singlehood and the sickly

Given that this blog is entitled "love/sickness," it's a bit odd that I haven't written a post about love and illness yet. Part of the reason is that I'm single now, and I wasn't sure what to say about love and sickness. Then I realized being single and sick is a perfectly good topic in and of itself.

I've hardly ever been single in my life, so that's a struggle in and of itself. Then, piled up on top of it, are all of my feelings about being sick. As I am sure is the case with many sick people, I wonder if potential partners will like me less because of my chronic illnesses. The dating scene is tough enough already, and people naturally fear rejection, so it's even worse when you feel like you have a couple extra strikes against you. Being sick adds an additional quantum of uncertainty to a dating situation, as you're never sure how someone is going to take it. In my experience people have more positive reactions than I expect, but that might be because I tend to think in terms of worst case scenarios.

Sometimes it's not the dating that scares me the most. Those are the times when I'm more worried about going through sick things alone. While I realize I've gone through a lot by myself, either during times I was single or times when my partners did not take care of me, I can't help but fear going through that again. Some of those experiences were flat out traumatic. An example would be the times I had serious bronchial illnesses and didn't know if I'd make it through the night. When I was a minor, my mom would selflessly stay up all night and make sure I kept breathing. When you're an adult (at least in our society), you can't be sure that someone will take that kind of care of you. With some of my exes it was a miracle if they made me pancakes, much less commit a major act of self-sacrifice.

Other parts of the single and sick life weren't as extremely bad, but really wore on me. There was a year when I was pretty sickly, single, and living far from almost everyone I knew. I had few friends in the town where I was attending grad school, and I definitely didn't have any other sick friends. Very few people knew I was sick, and no one in the world knew the full story. I just felt so fucking miserable about everything that I wished someone would step in and care. That's not a very good reason to date people, though. You have to do it for the same reasons as everyone else, or it won't work. It has to be about the way they make you feel sick to your stomach in an *exciting* way, the fact that you care about them regardless of their flaws, etc. If you're really lucky, they will extend the same affection to you, overlook your flaws, and accept your chronic illnesses.

Recently I've found myself haunted by the times that sickness has been a relationship issue in the past. I can still hear my ex-boyfriend's parents saying, "well, we're glad you broke up and didn't have kids, because you're obviously genetically inferior." To their credit, they are evolutionary biologists and that is how they talk about anything, but it was still an incredibly insensitive thing to say. And it's not like food allergies and asthma (the illnesses they knew about) are death sentences. If we had some allergic kids, they would just have to eat coconut ice cream instead of regular ice cream. And I might make them eat extra healthy. And maybe they couldn't run as fast as the other kids. That's my life, and I think it's worth living.

I also remember the times when I got sick and my partners just stared at me blankly, scared shitless, totally uncomfortable, knowing there was nothing they could do to make a situation "better." There were also the times I occupied my partners' beds, too sick and incapacitated to go home to my own. That's a shitty spot to be in. There are of course the infinitely many nerdy moments of being sick like "I can't drink... I need to take double-Benadryl tonight," and "Hold on... I need to use my inhaler first," and "I think dinner is giving me hives." And of course, nothing ruins a date night like, "Hey, can you take me to the hospital? I think I really am having too much trouble breathing." Or the time when I tried to hook up with my diabetic friend, but he ended up overdoing his insulin at dinner and I got sick from whatever was in the food I ate. Good times.

While I could recite a pretty long litany of similar experiences, I think there's one that takes the cake. It seemed worse than others because it was early on in a relationship, and I didn't know the person that well. I had spent the night at an anarcho-co-op house where the person had lived and woke up feeling... off. It had been very, very hot for quite some time, probably over 100 but I don't remember for sure. The house was moldy, old, and not air conditioned. I had some trouble breathing in the night but shrugged it off and thought that I could put up with it for my politics and for lurve. When I finally stood up in the morning (afternoon, whatever), I experienced a near complete loss of my vision, my ears stopped up, and I felt nauseated. I stumbled blindly down the hall, past a few people, and out the door, only to have my first full-unconsciousness fainting spell right there on the porch. I have some memory of what happened during the faint, but let's just say it is so embarrassing that I can't even mention it in the anonymous halls of les internets. It didn't end up affecting my relationship at all, probably by some combination of the facts that the girl was still asleep, never got the full story, and was going to dump me shortly thereafter anyway.

Now that I'm single, I'm trying to make meaning of such experiences. Were these incidents so bad that I should warn people of what they might potentially be getting into? Am I worth dating at all? It seems that none of my exes would say that my sickness was so bad that I shouldn't have dated them at all, and it seems that it was often no worse than the crap their other exes put them through. But what are the actual implications of my chronic illnesses for relationships? Was chronic illness more of a factor in break-ups than I thought? Did people get sick of hearing me bitch and moan about my treatment protocols, allergy shots, doctors visits, and expenses?

I guess I'll never really know the answers to these questions. All I can do is focus on how I will handle these issues differently in the future. I think the biggest lesson I've learned is that I need alternative sources of support. I can't rely on one person to make it all better--especially when I'm never going to get "all better." I think it's really beneficial that I have sickly friends now, so that I can have a more productive outlet for the neurotic energy that accompanies my chronic illnesses. It's also helpful to hear what their experiences of illness in relationships has been like.

There is definitely the issue of when to tell people things, and how much to tell. n the past, I covered up my chronic illnesses, and kept them hidden for entire relationships. One of my exes just found out this stuff seven years after our three year long relationship ended. It's not like I totally succeeded in keeping my secrets, of course. They all had suspicions, all knew something was awry. Occasionally I wonder if that was the best way to deal with sickness, to keep it as a secret so that no one had to worry, but the truth always reared its ugly head, either in front of them, or in private. You can't keep it bottled up forever, especially around the people you care about the most in the world.

Now, I'm all for letting people know as soon as it is relevant. With food allergies, I usually tell people right away. Given the number of food limitations I have, the person will know pretty quickly that something is up. Sometimes I forget to tell people about the asthma, seasonal allergies, or GERD, but that's mostly because they're becoming less and less of an issue, and are actually slipping my mind for the first time in many years. When they do come up, it's not any worse than someone getting a horrible headache or a nasty cold.

Perhaps the hardest thing to hide is how I feel about the illnesses. I'm feeling really great for the first time in 12 years, and sometimes I just want to run with it and pretend like nothing ever happened. I know I've made major improvements in managing my illnesses, but the specter of their past and possible future still haunts me. I have a hard time not dumping out the whole story to every new person I meet, but it almost seems irrelevant at the moment. And I'm never sure what to say about the future. It's hard to tell people "I'm OK... at least for now..." and "I know what's wrong with me... sort of" and "I don't expect to get very sick again... any time soon."

And of course, with my illnesses being interrelated, it's hard to give people just a slice. I often just tell people about the food allergies, but then they start asking how a person could become allergic to so many things. Then I have to get into all the hell of living in moldy houses, getting really sick, having my chronic illnesses get worse, and becoming oversensitive to everything. That of course begs the question of how I will stay healthy in the future, and what I'm doing to maintain that health so... the ghosts of sickness past and future always pop their way into the conversation, as much as I try to keep them at bay.

All of this said, I'm looking forward to trying again someday. To laying myself bare, and seeing who will take me (like every other single person). To finding out who is strong enough and loving enough to care. It's not that I am so unlovable... moreso that chronic illness is not what a lot of people bargained for, nor what fits into their ideas of life and relationships at a given time. Also, there are a lot of people who haven't been through much in their lives, and can't really relate or understand trauma. I understand that, and don't want to end up with anyone who isn't ready for what I've been through, and could possibly go through again.

There are people who are strong enough, many of whom I count as my friends, and some who have been my partners. Here's to the search for such people, once again. Someday.