Emotional equality

Marja left a great comment at my last post about bipolar friendship. She provided clarity on an issue that I've often struggled with, although I'd never been able to articulate it as well.

She wrote that:

My best friend, a person who has been a mentor and my major supporter, does not have bipolar disorder and does not fully understand. Yet she has been very helpful because of her godly compassion. I've needed her terribly at times.But the problem with a relationship like that is that it tends to be unbalanced. She is mostly supporter and I am mostly the supported one. I've had huge struggles trying to balance out the relationship - trying to encourage her to lean on me once in a while as well. I don't want to always be the weak one. I want to be there for her as well - yet it's hard for her to let me take that role.

But she understands how I feel and I've worked hard to teach her to be as a sister, rather than a mother figure. It's working. I'm finding lots of opportunities now to support her as well. And I feel better about myself because of that. Yet this continues to be a constant struggle.

This concept of lop-sided relationships is surely not confined to relationships in which one party is bipolar and other is not. And it's probably much more prevelant than most of us realize. I'd imagine it exists when one party has any kind of illness and the other is well, when one is going through a difficult time and the other is happy, or even when one is married and the other is not.

In fact, I have a few friends locally who are all wonderful women, who've been very supportive of me, particularly when I was going through a difficult divorce, but now that the crisis is over, it's been difficult for us to maintain our friendships, and that has nothing to do with being bipolar. It's simply that they're all married with children in high school and/or college and they all live on the opposite side of town.

I know it's probably selfish, but it's frustrating for me to always be the one to drive 45 minutes to an hour each way to meet my friends for dinner at a restaurant that is conveniently within 10 minutes of where most of them live. When I do make the drive, we always have a great time, but it's very awkward for me when so much of our conversations revolve around topics that are not at all relevant to me.

I'm not married, so I have no husband issues, anniversary celebrations, or funny stories about the in-laws to interject. Their lives are full of soccer practice, driving lessons, trips to visit the kids in college, or dropping everything because the kids are coming home from college for the weekend. My daughter is in the Army and is stationed in Iraq, so while they always ask how she is, and they sincerely do care, anything more detailed than "She's safe and doing well, thank you" seems to put an immediate damper on the conversation. Nobody seems to know what to say after that.

Good or bad, right or wrong, I've usually dealt with my bipolar issues internally (and I have a host of stress-related autoimmune system symptoms to show for it). Before Susan, my mother, my aunt and my friend Jane, who also lives on the other side of the country, were the only ones who really knew what I was going through. And they've all been wonderful supporters. I wouldn't have made it through the dark days without them. Moving forward, I fully expect to have a much better handle on my moods because I'm working hard on doing that. So while I'm hoping that being bipolar will not play a huge role in future relationships, I need to remember Marja's advice and make sure that I'm finding ways to give when I can and to be honest about what I need when I need it.

But, as I make the effort to meet new people and make new friends locally, I need to make the conscious effort to seek out people with similar interests and who are in similar stages in their lives. I need to seek out single women whose children have left the nest who would enjoy going to a play, or to dinner and a movie, sometimes on short notice. I need to spend more time with my knitting buddy, who's married, but who's husband is a gem and encourages us knit, and shop, and hang out together. I need to find a friend to go on that 5-day Cruise to Nowhere with me in the spring, and maybe even a friend who wants to travel with me to Greece to celebrate my 50th birthday in 2009!

And, if and when I decided to attempt dating again, I REALLY need to remember the concept of emotional equality. The days of enabling my co-dependent beliefs that I need a man who needs me to save him from himself are over. I'm doing the hard work to be a whole person and when it comes to dating, I need to date a man who's doing the same.