Love Rollercoaster: Dating with Bipolar Disorder

At the end of my first date with Sara, she moved in with me.

You might think the date was extraordinary. It wasn't. We'd gone to a Hollywood hamburger stand and gabbed about bands and writers for four hours. Until that night, we'd only spoken on the phone a few times. It didn't matter. By the time the ice in my soda had melted, I'd fallen in love.

Sara was twenty-seven, and what people used to call a wag: smart, quick-witted, encyclopedic. She could recount every failed Everest expedition in mesmerizing detail -- the sort of a talent I would expect of a rock climber, not someone who'd never gone camping. I kept wondering why no one had snapped her up. Then I found out.

"There's something you should know about me," she said, a couple of hours into the date. "I hope it doesn't scare you off."

Panicked thoughts raced through my mind. A jealous ex? An STD? I tried to remember if I'd sipped from her drink.

"I'm bipolar," she said.

"Good," I replied.

This was the odd humor Sara and I had already established, but I wasn't entirely joking. I'd had several close bipolar friends, and had once been in a long-term relationship with a bipolar woman, Nyla, whom I still consider the smartest person I'd ever met. From a distance, I'd seen how much energy it took Nyla to keep her episodes under control: weekly doctor's visits, blood tests, complicated regimens of medications.

And yet for all their problems, my bipolar buddies had always kept things interesting. Take my friend Jerome, hired one summer to drive a van full of rich and annoying European teenagers across the country. Somewhere in the Midwest, without telling the kids or his employer or anyone else where he was going, he simply got out at a gas station and walked away. "I was bored," he told me. Irresponsible, yes, but hilarious.

I didn't hear Sara's story until later, but it didn't have many funny parts. Her condition was rooted in a childhood depression that began when her father died suddenly of stomach cancer. At eighteen, she enrolled in the Ivy League university she'd dreamt of attending since childhood, and within a semester, was incapacitated by depression; she dropped out and returned to L.A. Suicide attempts followed. Then came her diagnosis, and years of experimenting with different psychiatric drugs until her doctors found the magic combination. Sidelined for years, she was finally looking forward again: doing PR for a record label and working part-time toward her bachelor's degree.

How could you not admire such a person? When I looked at Sara, I felt inspiration, not pity. And even though I'm not the type to plunge quickly into relationships, I was convinced I was in love. I invited her back to my place. Aside from a quick trip to clean out her studio apartment a few weeks later, she never went home.

"Of the two of us," I told her as we lay happily in bed, "I must be the crazier one."

Nine months later I stood over her pale, unconscious body, frantically dialing 911 for the first time in my life.

You could compile an entire book of quotes comparing love to madness. But of all the psychological issues in the DSM-IV, only one really resembles the experience of love. "An illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure," writes Dr. Kay Jamison in one of the most famous memoirs of bipolar illness, An Unquiet Mind. It's easy to confuse love with mania, Jamison says. The trouble is that love is fleeting. There's no cure for bipolar.

The popular caricature of the disease -- people swinging rapidly between happiness and sadness -- isn't the whole story. Most of us may have been unhappy enough at one time or another to recognize a fit of depression, but the other half of the disease (the mania that leads to everything from religious fervor to shopaholism to insatiable libido) is much harder to fathom. For instance, hypomania, which is a mild form of mania characterized by enviable productivity, can lead to what is called a "mixed state," in which the bipolar individual is both miserable and energetic enough to do something about it. Before L had found an effective combination of meds, she drove halfway across the country in a mixed state, buying expensive clothes and jewelry for herself, with the goal of committing suicide when she reached California. Fortunately, her mania dissipated before she made it there.