I have been going to therapy off and on for years and whenever I bring up my desire to date and my difficulties with it I have gotten back to just work on myself and online I have seen “if you aren’t happy alone you won’t be happy in a relationship”. I have major depression and have had it for years. Am I supposed to just hope it goes away? Wait until my entire life has passed?
Nah, the key is that you do need to reach a point of homeostasis. It doesn’t take forever, but it does take steady work.
It just needs to be where you’re stabilized with your depression.
It is true that dating and relationships aren’t a treatment. And it’s true that the less stable you are in your depression, the less capable you will be in handling the work that goes into dating and relationships.
But you don’t have to be happy. That saying is a pain in the ass tbh, because it exaggerates the actual goal. People with depression can be happy, and still be depressed.
Just focus on finding a balance, where the depression isn’t interfering with your ability to function in relationships you already have. Friends, family, that kind of thing. Once you get the depression managed that well, you’ll be able to realistically approach new relationships.
The people that repeat that old saw forget that you can forge friendships perfectly well when depressed, it’s just harder. Romantic relationships are really just a more intense version of the same process.
Chronic depression, you have to find your balance with. You find a way to make peace with it and live with it. Remission is certainly possible, but it can’t be the goal that puts everything else on hold, or it becomes impossible. You have to have the room to grow and change outside of therapy, or it’s going to fail.
Now, you also have to be honest and realistic. There is a limit to how solid a relationship you can build with depression that isn’t in remission. It’s a damn rocky foundation to build on. So the closer you get to remission, the better the chances of dating turning into something. The inverse is true as well; the further you are from remission, the worse your chances.
But nobody can tell you exactly when you are or aren’t ready, as long as you’re in an outpatient scenario. They can absolutely give you guidelines, give you strong suggestions that you aren’t ready, but that’s a different issue.
That being said, you gotta take it slow. Depression fucks up your emotional senses. Stay slow, take it easy at each step so you don’t set yourself back, or fuck with someone else.
I mean I would say my mental health is fairly stagnant. There are some nights I am haunted by life not being what I want but I am not having massive fluctuations in my mood and I have a few close friends I have maintained a relationship with.
Seems to me that stagnant is good enough.
Chronic mental health issues really are like chronic physical issues. Once you find the spot that’s your normal, it’s maintenance rather than cures.
When part of that is caused by, or linked with, life situations that can’t be changed easily (or at all), you either decide to let go of life in general and do nothing but deal with the disability (and chronic, treatment resistant depression is a disability as much as my screwed up spine), or you find ways to live as best you can and treat that disability as a disability rather than an acute, curable problem.
You find ways to improve your life as much as it can be, and that includes developing relationships, finding meaningful work within your abilities, finding things that bring passion and joy when possible. Depression in specific is not a permanent, unscalable barrier to passion, joy, or love. There may be times when there’s not room for those things, and managing the depression has to be the main focus, but if you’re stagnate/stable, that’s not the case.
Being real here? I was only a few credits shy of my bachelor’s in psych. I never saw any evidence based data on dating with depression being a drawback. That’s been a very long time ago, so it’s possible something has come out since, but I’m skeptical.
What I’ve seen in group therapy, in support groups, it simply doesn’t point to there being a need or benefit to sidelining romance long term. It may need to be a few years, while someone is doing the work to find balance with a treatment resistant depression or other mental health issues. And, there’s some psychiatric issues where it may be a long term benefit to avoid dating, but that’s not the norm, and it would still cease to be a barrier if/when the issue is controlled via medication.
Now! This is the important caveat to that. We aren’t always able to tell when we’re stable. Nor are we all in a place where dating’s drawbacks won’t be a disturbance to stability. Rejection, failed partnerships, disagreements and drama, there’s a lot that can go wrong. If you can’t tell for absolute certain that your depression (in specific, but it applies to other issues) is stable and you can handle those bumps in the road, it may need to wait.
I’m not a shrink. Never completed my degree, much less any clinical requirements. The only reason I brought it up was to show that I did more than my due diligence on looking through published data. I’m not saying this as any kind of mental health pro at all, in any way. You always consult with your care providers before taking advice from randos.
Back to an anecdote. When I was at my lowest with depression, and the opportunity came up to enter into something serious, one of the things I had to look at was my resilience. Did bad things make my mental health worse? Did losing someone, or navigating existing relationships make me worse? Did it cause more than a temporary blip on the radar?
For me the answer was no. I had deaths in my family during that span, I had lost friends because of the array of mental health issues I was dealing with, and while they did cause a surge in my anxiety and depression in specific, that surge was temporary and in scale with the events.
I can not say if you’re in that place. All I can say is that if that’s where you are, where that bad stuff of life doesn’t sink you deeper and leave you there, then maybe it’s okay to go looking for the good stuff in life, and take the risk of temporary setbacks.
I will add that you need to be aware that these kind of problems make relationships harder, more prone to fall apart. It stacks the deck against you. Since you also have to be honest about health issues when things look like they’re getting serious, you have to be completely honest when that time comes. You can’t hide it, or lie about it because that’s dooming the incipient relationship before it starts. So there’s almost a guarantee that you’re going to face failures to start. If you aren’t ready for that, if the idea of it makes you more depressed, it may not be time to go for it yet.
Thank you for such in-depth answers. I know for certain that I am nowhere near the depths of my depression. When I was at my worst I was numbing all of my emotions to avoid the anxiety and feeling of failure. And while recently my mood has been more unstable, that is directly linked to a change of meds for a physical health issue. My life is by no means drama free and it hasn’t made me catatonic yet. Anxious, sure, but I am not constantly dwelling on it. I certainly could be at a better quality of life, it would require drastic changes to my living situation which while are doable eventually I think. Honestly, I think anxiety might be more of a barrier for me than depression. Not that depression doesn’t make everything harder, but is more of a sign that I am not living a fulfilling life.