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How I Learned to Navigate My Boyfriend’s Depression
Sometimes love makes you weak, but I’m stronger because of it
In the very beginning, I wouldn’t let him sleep in the same bed as me. “Let me get this straight,” Kevin said at 2 a.m. one night. “You’ll have sex with me, but you won’t let me stay the night?”
His confusion seemed like a put-on, and it irritated me. It wasn’t sex that made intimacy difficult. It was all those other grotesque parts: all that dependence and self-disclosure. All the risk you take when you start needing someone.
I remember when I first realized that I’d fallen for him. It was about a year into our relationship and he was meeting me and my best friend at a concert on Coney Island. The sun had just set and the spring sky looked fake: puffs of pastel cotton candy stretched across it. I spent the whole opening band’s set looking back for him, and when I finally saw him — this tall, silver-haired Irishman pushing through a crowd to get to me — I just knew.
My worst nightmare wasn’t that someone would leave me. It was that he’d stay and destroy me.
It made me a little sick.
Until I met Kevin when I was 32, I mostly thought of love as something that made you…
