CW: suicide

So this is about someone from about 5.5 years ago.

I (f26 at the time) met someone online (m31 at the time). Let’s call him G.

From the moment G responded to my glorious ad on Craigslist personals, I knew we would have incredible chemistry. And we did. We emailed back and forth about 100 times in the CL relay before going to regular email and then quickly going to text. I wasn’t sure I’d ever had this much of a connection with someone before. We had enough differences for our taste preferences but had an equal sense of humor, a little sexiness, and compassion.

Which is why our first date, when it finally happened (a few days or maybe a week after our endless texting), was one of the best first dates I’d ever had. We had dinner, went for drinks elsewhere, and then walked back to his place for dessert and just a little bit of fun (not sex). But again the CHEMISTRY was through the roof. I slept over and we showered and had breakfast together in the morning. It was so relaxing and sweet.

We both went to work and texted the rest of the day, basically until we’d passed out for the night.

I didn’t hear from him again until Monday after I asked about his doctor appt and he responded with a long explanation:

“Good afternoon. I get discharged from the hospital this afternoon. Long story short. I have bipolar disorder. 8 months ago I attempted suicide with CO poisoning, and failed. I have been stable with zero problems since then, at least mentally. However, at the doctor they discovered that my liver was beginning to fail and that it was poisoning my blood, so I've been here since Saturday as they figure out what to do. I'll likely be on a pretty strict food regiment for a while to heal the damage, which means no more udon :-/ And I'm probably going to be in and out of doctors and things for quite a while. Litte free time. I'm very sorry, this was not part of the plan. I'm not sure I can give a relationship the attention it deserves. I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to ghost you. I just haven't had my phone. I should recover, but it'll be gradual and take a while. Luckily I'm young and pretty healthy, so my liver should be fine and don't need a transplant as long as I eat clean for a while. So anyway, that's what's up with me. There's no Bitmoji for that, unfortunately. :-(“

I told him that I appreciated his openness with me and that I could absolutely be a friendly support since he was new to nyc (all family was 1k miles away) and I’ve lived here forever… but he kindly rejected the offer.

I left it alone for a few weeks and then made the mistake of calling him while a little bit too something on my birthday. Apparently he wasn’t at home and didn’t recognize my number because he had attempted suicide again the week before, erasing all contacts from his phone. I apologized and gave him well wishes and all that, offering once again to be supportive but rejected (again, quite kindly).

A couple years passed and I thought I’d seen him a couple times when in that neighborhood, and reached out via text just in case (expecting - and ending up with - nothing in return).

I give all of this context and story to say basically that I wonder if this is normal, if there was a better response I could have given to begin with (repeated outreach aside)... or was it doomed to fail from the start? is the push away and rejection of support normal?

I know that what he and I shared for a week straight was most likely a more manic time for him (he claims he was on his medication the whole time) but even years later I’m still sort of trying to figure out what exactly happened.

I’d appreciate any advice, even if it’s to tell me that I reacted incredibly poorly. Thank you in advance!

TLDR: had an amazing week with someone years ago who revealed to me he was bipolar and then basically disappeared. How normal is this?