Dating With an Invisible Chronic Illness

About the Author: Chloe is a successful blogger and influencer that shares her experiences with invisible chronic illnesses. She tells everything fashion, travel, and fitness on her blog chloeschronicallycomediclife.com. She also shares some delicious gluten free recipes! If you want to see more of Chloe's fabulous fashion you can go visit her instagram (@chloeleanne132).



This post is an excerpt from Chloe's blog, linked above!


Dating in this day and age is hard enough without dealing with a chronic and mental illness. I’m chronically single to go along with it. Not that I haven’t been on a few dates, but lack of understanding because my illness is invisible for the most part fucking sucks. Warning this contains a fair bit of bowel talk so now would be a time to stop reading if it’s too much information for you.


I play down my symptoms a lot because I feel shame I really shouldn’t feel or I’ll pretend I’m fine and not tell them too much info about my illness because it’s the first time meeting them. (probably stupidly a bit scared they’ll think I’m a trainwreck and steer clear).


So let’s start with an example date:

I make a plan to meet someone, I have to plan how I’m getting there. Can I drive or am I on meds that forbid it? Am I well enough to get the train? Do I need my crutches? Should I shed out for a taxi? I’ve previously had an incident on the train where I’ve really needed to go the loo and the boy didn’t believe I needed to get off the train and it resulted in an accident with me legging it home from the station, greaaat.


So say I’ve got there and we go for food. I can’t have gluten so is the place gluten free safe? Been on a date and accidentally ended up with gluten in my food, swelled up like a balloon and looked six months pregnant. Couldn’t stop vomiting and had to rush home. Sometimes my gastroparesis flares up, this means I can’t even eat at all, so let’s do something else.

Instead maybe do an activity. So instead of me being completely honest I sometimes end up in situations doing activities I really shouldn’t be doing. Let’s go rock climbing and bamm I’ve dislocated a shoulder or I’m just in bed for the next few days with pain and fatigue.

Sometimes it’s worth it, but not when you’ve just met someone. I do love doing stuff like this, it just needs a bit of planning. Probably not go hiking either.


Drinks. Well yes we’ll just have a couple. There’s a slight problem with this in the fact it can trigger mania in my bipolar and I’ll start refusing to stop drinking and go home. Best case scenario, we have the best night full of laughter and drunkeness, worst case scenario, I run off somewhere with a head full of mad ideas, they leave me to it, put myself in danger and my Mum has to come and fetch me hahaha. I’ve told boys before about this and they’ve bought me too many drinks anyway. I don’t have the capacity to say no, as it always seems a great idea to me.


So if I’ve been dating someone a while and they want me to stay over.. For starters we have the issue of my medication, real problem if I don’t have it with me. I need to take my meds regularly for pain, my stomach, my head, my bowel. This is just a days medication:



Then we move onto my bowel. It’s slow and doesn’t move on it’s own. I take tablets for this that are included in that photo but I also have the hell that is my irrigation system. I have to use this once a day to manually get my poo out haha. There is no way I’m taking this bad boy out with me:



Obviously I’m not saying it’s impossible, but dating was so much easier before all this came along. It makes me miss the simplicity of my old life and realise the concerns I used to have are completely irrelevant and menial in comparison. I know I’ll get myself back out there one day but jeez it’s hard to be completely honest to strangers and guess what their reaction will be.


I’m well aware there’s someone out there who’ll completely accept me, but it’s just weeding through the ones that don’t understand the fact I’m too tired some days to go out. That I can’t do everything they can do, even if I look like I can. Just because you can’t see my illness doesn’t mean it’s not there and I’m not sat in pain, I’ve just got really good at faking being fine.