Sharing advice on how to seek, manage, and maintain a relationship that includes CGL identities.
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#28
Quite honestly, I feel it's most appropriate to disclose health conditions as soon as you know you have them, or if you're just meeting someone, fairly soon into a friendship or relationship. Within I'd say the first six "dates", if you will.

I have seen a lot of friends in my online communities struggle with this, and the best option, across the board, seems to be to let partners know about health conditions, physical and mental, as soon as possible, right up there with Negotiations in importance. It's easy to tell yourself, 'I have this under control, I don't need to burden my Little/partner with this', but even for the more relatively "easily managed" issues like ADHD, it can interfere in unexpected ways. And I can't speak for any other littles, I have one in my life and a Queer Platonic Partner who isn't comfortable exploring the idea yet (but does have tendencies), but I've always been honest about what conditions I have when I realized I might have them. If I didn't, I know my puppy (my little) would be upset, even in his little state, and wonder if I didn't trust him. He already can have trouble regressing- if he thought I was withholding health conditions, his own issues would insist it was because I didn't think he was big or grown-up enough to be made aware of what's going on with his Daddy.

Constant open and honest communication is the only way a relationship as deeply intimate and vulnerable for both sides as CG/l is to thrive and grow, and sometimes scary medical stuff is part of that communication.

It also helps when I gently remind my puppy to speak up "because Daddy's ears are stupid" (my partial hearing loss is being particularly troublesome) or ask him what I was doing because "Daddy forgot" (my ADHD deleting things on my task list). Sometimes this even turns into a fun game, like my little one says I was totally doing something that is definitely not what I was doing and it turns into a cute guessing game, or I tell him what absolutely ridiculous thing I thought I heard and he giggles at me for my ears "misbehaving". If he didn't have the background knowledge of my conditions, these interactions wouldn't go so well.

So in summary: Tell every partner, including Little partners, right away, in whatever language they'll understand best.

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