Getting To Know Stephen (REFLECTION)

There is an uncomfortable irony in the fact that one of the first significant things Stephen ever told me was that something he had already told me wasn’t true.

He wasn’t a property developer.

He was unemployed.

On paper, perhaps that should have mattered more than it did. Stability was one of the things I was actively looking for, and financial and employment insecurity were things I specifically hoped not to carry into another relationship.

Yet I didn’t experience Stephen’s confession primarily as dishonesty.

I experienced it as honesty.

That distinction interests me now.

He hadn’t been caught. I hadn’t challenged him. He volunteered the truth almost immediately and gave me an explanation I could understand. Dating profiles are advertisements of sorts, and unemployment isn’t something many people would enthusiastically offer as their opening line. Property development was something he aspired to do. He had simply presented the man he hoped to become as though he already existed.

I could understand the insecurity behind that.

Perhaps because I could understand it, the confession actually reassured me. Someone determined to deceive me, I reasoned, would surely have maintained the lie.

Stephen hadn’t.

So instead of thinking, This man has lied to me, I found myself thinking, This man is willing to tell me uncomfortable truths.

And throughout that day, he appeared to keep proving it.

He told me about his previous relationship without turning his ex-partner into someone I needed to dislike. He told me he had EUPD. He hinted at childhood trauma without using it to demand sympathy or revealing details I hadn’t earned the right to hear.

None of those things felt manipulative to me.

They felt vulnerable.

I wonder sometimes what that conversation felt like from Stephen’s side.

Perhaps telling me about his diagnosis so quickly was simply openness. Perhaps he had learned that it was better to disclose it early rather than risk somebody discovering it later and feeling misled. Perhaps there was also an element of testing involved: Here are the less straightforward parts of me. Are you still interested?

I can’t know.

What I do know is that I stayed.

More than that, I remained fascinated.

And perhaps Stephen learned something about me that day too.

He learned that difficult information didn’t automatically frighten me away.

At the time, I would have considered that a good thing.

I still do, in many ways.

I don’t believe a mental health diagnosis should disqualify somebody from being loved, nor do I think childhood trauma makes someone inherently dangerous or incapable of a healthy relationship. If anything, Stephen’s willingness to name his difficulties suggested to me that he had some understanding of himself.

What I didn’t yet appreciate was the enormous distance that can exist between knowing something about yourself and being able to manage it.

A diagnosis is a description, not an explanation for every behaviour that follows. And self-awareness, however valuable, doesn’t automatically create self-regulation, accountability or change.

But those were distinctions I had no reason to be making on Christmas Eve.

I was simply listening to a man tell me about himself.

And I liked what his openness seemed to say about him.

There was something else happening between us that was much less intellectual.

I was becoming intensely attracted to him.

His voice changed things.

Until then I had been responding to photographs and words, but suddenly there was tone, rhythm, laughter and personality. The giggle particularly disarmed me. There was something unexpectedly boyish about it, something that seemed at odds with the handsome, confident man in the photographs.

I found that contrast incredibly appealing.

Perhaps it also awakened something very familiar in me: tenderness.

I had always been drawn to complexity in people. Strength didn’t interest me nearly as much when it stood alone. Stephen seemed to possess confidence and vulnerability simultaneously. There appeared to be a capable adult and something softer underneath him.

I wanted to know both.

And already we were talking about dreams.

His woodland. My home.

Neither of us was proposing that we build those things together. We had known each other for barely a day. But when two people are strongly attracted to each other, similarities can begin to feel disproportionately meaningful.

There is a psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias: once we begin hoping something might be true, we naturally notice information that supports that possibility.

I wasn’t planning a future with Stephen.

But I was beginning to notice how easily he might fit into one.

The differences hadn’t disappeared. I was still conscious of his unemployment. I knew EUPD could potentially make a relationship more complicated. And somewhere in the conversation sat that first small lie.

But beside those things were intelligence, humour, attraction, vulnerability, apparent self-awareness and dreams that didn’t seem incompatible with mine.

The balance felt overwhelmingly positive.

And perhaps that is one of the things hindsight can distort most cruelly.

Once we know that something eventually hurt us, we can become obsessed with identifying the point at which we should have recognised the danger. We turn ordinary decisions into evidence against our former selves.

I don’t think that’s fair.

I noticed the lie.

I noticed the diagnosis.

I considered them.

Then I made a judgement based on the person Stephen appeared to be and the information available to me.

What I couldn’t know was which pieces of information would eventually matter.

Nor could I know that one of the qualities I was beginning to admire most in Stephen—his apparent willingness to tell me uncomfortable truths—would become far more complicated for me to understand.

For now, honesty seemed simple.

You told someone the truth.

They listened.

And if the truth was difficult, perhaps accepting it was one of the ways you showed someone that they were safe with you.

I had no idea how often, in the years ahead, I would find myself trying to work out where understanding another person should end and protecting myself should begin.