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What I find interesting is that her 'friends' that she claimed were so close to her have not reached out to me since our relationship is over. Now her friends saw how much I did for her and her boys and quite a few of them actually loved me... as a friend. Now I don't hear from any of them. I reached out to one of her 'dear friends' and she told me that she wasn't too close to my ex and didn't really know her too well. I always questioned my ex and how she perceived her friends. She called them dear, close, etc... yet I hardly saw them around.

Can anyone expand on this.? It seems her friends were fantasy or at the very least a distorted image in her mind.

From my understanding that is pretty normal for someone with BPD traits. They can't keep lasting friendships, and they exaggerate (or worse) the ones they have.

My exGF was extremely beautiful with a very outgoing personality. She engaged people easily and I believed her when she said she had many very close friends, but in the almost 4 years I knew her she went to or was visited by people just a handful of times.

Worse, I found out midway in our relationship that a half dozen of these friends were imaginary. I mean come on, what normal adult has imaginary friends?(she is 33) These friends not only posted on her Facebook, she talked of going places with them. I remember right after I met her she had a birthday. These "friends" were coming into town to take her to the city for a big part they were throwing for her. But I got texts that their car broke down and they couldn't come get her and she was sad and home alone. Wanted me to come rescue her.

Her ex boyfriend was part of this friend group and they all went skiing together, stayed in cabins at hot springs together etc. It wasn't until much later that I realized the only real person in the group was her ex boyfriend  

She painted these imaginary people so real. She went to coffee with them, got escorted to her brothers wedding with one ( a really nice GQ doctor, I  saw "his" facebook profile)  One of them was a model and she fixed up a guy friend (whose wife had just left him)  to go on a date with him!  But the model never showed. Another time a homely girl from her work got left by her husband. My ex told me all about the date she fixed her up with her doctor friend and what a great time they had. That made the homely girls husband jealous so he took her back! My exGF saved the day again! :)

When I found out the truth (dont snoop in Facebook unless you are prepared to find out the worst) I worried that she had multiple personalities. I talked to her therapist mother who knew all about the friends, just not that they weren't real. I finally confronted my exGF about it after we had broken up and had gone 3 months NC. She was wanting to recycle, I was wanting to get things out in the open. I even brought up her Bpd (something her therapist mother had clued me into the year before) Needless to say she got angry and threw me out. Not willing to talk about it.  And dumb a#s me still got back together with her a few weeks later. I am amazed at what I was willing to look past.

Sorry, not trying to hijack thread.

Back to topic; um yes, their friends can be fanciful fantasies of a life they wish they could have.

Mine has some friends, but not how I would define them. One woman, one of her best friends from high school, lived two miles from us. She visited all of two times in three years, other than the common parties we saw her at. Early in our r/s, after our one and only recycle, that woman messaged me, "thanks for giving me my friend back." I've known my friends fir over half my life. If we lived close, we would be hanging out all of the time (because we did teens through 20s until careers and family seperated us geographically). My Ex used to criticize me when I would talk to a few of them for 40 mins on the phone sometimes, since I only saw them about once a month or less. Called me a social butterfly. So disrespectful and invalidating.

She engaged more with the high school friend during the time she was deciding to leave me. Saw and talked to her more. That's what friends are for? She was fulfilling a need. She has a few FB friends also from work. No one close. A few friends from the old days when they all worked for the same company, but they are states away. They talk, maybe visit once a year. Decent people, but they really don't know her. Even a few of my work friends whom I've known 20 years across 3 companies (small industry), I would posit know me better than hers do. She is co dependently enmeshed with her family, but isn't emotionally close to any of her siblings, and is even estranged in a way from her older likely uBPD brother, though she says they were inseperable when they were little.

My conclusion about my uBPDx I that her only close friend is her current love object attachment. I know her history, and was her longest and most stable r/s by far. She never really knew me though (my T pointed this out today, and he is right). So is it really any surprise that someone with an attachment disorder and an unstable sense of self typically wouldn't have friends as much as a non would define them? Friendship implies intimacy, reciprocity, empathy, and healthy boundaries, all of which a pwBPD has issues with.

Cron, years before I was involved romantically with my ex -- she was married to a friend of mine -- and our r/s was platonic, she would often have conversations with me about her 'friends' (she was trying to set me up with many of them at the time).   Her H was wealthy, so ex did not have to work and they had a nanny for their kids, at the time S3 and D4, so ex spent most of her nights partying with these friends pretty regularly for many years.  Back then common things I would hear from her about them were:

"They're all whores." (Many of them seem to be involved in extramarital affairs and promiscuous behavior but "whores" was a general descriptive for all of them).

When I would ask why she calls them her friends if she doesn't like or respect them she would say "I don't care about them, I just party and hang out with them and they like me because I pay for everything."  She said this often, especially after they were split into "bad objects".

"I don't trust women, they're all b___es." (She would get angry when I wouldn't agree with her and call me naive).

Her three closest 'friends' from her fairly affluent bedroom community were:

A divorced, blackout alcoholic (and police officer) and mother of two young kids who lived two doors down from her and was her primary party buddy.   Though she called this her best friend she would regularly describe her as a whore who would f*uck anything and who constantly cheated on her current BF.

A married blackout drunk with two young kids (their daughters are the same age and attend school together).  She regularly referred to this friend as "dumbass" and would tell me that she was always flaky and unreliable but that she was okay with it.

Another married neighbor with 3 daughters (one her daughter's age) who she considers her best fallback friend of all of them and who was also someone who she partied with for quite some years.

I've met all of them and when they're sober they're fairly decent people but I noticed they all held each other to zero accountability for nearly everything.  Plans would get cancelled with no notice, boundaries would routinely be crossed or violated (passing out in exGF's house, showing up late at night banging on her and her H's door when the kids were sleeping,  showing up drunk and unannounced at ex's house to get drunk with ex with the kids home, spouses making inappropriate passes), words would regularly be broken.  But after the inevitable splitting with each of them they would all fall right back onto the triangle.  It was quite a crew, not a rational one among them.  In fact the rational ones were routinely weeded out or not admitted to her circle.

When our r/s started I brought up that perhaps these friends were not safe people for a 44-year-old mom to be "hanging out" with and especially not safe people for her children (D10, S9) to be regularly exposed to.  During our 14 months together she would distance herself from her old group of party friends (She would say "I'm not like that anymore" or "I'm more mature now" while she was with me) and replace them with newer friends who were equally boundary-free but just from different locales.  Invariably the pattern would be:  she'd meet someone new, claim she's met her "soul sister" and usually within a week or two 'something would happen' that would end the friendship and have that new friend devalued like yesterday's news.  She also knew that she couldn't split certain friends who she had to maintain contact or appearances with, and managed to ward them off if they started to suspect or discover my ex was "off".  She was very specialized with whom she sought to make attachments to.

But probably the main thing I noticed about her friend was that very few, if any, were what we would consider healthy, balanced adults with reasonably functional sets of boundaries.  Those who she grew close to were generally gossipy, malicious, foul-mouthed, immature, petty and vengeful and in hindsight I realize this was not by accident.  This was who my ex was when I first met her. 

In all, her friendships typically functioned solely on need -- either hers or theirs -- and did not seem to possess anything resembling mutual accountability.  Ironically her "best" friend and neighbor once described my ex as a butterfly that floats from pad to pad.  This was not just how she related to friends but most of the people in her life.   

    My uBPDxgf doesn't have anyone I would consider to be a friend in the true sense of the word. She has drinking buddies, drug buddies and fu<k buddies. The woman (I use the term loosely) she calls her "best" friend is a 24yo drink/drug buddy (xgf is 40). This "best" friend is of course constantly painted black, then white, then black, then white... .

    Ironically, this lack of true friends was part of the reason I hung around for as long as I did. I felt - and often said when friends of mine questioned why I put up with her 'sheet' - that she needed at least one person in her life who genuinely cared about her. Co-dependence 101, I guess.