Dating With MS

So, full disclosure, I wasn't dating with MS for very long as I met my fiancé about 6 months after my diagnosis. However, I still went through, what I imagine, are all of the common fears that a single person experiences when diagnosed with a long-term illness: will anyone be able to love me?; will they run a mile if I tell them about my MS?; will they stay with me if my symptoms get worse?; and the list goes on…(*yes, I’m face-palming my 27 year-old self for ever having had these thoughts!*) Obviously, while these fears are completely understandable, they are also completely unfounded if you are with a kind and compassionate partner. And, to be honest, if they’re not kind and compassionate, then they are definitely not the type of person that you want to spend your life with anyway! However, the actual reality of dating with MS, especially as an “invisible illness”, did bring up some potentially tricky scenarios such as when to share that I have MS, who do I “have to tell” and being able to explain what the future might look like when I had absolutely no idea myself!  So, in this blog I want to share what I learned from dating with MS. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin...

I’ve learnt that there is a balance to be had between feeling “open and honest” and “hiding” my diagnosis. Just because you don’t tell someone about your MS diagnosis doesn’t mean that you are hiding it or lying about it, it just means that it doesn’t have an impact on your relationship with that person and it isn’t a piece of information that they need to know about right away. For example, not everyone needs to know that I got so drunk on my year abroad that I fell out of bed onto a concrete floor and broke my rib! It’s not a story that I lead with when meeting people, but if you talk to me long enough, it will probably come up in conversation– just like my MS!

Who you tell about your MS diagnosis and when you tell them is completely up to you. There is no right or wrong time.  Some people prefer to be upfront about their diagnosis from a first date, others prefer to wait before sharing their diagnosis with a potential partner. Whatever you choose to do is perfect. For me, I never mentioned my diagnosis on first dates. It wasn’t really a conscious decision and if anyone had explicitly asked me, “Do you have a long-term illness?”, I would have said, “yes”. However, as that isn’t the best first date chat, unsurprisingly it never came up in conversation!  For a long time I didn’t want to be defined by my MS and so, for me, I didn’t think that it was the most interesting or important thing that anyone needed to know about me and so I didn’t share my diagnosis when I first met people.  I definitely agonized internally over this choice when dating because I wasn’t sure whether I was being deceitful or whether it was wrong, but there really is no right or wrong to it. I was still trying to come to terms with the MS diagnosis myself and what it might mean for my life, let alone trying to explain it to a potential partner. So being kind to myself and giving myself time and space to work out whether the person I was dating merited me being vulnerable and sharing my diagnosis with them was the best decision for me. 

When I told my now fiancé about my MS diagnosis he surprisingly didn’t have many questions. I word garbled, in between tears, that I had MS and described what MS was and that I didn’t know what the future held and that I completely understood if he didn’t want to continue seeing me (poor boy didn’t know what was happening!). And then he said, what can only be described as the perfect response: “Well none of us know what the future holds, at least you know what you’re dealing with.” And in that moment I realised that he was absolutely right.  I had been so worried that he wouldn’t be able to handle the uncertainty of my MS (mainly because I still couldn’t handle it) that I’d never even stopped to consider that everyone’s future is uncertain. It’s not something that human beings like to think about as we love having control, but the truth is that none of us have control and everything in life is uncertain. This can seem overwhelming, but it is also liberating and if I had continued to date other people, I think that this would have really helped me to be more confident when sharing my diagnosis.

WARNING: I am going to be soppy here. My fiancé Jon is the best man on the planet. FACT. You might have a wonderful partner, I’m not denying it, but he is the absolute BEST (I’m happy to argue this, just leave me a message in the comments ;p). He doesn’t love me in spite of my MS, he loves me for who I am completely and that includes my MS. He is my champion and my cheerleader. He tucks me up in bed when I’m tired, and blows on me to cool me down when I’m flushing. He also holds me to account when we work together on our businesses and calls me out when I know I’m being a bit pathetic.  He was there when I stood up in front of 200 people at my Landmark Advanced Course graduation and declared that I am more than my MS. Having spent 3 days fully focused on self-development sitting in a conference hall for 12 hours having only slept about 5 hours each night, I felt amazing and powerful because I had been more interested in the work that I was doing than in my symptoms or fears surrounding MS. I realised that if I’d been able to do that for 3 days, then I could do that in my normal life as well and that was how I intended to live my life from now on. When I sat back down, Jon turned to me and said that he was so proud to be my fiancé. And that is the person that you want to be with, whether you have MS or not.

I eventually told my fiancé about my MS diagnosis after about 5 weeks of dating. It wasn’t exactly planned and I ended up sharing my diagnosis with him because I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest from anxiety of not telling him. It was the right time for me and lifted a weight off my shoulders. Either way, remember, it’s your choice how and when you tell anyone about your diagnosis.

How do you find dating with MS? Let me know in the comments below!