When did you tell your partner?

Most of my relationships I've told people very early on to just get it over with, but this one I wasn't planning on being as serious so it didn't come up. Now I feel like it'll be too much to put on her. She definitely doesn't understand a lot about the disorder, so I feel like I'll have to start with explaining a lot and she won't understand why she hasn't noticed it before. I'm just very scared to bring it up and have honestly been wondering if I should stay in the relationship mostly because of that. I feel like waiting too long isn't okay, I don't want to hide it from her and then blindside her if I do end up switching noticeably one day.

Hi,

The telling thing is really hard. If you tell and they judge you it's bad or if it's been awhile and they think you've been lying to them it's bad or they don't understand it's bad or think they understand but they don't it's bad. Mostly you can't take it back if it goes bad. There's not much to like about this.

Iain

When you do tell your partner start with telling them how you now feel safe enough / see enough of a future with them to reveal the most vulnerable thing about you. Make them feal good about this revelation and don't worry about the whole keeping secrets thing because I guarantee you that you don't know 100% of her history/dreams. Use posative phrases along the lines of remember when we did xyz and you commented how awesome it was that I was letting my hair down/showing my fun side. Build up a picture of how they did spot the difference and here is the vocabulary to explain understand that difference reasure them about how many of you see them romantically how many platonically. They will have a lot of questions they may still feel angry that it took so long for you to trust them with the info explain that past partners have used your medical information to hurt you, they may not appreciate that explanation in the moment but later when they calm down they will see you were defending yourself.

No mater how you approach this there will be a pause but if you frame this as much in the poosative as possible if you make them feel like they did know this all along then the pause will be smoother.

I was really scared about telling my curent partner. In fact we ended up giving them our diary (we have wildly divergent hand writing) so they could read who they had interacted with. Our partner didn't beleive us for a while, thought we were doing a bit, but eventually they started spotting switches and now time has passed they can appreciate why we took our time to tell them.

mercuryandthestars wrote:Most of my relationships I've told people very early on to just get it over with, but this one I wasn't planning on being as serious so it didn't come up. Now I feel like it'll be too much to put on her. She definitely doesn't understand a lot about the disorder, so I feel like I'll have to start with explaining a lot and she won't understand why she hasn't noticed it before. I'm just very scared to bring it up and have honestly been wondering if I should stay in the relationship mostly because of that. I feel like waiting too long isn't okay, I don't want to hide it from her and then blindside her if I do end up switching noticeably one day.

We were married long before we knew... in fact, 23 years married this March and 7 years aware and knowing of our DID 7 years yesterday... She never really understood or saw "it" until it was made known to us... then she saw it in retrospect across the years.

I wish we'd known before... but then, if we did she's said over and over she wouldn't have married me/us knowing, so I guess that's a thing, too...
I hope your partner is more open to the fullness of you (as a system, as a whole) and you can make it work... But if they can't, I wouldn't recommend staying... from a personal perspective, I feel like it's a losing battle to try and hold on to a person that wants to change, heal, or fix you... or push you away and can't love or trust you fully b/c of how you are.

-Zor