Dating with my mental illness(es) …. during COVID

I create a Hinge, I obsess and complemate over every photo, every response. How am I coming across to the world? Will my responses get attention from the men and women that I want them to? Will people get my humor? Am I original enough?

Swipe, swipe, swipe, match, swipe, swipe, chat, swipe, swipe, swipe

Find someone who holds the conversation well, exchange numbers, agree to go on a weird COVID friendly date.

So for those keeping score you now have the anxiety of 1. dating 2. getting COVID from some rando from the internet 3. the general anxiety of being a woman in the world trying to date online. Great, lets keep going.

The first date goes well enough, you continue chatting. You continue going on walks in the cold, dark, Michigan winter. You put up boundaries, you don’t chat too often, you don’t want to play games but also don’t want to set any precedents, you can’t get attached to this person who will play but a fleeting role in your life at best.

You continue chatting for a few weeks, you hang out increasingly often, you’ve entered into sleepover territory, the COVID kind of sleepover where you don’t order the Lyft and wait for it to arrive on their front porch while they are still fast asleep. The COVID sleepover is essentially planned, you’ve discussed your movements the last two weeks, who you see, who in your life is at risk, how often you see them. You sleepover, you stay for coffee, you work from their couch, you begin to catch feelings.

You get a little more comfortable, you chat frequently, frequently enough to begin to know their habits, their schedule. This means when they begin having long lapses in responses you question things, this is when you begin to spiral. Your rational mind tells you they stayed longer at the gym, they are facetiming their family, they are napping. Calm down, nothing is wrong. Even if it is, fuck em, you don’t need them, you strong ass, independent, bad bitch, you.

Your anxiety tells you that they lost interest, they were in a fatal car accident, they are ghosting you, you will never hear from them again, they are with someone else, someone who will bring COVID into this tiny bit of happiness and fuck it all up.

Remember the days when you just had to fear chlamydia? Ah yes, the good old days.

You hear back from them, they just fell asleep it was nothing.

Or was it? Maybe they are lying to you. Remember that fucker Brad you dated in 2016, he lied to you about everything under the sun. Maybe they are lying about falling asleep, maybe they are lying about liking you. This has all been an elaborate scheme to make you like them just so they could disapear.

Maybe you think so much you are actually unlikable, maybe at this point they can hear all of the voices in your head yelling so loudly that you can’t trust anything. Your heart rate quickens, your breaths shorten, the knot in your throat grows, you can’t stomach anything, you become eratic, irritable, nothing is okay, everything is falling apart, it is all your fault.

If only you could be normal, the chill girl, the go with the flow girl.

You feel too much, you think too much, you spiral too much, you are too much. These things make you unlovable. You try so hard to keep them in the dark about all of these thoughts that are always racing through your mind that you make yourself miserable. You bottle it up, you stay silent, you don’t want to look crazy, it’s too early to look this crazy. Run.

Maybe you run, maybe you have the tough conversation and hear the tough answers, maybe you have the tough conversation and are at ease with your thoughts for 5 minutes, you can breathe again. I don’t know what the answer is, I know that all of them end in the same amount of anxiety, the same depressive bit in the end when you are back on Hinge.

Back to swiping, swiping, swiping, matching, swiping, swiping, chatting, swiping, swiping, swiping.