Practical Tips for Dating Someone with Depression

What to talk about, what activities to do and how to improve the relationship

Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash

When starting dating someone, we are in the process of getting to know the other person. We don’t find out everything about the other person on the first date or even first few dates. Also there is the saying “Love is blind”, which means “loving someone makes you unable to see their faults”. Sometimes depression is not there from the beginning of a new relationship, but may start only during the process of dating due to some other life events. The same way as the common cold is very common, depression is also very common in today’s society and it has a rising tendency, which means that chances are getting higher that more and more people find themselves dating someone who has some form and severity of depression. Talking about depression is often avoided and suppressed. People consider mental and emotional suffering as normal, as part of life, and don’t want to look weak, or bother others with it. There are also cases where both people in the relationship have depression and they are both doing their best to hide it from each other. They may even be already taking an antidepressant and hiding it in different places in their shared accommodation.

Whatever your situation is or turns out to be, here are some tips for dating someone with depression.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Helpful questions you can ask yourself:

• What can I learn from this situation? What is the benefit of it?
• What would I like and appreciate somebody else doing for me if I would be the other person?
• How can we make the current activity to be even more fun/enjoyable?

Phrases to Avoid

Be aware of, that there are certain phrases, which most depressed people find unhelpful, even offending.

There are certain “kryptonite” phrases — it is better to avoid saying them:

• Get over it
• Stop pretending
• Don’t be so lazy / you are just lazy
• Cheer up, be more cheerful

There are types of relationships, when if said in a funny way (makes the other person laugh), or when said with truly playful (loving, kind) intonations, it is not making things worse. So it is not just about what you say, buy how you say it makes a huge difference.

Encouraging, Supportive, Positive Phrases

Phrases, which you can say, which are not offensive:

• I am here for you, if you want to talk about anything, you can always reach out to me
• Often give the other person different types of compliments, which make sense, keep giving them positive input in the form of words, what do you like about them the most? Be the one pointing out positive things in life one can be grateful for them.

What to Talk About

Topics you can talk about:

• Brainstorming and discussing what are the things you always wanted to do in life, but didn’t do yet?
• Ask: Is there anything bad in your life that you experienced, that many people don’t know about and you haven’t told it to anyone yet? What troubles you the most? Would you like to share it with me? I can start first. By talking about old memories and situations with a negative emotional impact, a sense of release and a feeling of lightness often occurs and this may improve the mental state of the other person not just temporarily, but even with more lasting effects.
• Ask yourself / each other: What do you want out of your life? What would you be proud of and happy about to have done and accomplished in your life? What is the minimum type of lifestyle and way of living that at the end of your life you would say: “I am satisfied with the way I lived”?
• Ask: What topics interest and fascinate you the most in life? And keep asking related questions on that topic out of curiosity.
• Brainstorming and discussing hidden potentials — what do you both think are the other person’s strengths and how can they be utilized more?
• Ask: If you could learn anything, what new skill or skills would you like to become really good at?
• Discuss “motivation”. Find out what are the best ways to feel more motivated. Whether it is certain visual images, a video with a story in it, a motto, thinking about doing something for someone else, reading about motivational real life stories. And once you know it, find it, prepare it, make sure to use it. Some people can get motivated if they see how people with even worse life conditions managed to turn it around and achieved their goals.
• Imagine you have been granted superpowers for the rest of the day: what would you truly love doing if you could do anything? Come up with several answers and discuss.

What Activities to Consider

With activities the goal is to:

1. Get the body more active, animated, get the energy moving
2. Get the mind busy with having to use it to focus on something concrete, which is necessary to be able to do the task/activity

Suggestions for activities to consider:

• Trampolining (a fun sport/workout/activity to jump on a trampoline)
• Going hiking in nature
• Spending time with adorable friendly playful animals
• Going to an amusement park
• Giving each other massages (you can learn some techniques for free for example from youtube and try them out together)
• Finding and watching something, which is funny for both of you
• Instead of silence in the background listening to some uplifting music, which lifts the mood
• Doing funny dance moves and the other person has to repeat (practice makes perfect, every expert was once a beginner, don’t take life too seriously, everybody dies one day so it would make sense that it is O.K. to enjoy life in between and cross mental mind-created comfort zones)
• Playing the game called “Activity” together: one player has to act (pantomime) or to describe or to paint a phrase given on a card and the other has to find out what that should be
• Signing up together to go to a workshop/seminar to learn some complementary alternative healing modality such as: sound healing, reiki, something you will be able to practice together and also on your own and keep receiving the benefits of it
• Going together to a holotropic breathwork session
• Going to a professional fasting retreat together

When you make short videos with your smartphone, where the behavior of the depressed person can be seen — when you watch it together, the other person suddenly sees that situation and herself/himself from a different point of view and this can be insightful to realize something on a deeper level, by observing the behavior in the video. This can help shift something and thus be helpful.

What are Good Gifts

Suitable gift ideas:

• Books
• Wellness related activities
• Adventure experiences (instead of material things collect good memories and new experiences)
• The gift of presence — spending time with another person and expressing acts of kindness and love

How to Improve the Relationship

When talking about dating, usually for most people the first related word that comes to one’s mind is love. Feeling love, giving and receiving love. To understand the main forms of love and making use of them, finding out what type of person you and your partner are, this can help greatly to increase the amount and intensity of love between each other and in the relationship. You can find out more about such love related topics by reading the book “The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman”. The power of love can heal and move mountains. Learn to give and receive the type of love, which is most suitable for you and your partner — reading the mentioned book helps.

There is something, that seems to work really well for many romantic life partnerships independent of whether there is depression involved or not. It is an unofficial written agreement, a “relationship contract”. A set of rules and values and personal needs both agree to honor in their relationship. Having clarity about them. It creates more transparency and can help to resolve potential future conflicts much quicker with less drama.

In general a good approach for dealing with depression is to do your best to find out the root causes of it for that person, and once you know the root most significant causes then get suitable recommendations how to release and transform, treat and heal them. Make the effort to find out the root causes. Here are a few questions, which may help:

• When did it start?
• What contributed and is still contributing to creating certain unpleasant feelings and disempowering beliefs?
• What do you often fear?
• What do you often worry about?
• What are you most unhappy about and dissatisfied with and why? What would have to change to not be unhappy and dissatisfied anymore?

If we just ignore something related to depression, we just postpone it and it may keep coming back even stronger in situations, which trigger it. So ignoring and avoiding is not recommended. Often family and friends come to their limits in how they can help, and that’s when qualified professional help from experts, who are trained and have experience with certain psyche and health related topics can help. So the way to help is to help finding, suggesting, recommending such people, because people who are depressed are often not that good in finding such people/experts themselves.