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Topic: Dating somebody with a personality disorder
mysticalview21's photo
Sat 10/10/15 02:56 PM
Edited by mysticalview21 on Sat 10/10/15 03:01 PM
I was just going to put in my profile ... they would have to be able to put up with my best or worse mood and love me for who I am ... + I think some guys do the same thing ... + leave your attitude at home ...laugh

DavidCommaGeek's photo
Sat 10/10/15 03:36 PM
I think a lot of people are hasty to judge others as having a "personality disorder" simply because they receive answers to questions they weren't expecting, or which are uncommon or unusual.
I am reminded of an episode of "Better Off Ted" (which is an utterly hilarious show, and I recommend it to everybody) where the female lead and her romantic interest were discussing things they did to relieve office stress and feel better about themselves.
The romantic interest's response was "I like to dress up in a totally realistic bear costume and wander around the park... it makes me feel powerful".
Immediately, you saw her start to inch away from him and get that freaked-out look in her eyes, which is as much as saying "I think you are crazy/have a personality disorder".

Now, granted, dressing up like a bear is not something most people do (aside from the guy in those new Smokey the Bear commercials). But people do lots of weird stuff to make themselves feel more confident and powerful. For women, I've been hearing a lot lately about how their shoes make them feel more powerful/confident/sexy. On the internet, there are even stranger things.
The point being, however, is that you can't demand both honesty and utter conformity - because if you get both of those in a person, they're probably not very interesting. I'd rather be interesting than commonplace or conforming, but for some reason people don't like it when you practice what you preach in this regard.

In short: if you're really interested in having a romantic relationship, then you should be prepared to accept a person's foibles as long as they don't do harm to others.
And don't ask questions you don't really want to know the honest answer to. Would you rather people kept things from you now, only to reveal them at a later, infinitely more uncomfortable later date?

TawtStrat's photo
Sun 10/11/15 02:23 AM
I think that a lot of it does depend on how conformist and conservetively "normal" you are how you're going to feel about dating any sort of a quirky or eccentric person. There's also perhaps what I might call ignorance, or willful ignorance, operating when people say no to it.

If you had been diagnosed with a personality disorder how would you feel about being stereotyped, with people taking the atitude that "they're all the same if they have diagnosis X?" There would seem to certainly be a compatibility issue here if a lot of people are coming to conclusions about certain types of people because most of what they know about such things comes from the media or anecdotal evidence. People like to play amatuer psychologist and not just on internet forums.

So, imagine that you're sitting there and you're trading life stories. Your date tells you that they had a difficult adolescence and hated high school. Red flag or not if you're "normal"? They continue to tell you how they're a bit of a social misfit. "This guy's weird. He's never been married and doesn't have what I would think of as a normal social life."

Then there's just bigotry. Your date tells you that they smoke marajuana sometimes. Well, this is just a big no no for a lot of people that think that it automatically makes you a scumbag, or someone that needs professional help, or they say that they just don't like druggies; or drunks if that's their prejudice. But wait a minute. I had someone that said that they don't like people that drink or drug sending me a friend request on here the other day, so what's that all about? Why was it alright for The Beatles to experiment with drugs but you wouldn't date somebody that had? Does a person smoke marijuana because they're self medicating and avoiding issues, or is it the opposite and are they some sort of artist that finds that it helps them to be creative? Would you even just back off if they told you that they were an artist because they tend to be eccentric and may well be using their art as some sort of therapy? Or would you reserve judgment until you had seen their work and be alright about it if it turned out to be quite dull and unoriginal?

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