There are those for whom MS was already a diagnosed part of life when their current relationship began, and there are those for whom MS became a new third wheel after the coupling was established. Of course, there’s also a subset of people who have experienced both a former relationship during which MS was diagnosed, and a current one that began after MS got its hooks in us. I fall into this group.
When Love Blooms Before MS
When we think back on the early days of a budding relationship, it’s hard not to smile and long for the time of total infatuation, creeping hours before the next meeting, and a seemingly endless supply of sexual energy. Particularly if symptoms or a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis aren’t a part of life as love blossoms, young relationships can nearly burst with potential and expectation. A healthy relationship that has a chance to form, mature, and advance before the onset of MS can stand a strong chance of absorbing the shock and persistent attack of the disease. One that has preexisting fissures — obvious or subterranean — mayn’t fair as well. One benefit to a couple who experience the symptoms and diagnosis of MS together is that they have time to work through and strategize together as a unit — a definitively lopsided unit, as each contends with different sides of the scales, but a unit all the same. RELATED: 9 Signs You’re in a Healthy Relationship
When MS Precedes a Love Connection
When one person has lived with the disease before meeting a new person and entering a relationship, things can be quite different. Meeting and courting with MS in the room is like one partner owning a vicious dog that has contempt for its master. That is not to say that relationships are impossible, only that the third wheel in these relationships has loose lug nuts and often steers a couple well and dangerously off course. Add to that the coping mechanisms and MS life skills a person who has learned to live with the disease on their own will have established, and the difficulties compound. Like a foreign language, these can be beyond comprehension to a new partner. If there is a benefit to the post-MS relationship, it is that a potential partner can learn about the disease and its place in an alliance. This doesn’t guarantee success, but counters the surprise effect it can have on an established couple.
My Post-MS Love Story
My wife, Caryn, and I recently celebrated 11 years married. We met over 14 years ago, and I’ve been living with my diagnosis for nearly two decades. MS was not only there when we met — at a 40th birthday party that was also a National Multiple Sclerosis Society fundraiser — but it was also a significant and regular part of my life, beyond just the symptoms of the disease. In our time together, we have established a joint approach to living with MS that respects the very personal nature of what the disease does to my body, while acknowledging what my symptoms, and my reaction to those symptoms, does to us as a couple. We have code words and signs we use in public and have incorporated into our response protocols for experiences we have shared. We’ve laid out something of a constitution of guiding principles for how we as a couple — if not always how each of us, individually — plan to cope with MS-induced situations. Nothing about living with an ever-changing disease is easy, but having a shared and established philosophy on the books has been of great benefit to both she, me, and us … as well as the dogs, I suppose. RELATED: Share Your Relationship Tips on MS Tippi!
Wishing You the Best in Life and Love
Multiple sclerosis has either interloped your current relationship, was baggage you brought with you to a new love, or, the hopeless romantic in me expects, will be for you in a future encounter. That same romantic is sad to acknowledge that not all relationships — current or future — will survive multiple sclerosis. Whether you and your partner have found (and continue to adapt) the required tools together, or your other half met you as you carried your box full of skills, the knowledge that more tools will be needed, that two sets of eyes can find those aids better than one, and that each side of a relationship may require different work with different tools at different times, has been helpful to me and mine. As Caryn is oft to tell me, “It’s just what we do.” Wishing you and your family the best of health. Cheers, Trevis
