Tag: mental-health

Stephen And The Denmark Event (Part I)

~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

It had been almost a year since Stephen’s dismissal and his moving out of my house, and against all my fears at the time, that year had been amazing.

There had been almost no alarm bells.

Stephen seemed to have grown. We were enjoying each other more than ever, our relationship felt calmer and more secure, and I had begun to believe that asking him to leave had achieved exactly what I had hoped it would. He still didn’t have a job, but if that year had been spent working on himself, I could live with that. I wasn’t interested in measuring his progress by a salary. What mattered to me was whether he was becoming happier, healthier and more self-aware.

And from where I was standing, it seemed that he was.

Stephen’s son had been working for me one day a week at the house I managed. When he left for his summer break after leaving college, Stephen had stepped in to fill the role.

Shortly before Denmark, Stephen had made his first trip to his friend’s hostel in Scotland, taking his eldest son with him. His son had been feeling stressed about what he would do after college, and Stephen thought a few days away together might do him good.

When he returned, we had only a few days before we flew to Denmark.

This time we had been invited to stay with my aunt, my mum’s younger sister, because the guest rooms at my grandmother’s house would be occupied by my parents and other family members coming for the party.

I had always been very fond of my aunt. She is considerably younger than my mum, so when I visited Denmark as a little girl, she was still a teenager. I looked up to her. She would style my hair, paint my fingernails and do all those little things that made an older girl seem impossibly glamorous to a child.

About twenty years earlier, she had experienced an unimaginable tragedy. Her English husband, whom she had met through my dad while staying in England as a young woman, took his own life, leaving her with four children.

It was a devastating time for the whole family, but my aunt was incredibly resilient. Forever the optimist, she somehow found a way to continue living and to create joy again. Inevitably, though, the circumstances surrounding their father’s death affected each of her four children differently—some in ways that were obvious, and others that were perhaps much harder to see.

On our second evening, my aunt took Stephen and me to an outdoor live music event. The weather was kind to us, we had drinks, listened to music and had a genuinely lovely evening. It felt like the beginning of another wonderful trip.

The following day, my aunt’s eldest daughter—I’ll call her N—came to visit with her son. Of all my cousins, N had always seemed to me to be the one most visibly affected by what had happened to their father. Over the years I had heard stories about arguments and difficult encounters between her and other members of the family, including my mum.

We talked about some of those family tensions and asked whether she was planning to come to my grandmother’s party. N wasn’t sure she would be welcome.

Rather naively, we encouraged her to come.

Put the past behind you. Come with an open heart. Start again.

It sounded reasonable at the time.

Later that evening, my aunt’s eldest and only son—I’ll call him R—dropped by and stayed for dinner. Afterwards we sat in the garden well into the night, smoking, talking, listening to music and discussing films.

I had always been very fond of R, and Stephen seemed to connect with him easily too. I wondered whether Stephen’s own history of trauma and mental-health difficulties gave him a particular empathy for some of what my cousins had experienced following their father’s death.

Everything felt easy.

Then came the party.

My sister and her family had arrived in Denmark and were staying in a rented house nearby. We all went to my grandmother’s early to help my mum set everything up, and throughout the afternoon friends and extended family began arriving.

There was a lovely atmosphere. Everyone was outside in the garden—different generations milling around, joining conversations, drifting away and joining others.

My aunt’s middle daughter—I’ll call her M—arrived. Stephen looked up.

Almost immediately, I noticed something in him.

It reminded me of the young woman at the Claridge’s party the previous year. Nothing overt happened. It was simply a slight change in him: a little more nervousness, a fixed quality to his gaze, an attentiveness that felt different.

It occurred to me that M might be his type.

She was dark-haired, tall, around thirty, fit from going to the gym and had a couple of tattoos. She had a particular look I had noticed Stephen respond to before, both in women we passed in the street and women he saw on television.

If he found her attractive, that was fine. People don’t stop finding other people attractive because they’re in a relationship.

But I noticed.

And after the relative peace of the previous year, I had also become accustomed to questioning myself when I noticed things like this.

Perhaps this was simply what trusting someone required.

My aunt’s youngest daughter and her boyfriend arrived and Stephen and I had some lovely conversations with them. R arrived too.

Then N appeared with her son.

The reaction was immediate.

I could almost feel the atmosphere change.

People who had been relaxed suddenly seemed watchful. There was surprise on faces and an apprehension I hadn’t expected. For the first time, I wondered whether we had badly underestimated the fractures within this family and whether encouraging N to come had been a mistake.

Initially everything remained civilised, but as the afternoon went on and more alcohol was consumed, tension began building between N and M.

Then it escalated frighteningly quickly.

Before we really understood what was happening, N had become aggressive and M was in tears. N and her son were encouraged to leave before things became worse, while M stormed out of the garden crying.

Stephen and I followed her.

It was then that M told us what had happened the previous Christmas. What I had understood to have been an argument and a fight between the sisters had apparently been far more serious. She showed us a photograph of her face afterwards. It was black and blue all over.

We had had no idea.

Once N had gone, M began to settle down and Stephen spent a great deal of time talking to her, calming her and listening to her talk about her relationship with her sister.

At first I understood completely.

She was distressed. Stephen could be extraordinarily compassionate when someone was struggling, and this was exactly the sensitive, caring side of him that I loved.

But gradually I became aware of just how invested he was becoming.

He wasn’t simply offering some comfort and then returning to the party. His attention remained with her. Conversation after conversation revolved around M, her feelings and what had happened.

And once again, I began to experience that familiar sensation of somehow disappearing from Stephen’s awareness when another woman captured his attention.

I didn’t want to make something out of nothing.

So I said nothing.

Despite the drama, the party had otherwise been a success, and when it was finally time to leave I felt relieved. I was tired and ready to return to my aunt’s house, climb into bed with Stephen and put the events of the day behind us.

Then M asked her mother if she could come back with us and stay the night.

My heart sank slightly.

I didn’t particularly want her to come. I had already noticed what I thought might be chemistry between her and Stephen, and I had watched him devote much of the evening to her.

But what could I reasonably say?

She was my cousin. She had just been through an upsetting confrontation with her sister. This was her mother’s house.

So M came back with us.

My aunt soon went to bed, leaving the three of us sitting in the conservatory with another drink.

The table was small.

Stephen sat between M and me.

We chatted for perhaps half an hour, but it was late and I was exhausted. Eventually I said I was going to bed and asked Stephen to come with me.

He said he would stay up for just a little longer.

Something in me didn’t like it.

But I also knew that if I suddenly insisted he come to bed, I would look worried. Jealous. Controlling.

And after everything we had been through, I didn’t want to be that woman anymore.

So I said goodnight.

“See you shortly,” I told him.

I climbed into bed.

And lay there awake.

Of course I couldn’t sleep.

I knew they were outside alone together, and no matter how much I tried to reason with myself, my body would not settle.

I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Every minute seemed to make the silence outside louder.

Nearly an hour passed.

Eventually I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I quietly got out of bed and crept back towards the conservatory.

What I saw stopped me.

They weren’t talking.

M was reclined in Stephen’s arms.

For a moment I couldn’t quite process the image in front of me.

Then something exploded inside me.

“What the hell is going on here?”

M jumped away from him and immediately pulled herself upright.

Stephen looked at me. His eyes bulging like a deer in the headlights.

I don’t remember exactly what I said next. I only remember the anger. The shock. The feeling that something I had feared without really allowing myself to fear it was suddenly happening right in front of me.

I could have stayed there.

I could have separated them.

I could have demanded Stephen to come to bed with me.

But I didn’t want to have to drag my partner away from another woman.

I wanted him to choose me.

Surely catching them like that and seeing how upset I was would be enough.

So I stormed back to the bedroom.

I expected to hear him behind me.

I waited for footsteps.

Nothing.

The house became completely quiet.

I gave it perhaps five minutes.

Still nothing.

Finally I got up again.

The conservatory was empty.

I checked the other rooms.

Nothing.

And then a horrible thought entered my head.

Don’t tell me they’ve left.

I hurried down the garden path and reached the gate. I looked one way and then the other.

There was nobody there.

They had gone.

To be continued…

Stephen Goes To Work (REFLECTION)

~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

For six months, I had believed that greater stability would help Stephen become more settled.

A job.

A home.

Routine.

Purpose.

A loving relationship.

Those things seemed like answers.

And yet, once Stephen had them, he seemed to become more unsettled rather than less.

What is striking to me now is that this wasn’t something I only recognised with hindsight.

Even then, I was beginning to question whether Stephen’s unhappiness was really being caused by his circumstances.

When he told me that he thought whatever was troubling him might have something to do with work, I told him I didn’t think it was situational.

“It seems every time we remove what troubles you, you remain troubled by a new thing,” I said.

“I fear this may chase you the rest of your life.”

That is difficult to read back now.

Because somewhere inside me, I had already begun to understand something I wasn’t yet ready to fully accept.

Perhaps the instability wasn’t only around Stephen.

Perhaps some of it travelled with him.

Recognising that possibility, however, was very different from knowing what to do with it.

I was still enormously proud of him for getting the job.

On paper, it seemed to suit him. Stephen was socially confident, curious about people and capable of great compassion. I could imagine him being very good at work that involved talking to people and understanding difficult circumstances.

But applying for a job and sustaining one are very different things.

Some of the training may also have genuinely triggered painful memories for him.

When he told me he was struggling through a morning of training about domestic abuse, my instinct was to help him find a way through it. I encouraged him to think about the people he might eventually be able to help rather than allowing the subject to pull him backwards.

That was how I approached most difficulties with Stephen.

Understand the problem.

Find another way of looking at it.

Work out what might help.

Keep moving.

The difficulty was that I increasingly didn’t know how much of what I was seeing could reasonably be explained by trauma.

The smoking.

The restlessness.

Missing the beginnings of meetings.

Drinking whisky while working.

Disengaging from training.

Behaving almost adolescently when he was supposed to be working.

I didn’t know where trauma ended and responsibility began.

And because I knew what Stephen had been through, I sometimes became uncertain about how far I was entitled to challenge him.

Not because I stopped challenging him.

I didn’t.

But challenging someone becomes complicated when you are simultaneously wondering whether the behaviour upsetting you might be a symptom of something painful.

Empathy can make judgement surprisingly difficult.

The pub bothered me for a similar reason.

Going for a drink after work is hardly suspicious behaviour.

But Stephen had already told me a story about another period of his life in which going to the pub had been part of avoiding going home.

So when he did something similar after moving in with me, my brain connected the two things.

That was increasingly how my mind worked.

The night at his ex’s.

The broken promise.

My aunt.

The stories about his marriage.

The pub.

J.

Each new detail arrived carrying all the ones that had come before it.

Once trust has been damaged, very little arrives alone.

Sometimes my mind was joining dots that didn’t need joining.

Sometimes it was noticing something accurately.

The problem was that I couldn’t tell which was happening.

Even when my instincts told me something was wrong, instinct could only take me so far. It could make me ask questions. It could make me notice changes. It could tell me that an explanation didn’t quite fit.

It couldn’t give me information I didn’t have.

Collecting Stephen from work is probably one of the clearest examples of how my role in the relationship was beginning to change.

Initially, it was ordinary care.

I had deliberately arranged time off partly so that I could help settle him into our home and his new job.

Stephen himself had told me how much easier life felt when we were together.

“With you…… Even the mundane feels nice. Hard things are easy. Good things are great!”

I believed him.

And I liked making life easier for him.

So collecting him meant seeing him sooner, saving him a bus journey and helping establish the life we had planned.

Then another motive crept in.

If I collected him, he couldn’t stop at the pub.

That is such a small shift, but I think it matters.

Care had begun to mix with anxiety.

I didn’t want to be a suspicious girlfriend.

But I didn’t want to become a managing girlfriend either.

What I really wanted was a third option.

A partner whose behaviour made neither role necessary.

J created another version of the same problem.

Stephen told me she was his type.

Part of me was reassured by that openness.

Surely someone intending to do something inappropriate wouldn’t tell his girlfriend that he found another woman attractive?

I repeatedly returned to that kind of reasoning.

At least he’s telling me.

And disclosure can be a form of honesty.

But I would eventually learn that disclosure doesn’t automatically make a situation safe.

Someone can tell you that they find another person attractive and still struggle with what they do with that attraction.

Women were beginning to appear in our conversations more often.

J.

Women walking around town.

My son’s girlfriend.

Any one of those things in isolation might have meant very little.

Together, they created a feeling that Stephen was unusually preoccupied with female attractiveness.

I didn’t expect him to stop looking at women.

I didn’t expect attraction to disappear because he loved me.

I expected him to know what to do with it.

Instead, I sometimes found myself explaining boundaries that felt instinctive to me.

Don’t stare.

Don’t make somebody uncomfortable.

My son’s girlfriend belongs in a completely different mental category.

Make sure a young woman living in our home feels safe.

The fact that I quietly checked with her matters to me now.

She told me Stephen had never done anything to make her uncomfortable, and I believed her.

But I had reached a point where I felt the need to ask.

My concern was beginning to extend beyond protecting my relationship.

I was checking the environment around it too.

And still, I loved him enormously.

That is important.

I wasn’t standing outside the relationship clinically assessing Stephen’s behaviour.

I was waking up beside the man I loved.

I was attracted to him.

We laughed.

We cooked dinner.

We went shopping.

We watched television.

We made plans.

We had sex.

There were countless ordinary moments in which nothing was wrong.

And then something would happen that unsettled me again.

Love and alarm were beginning to coexist more regularly.

I think that is where hypervigilance really begins.

Not simply in noticing danger, but in the exhausting process of continually trying to decide whether something is dangerous at all.

Is this normal?

Is this his mental health?

Is this trauma?

Is he immature?

Should I challenge it?

Am I being controlling?

Am I overreacting?

Or am I seeing something important?

Those questions are exhausting when you ask them often enough.

There may have been many things happening for Stephen at once.

Perhaps the demands of a full-time job were harder for him to sustain than getting the job had been.

Perhaps living together changed our relationship from something exciting and episodic into something ordinary and accountable.

Perhaps emerging from lockdown into colleagues, offices and social freedom provided a kind of stimulation he hadn’t experienced for a long time.

Perhaps it was several things at once.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the stable version of Stephen I had expected to emerge once his circumstances improved wasn’t appearing.

And the unsettling thing is that I had already begun to recognise that at the time.

I had told him myself that I didn’t think it was situational.

But recognising a pattern and accepting its implications are two very different things.

If circumstances were the problem, then circumstances could be changed.

A better home.

A better routine.

A different way of approaching work.

More support.

More understanding.

There was always something we could do.

If the problem was something Stephen himself needed to understand and manage, however, then there were limits to what I could change for him.

I wasn’t ready to accept those limits.

Especially because Stephen himself had given me reason to believe that my presence made a difference.

He had told me that hard things were easier with me.

That the mundane felt nice.

That being together made life more achievable.

Those were beautiful things to hear from someone I loved.

But they also reinforced an idea that was becoming increasingly important in our relationship:

If I could help create the right environment — stable enough, supportive enough, calm enough — perhaps Stephen would be okay.

So I kept trying.

Encouraging.

Collecting.

Reasoning.

Making suggestions.

Setting boundaries.

Watching.

Keeping the plan moving.

And slowly, without really noticing it, the ordinary domestic life I had wanted so badly was becoming remarkably unordinary.

By the time Stephen was preparing to go to the Lake District with his father and sons, I was looking forward to the house being quiet.

I would miss him.

I loved him.

But I wanted a few days in which I didn’t have to watch, interpret, encourage, question or wonder.

Perhaps that was the first faint understanding that loving Stephen could also be exhausting.

But I didn’t interpret my exhaustion as a reason to leave.

I interpreted it as evidence that we needed a reset.

A holiday.

Some space.

A clear head.

Then perhaps the man I had fallen in love with would come back.

I still believed he was in there.

I didn’t yet understand that I was beginning to organise my hope around the return of a version of Stephen I had already known.

And each time he returned, even briefly, it reassured me that waiting for him had been worthwhile.

Stephen And The Bedsit (REFLECTION)

~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

Looking back, I am struck by how clearly I could see one particular danger.

Stephen wanted to live with me.

I knew he’d moved quickly into a previous girlfriend’s home when his life had become difficult, and I could see that something remarkably similar might be developing between us.

So I stopped it.

That matters.

Once again, my instincts weren’t failing me.

I loved Stephen. I was increasingly concerned about him. I hated knowing how unhappy he was at his father’s house. But I also knew we’d barely begun our relationship and that allowing an unemployed man I’d known for such a short time to move into my home would be unwise.

So I created a condition.

Find a job first.

It was a boundary designed to protect both my independence and the pace of our relationship.

And Stephen accepted it.

The bedsit seemed like an encouraging alternative. He would have somewhere safe and private while also proving to himself, and perhaps to me, that he could establish some independence.

For a moment, it looked as though that was exactly what was happening.

Then came something I could never have anticipated.

A tiny lie.

I don’t excuse it because it was small. In fact, the reason I confessed almost immediately was that honesty mattered enormously to me. I didn’t want even something as inconsequential as pretending to have experienced something sexually that I hadn’t to become part of the way Stephen and I communicated.

So I told him the truth.

What happened next taught me something.

Not consciously.

Not all at once.

But powerfully.

Stephen experienced my admission very differently from the way I expected him to.

To me, the important part was that I’d corrected the dishonesty almost immediately because I wanted our relationship to be truthful.

To Stephen, the important part seemed to be that I had lied at all.

The distinction almost disappeared.

His reaction was so intense that I found myself trying desperately to make things right.

I apologised.

I explained.

I reassured.

And when his distress escalated later that night, I went to get him.

Once again, Stephen became overwhelmed and I responded by moving closer.

I still wonder what happened inside him that night.

Perhaps my admission touched something much older and more painful than the event itself. He explicitly connected it to experiences with his ex-wife, so perhaps dishonesty carried an emotional meaning for him that I couldn’t yet understand.

Given what I knew of his history and diagnosis, it’s also possible that something relatively small triggered feelings that became extraordinarily difficult for him to regulate.

But explanation and responsibility are different things.

That’s a distinction I hadn’t yet learned to make.

I could understand that Stephen’s reaction might have roots extending far beyond me.

What I couldn’t yet see was that this didn’t make me responsible for calming it.

At the time, however, his distress was happening directly in front of me.

And it was frightening.

The man I was falling in love with was crying, drinking, paranoid, confused and barely coherent.

Suddenly EUPD wasn’t a collection of letters Stephen had disclosed during an intimate conversation.

It was something I was experiencing beside him.

I didn’t know what was happening.

I didn’t know how serious it might become.

And I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

So I did what came naturally.

I looked after him.

The episode eventually passed.

But something remained.

I never deliberately lied to Stephen again.

For years, I regarded that simply as evidence of how seriously I took honesty in our relationship.

Now I think there may have been something else happening too.

I had learned how costly dishonesty could be.

Psychologically, we learn remarkably quickly from intense emotional experiences. When one action is followed by an unexpectedly distressing consequence, we become motivated to avoid repeating the action.

I didn’t sit down the following morning and decide, I must manage Stephen’s emotions by never upsetting him.

Nothing so deliberate happened.

I simply knew that I never wanted to see him like that again.

Perhaps this was one of the first invisible rules I learned in our relationship.

Be completely honest with Stephen.

On its own, that sounds like an excellent rule.

But there was another lesson hiding underneath it.

Be careful what you do, because Stephen may experience it far more intensely than you expect.

That was more complicated.

Meanwhile, the bedsit was showing me something else.

My boundary had worked.

Stephen hadn’t moved into my home.

Yet somehow I was still increasingly involved in helping him cope with the consequences of living somewhere else.

He was lonely, so I stayed over.

He struggled to fill his days, so I suggested things he might do.

He was unhappy, so I worried.

He returned repeatedly to his father’s house, and I watched the independence I’d hoped he would build fail to take hold.

Again, none of those individual acts of care was unreasonable.

The pattern was what mattered.

Stephen’s discomfort increasingly generated activity in me.

If he was unhappy, I thought about how to make him happier.

If he was lonely, I considered how much time I could give him.

If something wasn’t working in his life, my mind naturally moved towards solutions.

Perhaps that felt reassuring to Stephen.

I imagine there was something comforting about having somebody who responded to his difficulties by moving towards him rather than away.

And perhaps, without either of us understanding it, we were strengthening the roles that had begun forming between us.

Stephen struggled.

I helped.

Stephen became overwhelmed.

I soothed.

The crisis passed.

We felt close again.

There is a concept in psychology called co-regulation. In healthy relationships, we naturally help one another settle when we’re distressed. A voice, a touch, someone’s presence or reassurance can help our nervous system return to calm.

There is nothing unhealthy about needing another person sometimes.

The difficulty comes when one person’s emotional regulation begins depending too heavily on the other, or when the other person begins feeling responsible for maintaining that stability.

We weren’t there yet.

But I can see the beginnings.

And then Stephen told me he was going to stay with his ex-girlfriend.

Immediately, something in me tightened.

Why two nights?

Why stay at all?

Why was she collecting him?

Why couldn’t he simply retrieve his belongings and come home?

Once again, my instincts produced questions.

And once again, I didn’t ignore them.

But another part of my identity entered the conversation.

I didn’t want to be controlling.

I didn’t want to be jealous.

I wanted to be the kind of partner who trusted.

That mattered enormously to me.

Perhaps because I believed secure love shouldn’t require policing another adult, I tried to distinguish between what I was feeling and what I could reasonably ask of him.

I couldn’t tell Stephen he wasn’t allowed to see his ex.

I didn’t want that kind of relationship.

So I reduced everything I was feeling to one boundary.

Don’t share her bed.

It was simple.

Specific.

And, to me, entirely reasonable.

Stephen didn’t hesitate.

He would sleep on the sofa.

That reassurance mattered because something important was about to be tested for the first time.

Until then, most of my doubts about Stephen had been answered with words.

He had told me he wanted me.

He had told me appearance wasn’t important.

He had told me about his diagnosis and his past.

He had explained his strange behaviour outside his father’s house.

And whenever there had been uncertainty, there had usually been an explanation I could understand.

But trust can’t ultimately be built from explanations.

At some point, words have to meet behaviour.

I didn’t need Stephen to avoid every situation that made me uncomfortable.

I didn’t need access to his phone or proof of where he was sleeping.

I didn’t want to supervise him.

I wanted something much simpler.

I wanted to be able to tell the man I loved what made me feel unsafe, hear him reassure me, and then discover that his actions matched what he’d promised.

Perhaps that was why the boundary about the bed mattered more than the bed itself.

I wasn’t really asking:

Where will you sleep?

I was asking:

When I tell you something matters to me, can I trust you to treat it as though it matters to you too?

Stephen said yes.

And I believed him.

Not because my instincts had gone quiet.

Because I was about to give him the opportunity to prove them wrong.

Stephen And The Bedsit

~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

As Stephen’s unhappiness with living with his father continued, he began hinting more frequently about living with me.

I reminded him that he had told me about moving in with his former girlfriend very quickly. His story was surprisingly similar to what was now happening between us. He had been in a very difficult place mentally, and she had driven to collect him and brought him back to her home. Before long, he had effectively moved in.

I could see the temptation for Stephen to repeat that pattern with me.

So I set a boundary.

I told him that he couldn’t move into my home until he had found a job.

He accepted that, but he was becoming increasingly desperate to get away from his father’s house. Instead, he arranged to rent a bedsit.

I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad idea. In fact, I thought it might be good for him. It would give him some independence, some privacy and a place of his own while he worked out what he wanted to do next.

He put some effort into making it feel like home. He bought things he needed to cook and some nicer touches to make the little room more comfortable.

I was pleased for him.

The first time I visited, we were both excited about having somewhere of our own to spend time together. We joked that we needed to christen the new place.

What followed was an unexpectedly intense and intimate experience, and I remember leaving with a real glow of happiness.

I felt incredibly close to Stephen.

But there was something else I was carrying home with me.

I had pretended to have reached a level of sexual pleasure that I hadn’t quite reached.

It was a tiny lie, but it bothered me enormously.

The following day, I was still thinking about it at work. I felt guilty. I was falling deeply in love with this man, and the last thing I wanted was to start our relationship by hiding things from him. I didn’t want to create a pattern where I pretended everything was fine when it wasn’t.

So I decided to tell him.

I imagined we’d laugh about it.

Perhaps he’d tease me.

Perhaps we’d simply talk about it and move on.

Instead, his reaction was completely disproportionate to what I had expected.

He became extremely upset.

He compared me to his ex-wife and spoke at length about how much her lying had hurt him. He seemed to experience my admission as though I had deliberately deceived him, rather than what it was: something I had admitted to less than twenty-four hours later because I didn’t want to be dishonest with him.

I tried to explain.

I tried to reassure him.

Nothing seemed to help.

I was shocked by the intensity of his response and frightened that something so small might somehow cost me the relationship.

I went home from work that evening feeling ashamed and deeply upset.

Then things became much more serious.

Later that night, Stephen had returned to his father’s house and called me.

He was in an awful state.

He was crying, distressed and increasingly paranoid, and he had been drinking. I was so worried about him that I got in the car and went to collect him.

I brought him back to mine.

I remember him sitting on the edge of my bed, confused and barely coherent. He seemed completely overwhelmed by whatever was happening inside his head.

I didn’t know what to do.

Until then, I had known that Stephen had mental health difficulties. I knew about his EUPD and I knew about his traumatic childhood.

But this felt different.

This was the first time I began to understand that his difficulties could be much more serious than I had appreciated.

There wasn’t much I could do except stay with him, apologise for upsetting him and try to comfort him until eventually he slept.

Thankfully, the episode passed.

We got through it.

And from that point onwards, I never deliberately lied to Stephen again throughout the rest of our relationship.

The bedsit itself, however, soon became another source of difficulty.

Stephen moved in just as the UK entered its third national lockdown in January 2021. Restrictions meant that there was very little for him to do, and he quickly found the isolation difficult.

He struggled with the empty days and lonely nights.

He would try to cook, but often ended up bringing takeaway food back instead. He didn’t seem to know how to fill his time or settle into living alone.

I tried to help.

Sometimes I stayed over, even when I had work the next day, because I knew how difficult he was finding the loneliness. We still spent some weekends together when he didn’t have his sons, and I suggested different things he might do to occupy himself.

But nothing seemed to make much difference.

Within only a couple of weeks, I noticed that he was spending more and more time back at his father’s house.

When he had his sons, his father would often collect him on a Thursday, and Stephen wouldn’t return to the bedsit until the following Tuesday.

By the end of this period, my impression was that he was spending only two or three nights a week there, although I know Stephen may remember this differently.

I could see that the independence I had hoped the bedsit would give him wasn’t working out quite as I had imagined.

Then, sometime in March, Stephen told me he wanted to visit his ex-girlfriend to collect belongings he had left behind.

He planned to stay for two nights.

I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea.

Why did he need to stay for two nights?

Why couldn’t he collect his things and come home?

And why was he relying on her rather than asking me?

But I didn’t want to become the jealous or difficult girlfriend. I’d started this relationship wanting to be trusting and easy-going, and I wanted to maintain that part of myself.

So I didn’t make too much of it.

When the day came for his ex-girlfriend to collect him from the bedsit, I asked him for just one thing.

One promise.

“Just please don’t share the bed with her.”

He reassured me immediately.

“No way. I’ll be sleeping on the sofa.”

I believed him.

The Stephen Behind The Profile (REFLECTION)

~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

The five minutes outside Stephen’s father’s house stayed with me longer than they probably should have.

Something had changed.

Only the previous day, Stephen had seemed completely absorbed by me. Now he could barely look at me. His energy was strange — agitated, distracted, almost as though he wanted me gone.

My mind immediately supplied an explanation.

He’s changed his mind.

Then another.

He got what he wanted.

I find that reaction interesting now because, once again, my internal warning system was working perfectly well. I noticed a change in behaviour immediately. I didn’t need anybody to point it out to me.

But noticing something and understanding it are very different things.

By the time I arrived home, Stephen was messaging me normally again. He explained that living with his father was affecting him, and suddenly I had information that made the encounter easier to understand.

Perhaps that really was all it was.

I still don’t know.

He may have been overwhelmed, irritated by something that had happened inside the house, embarrassed by his circumstances or simply having a bad five minutes. People are allowed to behave strangely without it revealing some hidden truth about them.

What matters more to me now is how quickly I experienced two Stephens.

There was the man standing beside my car, difficult to read and apparently wanting distance.

Then there was the Stephen on my phone: warm, engaged, communicative and reassuringly familiar.

At that point the contradiction was tiny.

His explanation bridged the gap easily.

So I crossed it.

As the days passed, I began learning more about the life behind the man I’d found so attractive.

It was considerably more complicated than I’d imagined.

Stephen didn’t have his own home. He didn’t have a job. His relationship with his brother had broken down. His relationship with his ex-wife was difficult. He hated living with his father. There were financial problems tied up in the inherited house.

Individually, none of those things made Stephen a bad prospect for a relationship.

Collectively, though, they told me something important.

This was not the settled man I had initially imagined when I read property developer on his profile.

His life was in considerable transition.

Mine wasn’t.

I had my home. I had work. I had established routines and responsibilities. I’d come out of my previous relationship wanting companionship and security — not another complicated life to manage alongside my own.

And I noticed the mismatch.

Are we actually a good fit?

There were my instincts again.

Not screaming.

Asking.

That’s an important distinction because I don’t think instinct always arrives as certainty. Sometimes it simply presents a question and waits to see what we do with it.

The difficulty was that I was simultaneously discovering things about Stephen that pulled me in the opposite direction.

I was seeing vulnerability.

The confident man from the dating profile was becoming more complicated. There seemed to be someone underneath who wasn’t nearly as self-assured as I’d first imagined.

And vulnerability has always activated something very powerful in me.

Not pity.

Tenderness.

I didn’t want a project. I genuinely wasn’t looking for somebody to rescue. But if I saw someone struggling with circumstances I could understand, my instinct was not to judge them for struggling. It was to look at who they might be once those circumstances improved.

That distinction would become enormously important.

Because without realising it, I was beginning to assess Stephen partly on potential.

He wanted work.

He wanted somewhere of his own.

He wanted his financial situation resolved.

He wanted his life to move forward.

Those things mattered because they allowed me to interpret his instability as temporary.

I wasn’t choosing an unemployed man living unhappily with his father amid fractured family relationships.

I was getting to know a man who, as I understood it, was trying to move beyond those things.

There is a significant psychological difference between loving someone for who they are and becoming invested in who you believe they are capable of becoming.

I hadn’t crossed that line.

But perhaps I had taken my first step towards it.

Something similar may have been happening when Stephen told me about his limited experience of intimacy.

Again, I encountered something I couldn’t quite reconcile with the man in front of me.

He was attractive. Charismatic. Intensely physical with me. Yet he described himself as inexperienced.

Rather than making me suspicious, it made me curious.

Perhaps he’d simply never had the right relationship.

And then came a thought that, in retrospect, says a great deal about me.

Perhaps I could show him.

Not teach him how to have sex.

Show him what a really good relationship could feel like.

There was nothing inherently unhealthy about that thought. We all bring different experiences into relationships, and ideally we do teach one another better ways of loving, communicating and being close.

But there was something quietly seductive about the idea that Stephen might flourish with me.

It gave his vulnerability meaning.

The unsettled parts of his life didn’t necessarily have to be reasons we were incompatible. They could be circumstances we would eventually leave behind.

Perhaps with stability, love and reciprocation, a different Stephen would emerge.

I wonder what was happening for him during those same evenings.

My life must have looked very different from his.

I had a home.

I was settled in my work.

I had structure.

And, perhaps most importantly, I was responding enthusiastically to him.

If Stephen felt trapped or diminished by his circumstances, I can imagine that being seen through my eyes might have felt wonderful.

I wasn’t looking at an unemployed man living with his father.

I was looking at intelligence, humour, creativity, vulnerability and possibility.

Perhaps he liked the man he appeared to be when reflected back through me.

Perhaps I made him feel hopeful about himself.

Or perhaps that gives me too much importance.

Maybe he was simply falling for me.

I was certainly falling for him.

And then there was the chemistry.

Chemistry is difficult to write about without either romanticising it or reducing it to brain chemistry. But its psychological power is real. Strong attraction creates its own evidence.

You don’t merely think we might work.

You feel it.

Our bodies seemed remarkably certain about something our minds had barely begun investigating.

That certainty mattered.

Every evening reinforced it.

The conversations grew longer. The physical intimacy grew easier. The affection developed. I became more tired and simultaneously less willing to go home.

Nothing about that felt like sacrifice.

It felt exhilarating.

And this is where I think hindsight can once again become unfair.

I could look back at Stephen’s circumstances and construct a neat list of reasons I should have walked away.

Unemployed.

Living with his father.

Family conflict.

Financial problems.

Mental health difficulties.

A lie on his dating profile.

But people aren’t checklists.

Had I rejected Stephen solely because his life was difficult, I would have been rejecting a man I genuinely liked because he was going through a difficult period.

That wasn’t who I was.

Nor is it who I particularly want to become.

The more difficult question is one I hadn’t yet learned to ask.

Not:

Does this person have problems?

But:

How does this person take responsibility for their problems?

I was listening carefully to what Stephen wanted to change.

I hadn’t yet been around long enough to see what he actually did.

There is a world of difference between those two things.

For now, though, the evidence immediately in front of me remained compelling.

He kept messaging.

He kept turning up.

We kept talking.

We kept laughing.

The attraction was extraordinary.

And every night, I knew a little more about him than I had the night before.

Some of what I learned made me hesitate.

Some made me want to move closer.

Increasingly, I found myself doing both at once.

Perhaps that was the first real tension in our relationship.

One part of me was asking whether Stephen could fit into the life I’d already built.

Another was beginning to imagine what his life might become if we built something together.

I didn’t know it yet, but those are two very different ways of choosing someone.

And I was beginning to move from one towards the other.

Getting To Know Stephen (REFLECTION)

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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.

Getting To Know Stephen

~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

Christmas Eve 2020 was the busiest day of my working year. Normally, it would have been impossible to give anything else much attention, with important tasks to complete and an impossible long list of things that needed doing before Christmas could properly begin. 

But somehow, Stephen and I managed to keep talking all day.

Messages flew back and forth between us whenever I had a spare moment. Each one seemed to open another door into the other’s life, and beneath the practicalities of my busy day, we were quietly assessing the chemistry between us.

There was definitely a spark.

Our communication seemed to work effortlessly. We shared a similar sense of humour and enjoyed playing with ideas, and the more we talked, the more common ground we discovered. We were beginning to recognise similarities in our pasts, but perhaps more excitingly, we were discovering that some of our hopes for the future weren’t so different either.

It was during those conversations that I learned my first surprising fact about Stephen.

He wasn’t actually a property developer.

He confessed that he had listed it on his dating profile because, although property development was something he aspired to, it sounded considerably better than putting ‘unemployed’ on his profile.

It was, technically, a lie.

It raised an eyebrow.

But I also appreciated that he had told me himself, rather than allowing me to continue believing something that wasn’t true. He was remarkably open about other aspects of his life, and I could understand the embarrassment behind wanting to present yourself in a better light when entering the dating world. I decided not to make too much of it.

There were more important things I was discovering about him.

Stephen spoke warmly about his previous girlfriend, describing her as a lovely and kind woman but explaining that, despite those qualities, he couldn’t see a future with her.

I remember finding that refreshing.

There was something reassuring about hearing a man speak kindly about an ex-partner rather than dismissing her or turning her into the villain of his story. It suggested a degree of maturity and compassion that I found attractive.

Then Stephen told me something else.

He had EUPD — Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.

He suggested that it had developed as a consequence of something traumatic during his childhood, although he didn’t tell me what had happened. I didn’t push him. We’d only known each other for a day, and there were some things that I felt belonged to a later conversation, if and when we got to know each other properly.

I listened carefully, though.

I was aware enough to understand that entering a relationship with someone who had a significant mental health diagnosis could bring its own complexities. I wondered what it might mean for him, and potentially for me, if our relationship developed.

But at that point, what stood out more strongly than the diagnosis was his apparent openness about it.

He seemed self-aware. He wasn’t hiding it or pretending that everything in his life had always been straightforward. There was something quite compelling about that honesty.

I suspected that whatever had happened in his childhood had been serious, possibly involving abuse, but I didn’t need to know everything immediately.

There was plenty about Stephen that I found fascinating already.

My curiosity about him was stronger than my reservations.

We talked about the sort of lives we imagined having one day. Stephen dreamed of owning some woodland and creating a self-sufficient life for himself. I had rather more modest ambitions.

I simply wanted a lovely home to come back to after a day’s work.

Somewhere I could feel safe. Somewhere I could feel secure. Somewhere I could build a happy life.

When we talked about it, neither dream seemed incompatible with the other.

In fact, they seemed as though they might fit surprisingly well.

It was far too soon to be imagining a future with a man I’d met on a dating app only the day before, and I was perfectly aware of that.

But it was difficult not to entertain the possibility.

Something exciting and, perhaps, surprisingly realistic seemed to be taking shape.

That evening, I think we had our first telephone conversation.

Until then, Stephen had existed as words on a screen and a handful of photographs. Suddenly, there was a voice attached to him.

I loved it instantly.

It was quite low and textured, with a slightly silky quality that I found incredibly attractive. There was something almost contradictory about the way he spoke — occasionally quite polished and almost posh, then suddenly dropping into much more ordinary, familiar pronunciations.

And when I made him laugh, he would giggle.

Not a restrained, self-conscious laugh, but something much more childlike and spontaneous.

I found it adorable.

Hearing his voice made the attraction I’d already felt through our messages grow stronger. There was something about Stephen that seemed to combine confidence with an almost boyish naivety, and I found the combination irresistible.

It was Christmas Eve.

The timing somehow made everything feel even more exciting. There was something wonderfully surreal about being on the threshold of Christmas, surrounded by all the usual preparations, while at the same time beginning something completely unexpected with a man I’d only just met.

I was already pretty hooked.

I wanted to know more about him. I wanted to hear his voice again. I wanted to see where this extraordinary conversation might lead.

But I also knew that the next couple of days would probably put everything temporarily on hold.

Christmas was here.

For the moment, I had to put my phone down, finish my work and get on with the festivities.

I had no idea then that the conversation I’d started just a few days earlier would become the beginning of a relationship that would change my life.

For now, it was simply Christmas Eve, and I was excited about a man I had only just met.

The Beginning

~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

After my previous relationship came to an end, I had grieved its loss.

It had been a long, mostly loving and successful relationship, and although its demise had been shaped largely by the complexities and restrictions of Covid-19, six months later, I was no longer mourning what we had lost. What remained was the loneliness.

I was 47, and although I didn’t feel old, I was conscious that time was moving on. I didn’t want to waste any more of it. I was ready to put myself back out there and see whether love might have another chapter in store for me.

I had always been proud of the love and patience I brought to a relationship. I wanted to find someone who was deserving of those things, but I also wanted something for myself: companionship, comfort, security and someone with whom I could genuinely thrive.

I knew it might take some time, so I initially entertained myself with the idea of dating quite liberally. In my imagination, I would meet men of different ages, backgrounds and occupations, perhaps keeping a little black book of possibilities and choosing who to see depending on my mood.

It didn’t take long to discover that this was completely incompatible with who I am.

The moment I’m genuinely interested in someone romantically, I give them my full attention. I don’t have the inclination, or frankly the mental capacity, to divide my time and energy between several people. I can flirt with the idea of being a serial dater, but in reality I am an all-or-nothing kind of woman.

So I downloaded a respected dating app and began the strange process of assessing strangers from photographs and carefully constructed profiles.

I spoke to a few men and met two of them.

Neither experience was particularly pleasant.

In both cases, there was initially some rapport and chemistry, only for things to become awkward and confusing. I remained consistent, while the men seemed to have sudden changes of heart that they weren’t honest enough to communicate. Instead, I was left trying to decipher mixed messages until, eventually, both disappeared.

Ghosting is a peculiar experience. There is no proper rejection to process, no conversation that allows you to understand what happened. You are simply left with the silence and your own imagination to fill it.

I found I was questioning myself.

Perhaps I wasn’t attractive enough. Perhaps I’d said something wrong. Perhaps I had misread the connection entirely.

My confidence took a knock, and I began to wonder whether I could really be bothered with dating at all.

Then I decided to try one more time.

This time, I broadened my search and started closer to home. One evening, quite late, I saved perhaps ten profiles and opened conversations with five of them.

One of those five immediately caught my attention.

He was the youngest and, in my opinion, the best-looking man I had ever approached on a dating app.

His profile contained only a few photographs, but they were quite different from one another, and together they created an impression of someone who might be intellectual, funny and outdoorsy. He appeared to be mixed-race, and there was certainly something about his look that I found very attractive.

As I studied the photographs, I found myself filling in the gaps, imagining the sort of person he might be. I wondered whether he might be interested in yoga and healthy eating, both things I was keen to bring more of into my own life. His profile was funny and intelligent, and I remember thinking that this was someone I could probably have really interesting conversations with.

He was also a property developer.

That was less important to me than the other things I’d noticed, but it was certainly a bonus. After the financial and employment insecurities I’d experienced in my previous relationship, the idea of meeting someone grounded and financially independent was appealing.

And then there was the practical advantage.

He lived less than five miles away.

No more long, nervous journeys to meet someone who might ultimately give me the cold shoulder.

Of all the men I messaged that night, though, he was the one I considered least likely to respond.

In my mind, he was out of my league.

So when I opened the app the following morning and saw that he had replied, I was pleasantly surprised.

His name was Steve. He was 42.

And he hadn’t simply sent a polite response.

He had written me a long, personal message.

It was thoughtful, well written and full of interest and enthusiasm. There was something immediately different about it. On the surface, it felt genuine and promising.

I was still cautious.

My recent experiences had taught me that early attention didn’t necessarily mean anything. I knew how easily charm and enthusiasm could be used to create attraction, and I was wary of men who might say whatever was necessary to get a woman into bed.

So I kept my guard up, but I also kept an open mind.

It was the 23rd of December 2020.

By the end of that day, Steve and I couldn’t stop messaging each other.

The conversation flowed almost effortlessly. We talked about our pasts, our lives as they were, and the things we hoped for in the future. We discovered shared interests and a mutual curiosity about one another. We made each other laugh.

There was an ease to it.

Our intellects seemed to match, and there was just enough flirting to create a spark without either of us feeling uncomfortable. We were curious about each other, but neither seemed in a hurry to force anything.

It was only days before Christmas, and we were both busy with preparations, yet somehow that didn’t stop us.

The messages continued late into the night.

I had no idea then where that conversation would lead.

I simply knew that, after a few disappointing attempts to find someone, I had finally met a man who had made me want to keep talking.

And for the first time in a while, I was excited to see what might happen next.