.
Yes, if you have the right therapist, or the right clairvoyant, or the right drug dealer (I got lucky and found all three...). But it can't be improved in five minutes, or even five months, and not even necessarily within the space of five years.

So I think I would still say it's too soon to walk away from this one, but without a doubt you need to be walking into it with your eyes wide open (as you indeed appear to realize), in your own interests. Your primary duty is to yourself, because if you end up in pieces you can't be any use to anyone else.

Nothing you've described makes me automatically say RUN AWAAAYYY!!, but the old railway phrase "Proceed with Caution" springs to mind. Carry on getting to know the bloke. After all, this could be the start of something wonderful! It's still too soon to say it won't be. But your concerns do sound valid.

Too sozzled by this time of night to say more. Or too sozzled to say any more that's worth your listening to, anyway!

Did you start this thread to seek approval and support for a decision you've already made?

OUCH!!

Again thanks for sharing.
I have some things to talk to him about now.
I don't know when the right time will be but hopefully i'll notice.

I asked for advice from people with experience which could indeed mean that but you don't know.
I don't even know.
Either way there is no need to be rude and attack.
I'm not looking for stereotypes of depression that i'm already aware of,
just like he could look up stereotypes of aspergers to learn about me.
I could be completely cold emotionally and not very empathetic of him according to those.
Maybe those points are your experience but it'd help me more if you explained it more detailed.
And I only responded with that I haven't seen any such tendencies in him, yet at least.
Instead of answering rudely to that you could share if that could be because;
You think he's showing his best sides, or if he could simply have a good way of dealing with it.
Based on your experience.
Thanks.

I'm pretty sure you will, poppet. I'm comfortably confident you will. You claim to be 23. You write with the wisdom and sensitivity of an unusually good person of maybe 73.

Good luck ... and good night (I'm pretty smashed, by now...).