[“Allow me to be perfectly clear about this: one of the cruelest things you can do is to tell someone that they are ineligible for love because of mental illness. Yet this is something that happens all the time. In a discussion about this idea, upon hearing that I believed people who were dealing with mental illness should not face constant messaging that they aren’t allowed to pursue relationships, an acquaintance launched into a vehement argument for the right of communities to exclude people who may be “toxic.” Simply hearing the idea that mentally ill people should get love too made this person feel like he had to protect his community from the invading mentally ill masses. As he argued this point, all I could think was how people in this man’s community must feel like they could not step out of line, have problems, or be less than fun.
The upshot is that the circumstances the folks living with mental illness navigate in order to feel worthy of love often require them to act “as if.” As if they were healthy, as if their needs were being met, as if they were okay with things that they may not be okay with. There is a pressure to lessen the impact of your disorder on others, to shrink it down, and by extension to shrink yourself down. The less you that shows up, the less voice you have, and the less control you have over your circumstances. To the outside world you may look like a consenting partner, but when you only feel safe voicing one-quarter of your feelings, what is filling in that other three-quarters? Whose voice is that? Are you really giving your own consent, or are you simply giving the answer you know someone else wants to hear? The answer that causes the least trouble?
Going with the flow is not consent. Trying to be unobtrusive is not consent. Being afraid to bother anyone with your problems is not consent. Not wanting to cause drama is not consent. Not wanting to be a buzzkill is not consent. Not wanting your luck to run out with the awesome partner who is with you in spite of your mental illness is not consent. Not wanting the hot partner you’ve just met to think you’re high maintenance is not consent. Hiding yourself to make someone else’s life easier is not consent.
Yet we, in ways both implicit and explicit, ask the mentally ill to do these things all the time. The message is sent that certain people—cool, easygoing, fun people who don’t cause trouble—are lovable, and that not fitting those criteria is inherently problematic, so those who don’t should do something about it. Cover up that illness, don’t let it show, and if it’s too late, if we’ve seen it, have the good grace to be sufficiently grateful for any bones tossed your way, and then remember that you are on notice, on borrowed time, because you are lucky, and luck runs out, luck can be pressed, and you probably shouldn’t press yours.
If we want to say “yes means yes” and make it mean more than “no means no,” we need to go beyond the words to the lives that are shaping them. Someone who feels indebted to their partner, lucky to have them, in danger of losing them is not delivering the same yes they would to an equal. Someone who feels like it’s not safe to show their true self, that they need to repress, hide, or stifle themselves lest they be cast out for being dramatic, may not say yes for the same reasons they would were they living out loud.
We can start to change this dynamic by changing the way we look at mental illness and the mentally ill. First off, understand that given the choice most mentally ill people would not be living with a mental illness. Working from that understanding, decouple people from their illness—your partner and their illness are not one; they are more like an ongoing wrestling match. Two entities locked together but separate. This new understanding allows you to see how you can enter the right to join your partner’s team rather than stand off against your partner and their depression. Now you are working together. Rather than becoming your partner’s adversary whom they have to protect themselves from or caretaker whom they are indebted to, you are their equal with whom they can negotiate. We need to stop infantilizing and desexualizing the mentally ill and start relating to them as competent people capable of making their own choices. This allows everyone to be open, honest, and communicative. People dealing with illness can enter relationships being truthful about it, and partners can join them as allies.”]
joellen notte, from sex and love when you hate yourself and don’t have your shit together, from ask: building consent culture, edited by kitty stryker, 2017
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