3 Women on the Reality of Dating With Ulcerative Colitis

Dating for anyone can be rough, but add in an inflammatory bowel disease like ulcerative colitis (UC) and things can get even tougher. With symptoms like urgently needing to have a bowel movement and diarrhea, UC can cause first dates to have some pretty awkward conversations and intimate moments to get suddenly paused. But it’s not all bad! As these three women show, talking openly about your chronic condition can help you weed out the losers pretty fast—and find some real keepers.

“I use comedy a lot.”Rosie Turner’s main job involves humor—she’s a content creator and comedian based in London—so it’s no surprise she has a light-hearted way of telling potential partners about her UC. “I like to get into it right out the door because I don’t drink on the first date; alcohol is a massive trigger for me,” she says. “So I’ll just say, ‘I have a bowel disease, and I’m not having a good time with it at the moment.’ I’m a very honest person.”

It may seem abrupt, but she tends to get a pretty good reaction from people she’s seeing—something she credits to only dating women. “A lot of the time, they have their own gut issues, so we end up having long conversations about what we can and can’t eat within the first half hour,” she says. “Women are very receptive to these kinds of conversations.”

And to avoid future issues, like when someone she’s dating is picking a restaurant or cooking her a meal, she sends a note from her phone literally called “Bad Food List” that spells out the things she needs to avoid—things like strawberries, garlic, onion, chili sauce, and melon. “People are always like, ‘Why would we choose to cook your main meal with a raw melon?” she says. “I say, ‘I don’t know, but you need to know!’”

That honesty doesn’t mean Turner hasn’t had her share of embarrassing moments. “I remember I was dating this girl and I didn’t know at that point what foods I could and couldn’t tolerate. I was on the Tube with her playing it chill and was suddenly like, ‘I’m going to throw up and poop myself,’” she says. “I didn’t know what to do, so I ran out of the Tube and left her! I never saw her again!”

“I turned into someone different after my diagnosis.”When Catriona Mill’s long-term relationship ended after 10 years, she could pinpoint the exact moment things started to go bad: when she was diagnosed with UC five years prior. “I completely changed over the course of being diagnosed with a chronic condition,” says the mother of two, who lives in Scotland. “I wasn’t able to be as fun and carefree as I once was, and I was irritable, always exhausted, dealing with persistent pain, and anxious about what would happen next.”

It wasn’t that her partner didn’t support her. “He handled it well, but it was an unfair weight to ask for him to carry,” she says. “Having UC is like having a full-time job that nobody else can work and you can’t quit it. He coped well, but it was a difficult situation.” Making things tougher was that their communication started to break down. “I didn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with anyone else—I became very egocentric, and my world got so small,” she says. “My partner didn’t want to come to me with what was going on in his life because he didn’t want to make my stress—and, therefore, my symptoms—worse.”

On top of that, their sex life began to change. “While our intimacy remained strong, I found that chronic illness affected my ability to fully experience pleasure, including reaching orgasm,” Mill says. “There’s the emotional stress of living with the disease and also the biological impact. If you’re worried about releasing a bowel movement, you can’t relax enough to actually have the orgasm.” While they both tried to keep the relationship going, four years after her diagnosis, they split up.

It’s now been about a year since the breakup and Mill is starting to think about dating again. “I don’t want to be alone forever,” she says. “At some point, I’m going to have to open myself up to the possibility of finding love again.” These days, she’s definitely feeling hopeful for the future. “I’ve realized that there might be moments in my life where I may not be able to have pleasure or joy,” she says. “But I also know that those things will return.”

“I realized I didn’t need to feel shame about it.”OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Ashley Hurst, a registered dietitian nutritionist just outside of Houston, is now engaged to be married to a guy named Christopher, but their relationship wasn’t always so rosy—something she partly blames on her UC. “I was 24 when I was diagnosed and was dating Christopher at that time,” she says. “And he was not very supportive—it was like he didn’t understand what was going on or thought I was making it up. I looked fine, but I was in incredible amounts of pain and he didn’t get it at all.” It ultimately became part of the reason the two broke up for a year and a half.

“I started dating other people and realized how hard it is to date with UC,” she says. “At first, I didn’t want to share my UC diagnosis with anybody, but I realized I needed to be honest, to be my authentic self.” The most common time she’d bring it up with someone was when they were deciding where to go out to eat. “I can’t just go anywhere because I know how bad I’d feel and didn’t want to derail the date,” she says.

Because she was in her 20s at the time, Hurst felt like the guys she told weren’t that interested in dating someone with a chronic illness; they just wanted an uncomplicated healthy person. “I told one guy and it totally changed the dynamic,” she says. “We’d been seeing each other every day and, after two weeks, I mentioned that I had UC. I could sense the distance and he completely stopped communicating with me. It left a mark, and I wondered if I should not be telling people.”

Her mindset changed when her cousin reached out to her around that time to say he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a different inflammatory bowel disease. “He was so comfortable sharing it and I realized my diagnosis could be a point of connection instead of something to feel shame about,” she says. Not long after that realization, Hurst reconnected with Christopher, who had developed a different attitude about her disease as well. “It took us going to therapy, him getting educated on the disease, and me learning how to articulate my needs to others, but he now understands what I’m going through and is the most supportive partner,” she says. And he shows that through his actions. “He’s completely adapted to my way of eating, and when I’m down, he lets me rest and takes care of me,” she says. “He knows now that if I’m in a flare-up or struggling, just to hold me and let me cry it out, that he can’t change it.”

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