Sex and Love When You Hate Yourself and Don't Have Your Shit Together

JoEllen Notte

In my early twenties, young, searching for love, and with an undiagnosed mental illness, I heard the same words of "wisdom" over and over again: "You can't love someone else until you love yourself." Feeling like I was being asked to do the impossible, I spent a lot of time wondering what one needed to do to convince the world they loved themselves when actually doing it was unimaginable.

In my late twenties, my finally diagnosed but horribly managed depression coincided with a misdiagnosed, mistreated injury. The only thing everyone in my life at the time seemed to agree on was that I was so lucky to have my husband. I was living somewhere I didn't want to live for this man; I was constantly dragging my miserable, hurting self through everything for this man, while committing over and over again to "just try harder" — when I knew I was doing all I could just to keep breathing — for this man. I was dying inside, but wow was I lucky to have someone who would put up with me.

Years later, I'm dating online and very specifically looking for no commitments, no long-term relationships — I'm not asking for anything from anyone. My mentions of books like Opening Up and The Ethical Slut bring all the poly boys to the yard, but frequently, my honesty about my mental health history sends them running, turning to yell over their shoulder the now cliché polyamory mantra "You have to get yourself together first before you can really 'do' non-monogamy!" I look around and notice how many nonmonogamous women I know are concealing their mental health issues and facing struggles on their own in the quest to be the mythic "cool poly girl." I see a lot of women taking a lot of shit with a pasted-on serene smile because they want everyone to know they got themselves together and are now "safe" to be nonmonogamous.

These examples from my own complicated history with both love and mental illness serve to illustrate problematic issues that exist on a larger scale. We, as a society, consistently tell people with mental illnesses that they are not eligible for love.

In our culture, we believe many things about the mentally ill: they are out of control, they need care, they don't have sex, and they are dangerous, but one of the most pervasive and dangerous beliefs is that they are incompetent. Additionally, people struggling with mental illness receive constant reminders that they do not deserve love/acceptance/sexual attention as they are, that they are less than, too much trouble, emotional time bombs who are too broken to give back what they take. As such, they need to try their hardest to act like they are "well" for everyone else's benefit, be damn grateful to be loved despite their brokenness, and not press their luck by needing too much. Working from these beliefs, we end up with situations like I've described above: people who happen to have a mental illness feeling sentenced to loneliness because they have a brain that doesn't let them love themselves first, "broken and lucky" mentally ill people who feel damaged and so lucky that anyone would be with them that they dare not question it, or the buzz kill mentally ill people who might "ruin people's fun" with their needs and thus feel it necessary to hide them. In all of these scenarios we see one common theme: the partner dealing with mental illness is set up to accept a lot of crap they wouldn't be expected to otherwise. All of these situations can lead that partner to surrender their right to true, enthusiastic, genuine, fully embodied consent.

Many people don't love themselves. They can't. They won't ever. Simply telling them they have to do that before they can have the love of anyone else not only is cruel, but can backfire dramatically. Knowing that self-love is the "golden ticket" to the world of love, sex, acceptance, and everything else we're told comes with it can lead to the sort of over-the-top, "I LOVE myself!" play acting that makes one extremely malleable and susceptible to the demands of others dressed up as sex and body positivity. Because after all, why wouldn't they want to do ALL the things if they LOVE themselves, LOVE their body? Right?! Acting out self-love doesn't leave much room for weighing real wants and needs, only for doing what looks like what the character that's been created — the one who LOVES themself so much! — would do.

The "broken and lucky" dynamic, which can be common in relationships where one partner does a lot of caretaking of the other, consistently sends the message that the mentally ill partner is "broken," that they are damaged goods, that they are "less than," and, as such, extremely "lucky" to have a partner at all. Once it's been established that the mere presence of the partner is a gift, every act of caretaking gets added to the relationship balance sheet, and the mentally ill partner is so far in the hole they could never get out. The balance of power in the relationship is completely out of whack, and here is where consent becomes problematic. This dynamic leaves no room for equitable negotiation; it's not a relationship of equals. One partner has all the power and the other — the mentally ill partner — is relying on them, is convinced they need them, and often feels they "owe" their partner so much that they have lost their right to differing opinions, desires, and...