When I was 22, I found out my boyfriend had schizophrenia and it changed my life

We met at a game of “Mafia” and the next day we went out together. He was funny and quite smart. He had graduated from the best math school in town, despite failing to finish college. At the age of 24 he was studying and giving private mathematics lessons. It was a beautiful relationship, full of love and understanding and romance, almost like a fairy tale. We spent every day together for 8 months. And only later did I find out that he was schizophrenic.

My name is Polli Holli, and I recently started telling how I got out of a difficult relationship with a person who had a mental disorder. Today I am ready to tell my story to the readers of awesome.club🇧🇷

The first sign I got was when my mom invited me to take a trip and spend time with our family. I really needed to get some rest after graduation. He, however, begged me not to go on saying that he had no idea how he would live without me for 10 days.

But I ended up going to Cyprus anyway. And since then, he’s been acting strangely: writing a million meaningless messages and calling me 100 times a day. Every day he would talk about a new business idea and about certain partners, make strange posts on social media and send pictures of him walking down the street at 4 am.

After that, he disappeared for almost a day. I was told that he had lost his cell phone, and that he was at the doctor’s. That same night, he called me from another number, spoke truncated, and reacted very slowly. His mother said: “Honey, we gave him a pill as he hasn’t been able to sleep for a few days straight. It’s going to be okay, rest and don’t worry about a thing!”

He even said he wanted to diversify our relationship and decided to play cat and mouse with me, so he threw his iPhone in the trash.

It played. The telephone. In the trash.

The next day, he again showed no sign of life, and I decided to call his mother. She tried to avoid the conversation, but finally confessed. She told me that her son suffered from schizophrenia and that was another one of her crises.

I called a fellow psychotherapist via Skype and tried to explain the situation, between many hiccups. I don’t know how, but she managed to calm me down and reassure me that everything would be okay.

Our mutual friends started writing me, with a list of questions. I then discovered that all of them knew about the disease except me.

His best friend told me that he had bought a ring and was going to ask me to marry him. This news scared me a lot, and for a second I was glad he was in the hospital and not picking me up at the airport.

I came back after 4 days, which is when I got even worse. I lost 5 kg and was shaking constantly. After a while, I went to his mother’s house and we talked for over 3 hours.

She told me that my boyfriend was a normal, healthy child. Also very smart and talented. He was the best student and won several international competitions. Very nice and relaxed, full of friends and hobbies. After school he entered university with ease and moved to Moscow.

According to his mother, there he met a man, founder of a progressive school of thought. And with this new friendship things got worse.

He started skipping classes and got a job as a yoga teacher. He made really weird posts and didn’t sleep for days. And so he dropped out of college and went back to his hometown.

He was faced with the misunderstanding of parents and friends and was losing his mind even more. That year the war with Ukraine began, and he went to the city of Donbass to serve as a volunteer. A man who could not harm an animal went to kill people. This made it clear to the parents that the situation was worse than imagined.

He was caught mid-trip on the train and taken to a psychiatric hospital. Since then, he has crisis every year.

It is worth mentioning that in the first 2 weeks of meetings, I asked him to honestly tell me if he had any health problems. He said he suffered from asthma as a child. And about progressive schizophrenia I haven’t heard a word.

I don’t know where I was thinking back then, but I thought like this:

Conclusion: I will stay with him and find a way to help him!

I read forums where women wrote about the same issues, how they dealt with adversity and that all was well. This gave me hope that everything would return to normal.

I couldn’t quite believe the diagnosis, I thought it was all a big stupid joke that someone had made up. “But it was a beautiful relationship, almost like a fairy tale!” I would cry to the therapist. “That’s what the fairy tale is all about, my dear, what isn’t real,” the doctor replied, and so she prescribed me antidepressants.

At that point, my boyfriend and I weren’t talking much. His mother went to the hospital twice a week so we had the opportunity to talk on the phone. He cried and always said how much he loved me.

I didn’t recognize him after I was discharged. Thin, with a downcast look, he cried all the time and said he didn’t want to live anymore. His mother said it was temporary and that soon everything would be like before. She bought a one-bedroom apartment downtown especially for us and furnished it all.

A few weeks later, he improved a lot: he started going to university again, he went out with friends. One day he invited me to go to a restaurant. There he knelt down and took out a box with a ring. Looking into his pitying and loving eyes, I was afraid that if he refused, it would cause another crisis, and I agreed to marry him. At 22, becoming the wife of a man with schizophrenia, why not?

All our acquaintances congratulated us, the ring was already on the finger, but internally I was scared and uncomfortable.

I played the role of bride for 3 days, when there was a new crisis. He stopped sleeping and dramatically increased his social media activity. He began to be plagued again by obsessive and compulsive ideas.

I started to rethink the engagement ring, slowly realizing that my future husband was sick and there was nothing I could do to cure him.

During this new crisis, he thought he was an important businessman and he showed his fist to anyone who disagreed. He yelled at people who passed on the street and bullied beggars. His hand itched to fight someone and prove his superiority.

This repeated crisis occurred 2 weeks after treatment at the clinic, and his family members decided not to send him back to the hospital, but to try to help him at home with sporadic visits to the doctor. The treatment seemed to be working, he calmed down and seemed to be getting back to normal.

But what changed was my relationship. He was no longer my boyfriend at that point. He was simply a sick boy who needed care and attention.

He started working again, persuading me to move to a new apartment and start a family. We agreed that for the time being we would live together from Thursday to Sunday. I felt more comfortable with him being under his mother’s supervision for at least half the week.

I imposed one condition: sleep early. Only that. I didn’t need anything more than knowing he was sleeping well, as that is the foundation of health. The crisis began if he failed to sleep even a night. But even so, he decided to go out with friends to have fun at night and ignored my request.

We had our first argument in a year. He would cry for just about anything, and I stopped respecting him, dreaming that this would all be over soon. Making that decision, however, was very difficult. My life has turned into a big mess.

One situation was the trigger for me. He went out to play cards with his friends and hung up the phone. I tried to contact him until 1 am, and then I gave up. In response to this indifference to me, he would say: “Oh, you see! You’re getting used to it and you’re not bothering me so much!” At this point, I realized that he was trying to “train” me on how to be a better wife, and that made me start to hate him.

I already knew I was going to break up with him. But your mother was so happy that I was still part of the family that she went out of her way to please me. He called to visit, furnished our apartment, called to talk. I was starting to feel guilty.

The New Year was coming and we had already decided that we would spend it with my family.

We had an argument in the morning, went to his mother’s house, had a few glasses of wine, and headed over to my family’s house. He was doing quite annoyed, however, when we arrived at my family’s house, we talked and made up. He said crying that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be with me.

Instead of clapping and agreeing with him, I asked him to postpone the conversation until the next day so as not to spoil the moment of celebration. During the whole party he was silent and with a lost look. Right after the fireworks celebration, he decided to go to sleep and I agreed.

I sat at the table and ate the grapes as if everything was fine. I looked at my mother and saw her sad, disappointed look. And I couldn’t take it. I cried for about 30 minutes from the mental fatigue, shame and resentment of finding myself in this situation.

On the first of January, he didn’t want to break up with me anymore. This news didn’t make me happy, I knew I couldn’t go on like this. We had a long conversation with many tears, but we decided to part ways.

It felt like I could finally breathe a sigh of relief and live a happy life, but I didn’t.

A week after the breakup, he called me at 5am Saturday morning. He said he wanted to return the phone, which I gave him after he threw his own away. I asked why the hell he was up at this hour and if he’d already taken his insomnia pills. “Well, I couldn’t sleep and I drank water,” he said. The man drank water instead of pills… ok.

“Do you really think I’m going to dump you? You are my bride. You’re not going anywhere anymore,” those words sounded cold and like an order. At that moment I started to get really scared.

He started sending me a lot of messages. He said that he would give me a son named “Sasha” (typical Russian name) and that we would live happily ever after. He started calling from other strange numbers, asking other people to send me their messages.

A friend, to whom I wrote huge messages about how scared I was of him and how I couldn’t take it anymore, called me and said that she had advised him to wait for me at work with flowers! He…