We had a row tonight. We haven’t had that many lately, so it was a bit out of the blue.
We were at a out of town shopping centre and after it closed, we got something to eat and started to drive home. Helpfully, they’d closed the bit of road I needed and hadn’t put up any diversion signs. I finally got going where I was going but I was tired and a bit under the weather and really didn’t need a 50 minute scrabble and diversion so we ended up picking at each other. The picking turned to fighting.
I’m aware that he’s not at his best either but sometimes these discussions just happen. In the six and a bit years I’ve known him, he has always threatened to leave. He means in a going missing kind of way. He asked me if I could cope with that better now. I started to cry and said that he was being stupid and that would never be ok. I said I would always look for him and it would never stop. I said it was a horrible, selfish, hurtful thing to do and it didn’t matter when, it would always be that. My mum’s first husband vanished and she still wonders, nearly 50 years later, what happened to him.
This disappearing thing is always his go to place. It’s always upset me and it feels like this threat being lorded over me. It’s one of the main reasons we broke up in the beginning. I couldn’t feel safe and secure knowing he just might go if he felt like it. I think you need to have some security in a relationship and he didn’t ever provide me with a single shred. My mum thinks it’s hot air and he’s just sounding off. It’s so hurtful and deeply distressing and it’s hard for me see past that. He says he’d tell me he was safe but that isn’t acceptable. I’ve known suicide but I haven’t had anyone just leave so I don’t know if they are similar but I expect so.
I keep telling him that he has to take himself with him, if he left. He wouldn’t suddenly stop being bipolar if he moved and changed his name. He wouldn’t miraculously be able to hold down a job or have a girlfriend. He said his biggest regret is that I know the real him. He said he wished that we’d never got close and that’s why he wants to leave. He wouldn’t then have our friendship anymore. That’s such an extremely hurtful thing to say. I’ve done everything I can to care and support him. I’ve loved him even when he’s cheated on me and always been there. It’s a shame he can’t be there for me in any way, ever.
Bipolar's gf 