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I recently found out that my uBPDx is somehow still seeing my replacement. I say "somehow" because due to his job he usually travels overseas for 3 month chunks at a time twice per year (cycles of 3 months home, 3 months away), and now it's been 5 months so he must have gone overseas and probably come back by now. I really thought that they would never last the first 3 months of him being away due to her abandonment issues. I mean, she acted like having to wait 5 days until the next weekend to see me was some kind of torture, and going on vacation and being away for 9 days was enough to cause her to tell me she felt that I was taking it as "a break from her" and withdraw from the relationship. I thought there would be 0% chance of her lasting 3 months away from her bf... .

Not going to lie, deep down I think that while I want her to be happy in the long run I kind of wanted for her current relationship to fall apart. I think part of it is validating that she's not capable of being in a healthy relationship and that her abandonment issues are such that being away from her bf for 3 months would be unbearable. But I guess maybe that's not the case? I can't even imagine the hell I would have gone through had I gone away for 3 months while we were dating. I fully would have expected for her to have broken up by text/email and be on to a new guy by the time I got back, haha.

Have any of you guys experienced being away from a BPDx for a significant amount of time, and if so, what happened during that time?

Yes I worked 6 weeks on 6 weeks off.

I think my ex was faithfull for 7 months. Then I was devalued and I now realise she was cheating on me while I was away. Her daughter even told me once that mummy has a new boyfriend. I didnt press it as I was so far in denial plus I was at the point of leaving. Didnt leave for another few months though.

she now has a new bf wh live away and only see's him at weekends. Rumour has it she is cheating on him.

My relationship with my BPDexwife started as long distance relationship.

It was actually probably the best part of our relationship.

Somehow, it was actually much easier to be far away than close together. But that was early in the relationship.

But then when we moved in together things started getting weird quick. And yes, as soon as i was gone for 2.5 days (friends bachelor party) she tells me "we never see each other anymore" (totally ridiculous)

Many times when we were together while i was still sane i though "God it would be so much easier if i worked 2-3 weeks out of town and then home for 2-3 days" I dont know if that would make it better but that's what i thought.

I don't even understand why a person who has a personality disorder that causes intense abandonment issues would even try to start a relationship with a person who needs to be away for so much time for work. Maybe they are just that un-self-aware?

The thing is, I think my ex was pretty self-aware, she just couldn't help herself. For instance, I found some old text messages she had sent me from when we first started dating. I was shocked by some of the things she said and took a screenshot on my phone, haha. To paraphrase, she told me that she had just broken up with her ex the same weekend we started talking (on an online dating site, so she was obviously looking to date again), and after talking for a while and planning to meet she said that we should probably start out as friends. She said that in the past she always jumped from relationship to relationship, usually with only days or weeks in between so that she wouldn't have to deal with the pain of rejection. She said that she started to figure out that that's not ok and made her interdependent, and she knew that if she wanted to be in a healthy relationship she needed to find herself again first and be on her own for a little while. Yet, flash forward 4 days later when we first meet and at the end of the date she's basically asking me to kiss her... .and I had to tell her that it felt like it was too soon after her breakup and just kissed her on the cheek instead. It just goes to show that she knows the things she's doing wrong but just can't help herself.

The same sort of thing happened one time where she broke up with me for a little over a week, told me she "needed time to be on her own and find herself" and then a week later we're back together and she's acting in love and like nothing happened. I just realized that she actually rebounded from me... .with me.

In the text messages I found it was weird how eloquently she was able to put it too, she knows EXACTLY what her problem is and how she mishandles the ending of relationships. Of course once our relationship ended she told me how she was going to take some time to be single. Then we met to talk about the breakup two weeks later since it had been initially done over text message, and she told me how she was back to online dating and had already met a few guys, one of which she ended up in a relationship with. I told her "I thought you wanted to be single for a while?" and she said that she's lonely because she lives alone and is now single, so she just wanted to meet some people and get out of the house and have things to do. It's this crazy cycle of realizing the problem and then lying to herself to avoid being lonely or feeling abandoned. Kind of makes it even more sad really.

So I think she has to also be aware of her abandonment issues. It kind of makes sense I guess, because she would stress in advance over knowing that we wouldn't be able to see each other for a period of time. I just don't know how she managed to deal with it with her new guy leaving for 3 months, it's really baffling. I'm going to assume she won't last many of those 6 months cycles though.

Hmm, that's interesting. When you say that it started as a long distance relationship, did you actually meet in person at all in the beginning, or did you meet and start the relationship entirely over phone calls, texting, etc? Maybe because the relationship started as a long distance relationship there was no sense of abandonment because you were never physically there in the first place. Then once you moved in together and were actually physically together for the majority of your free time it made it so even leaving for 2.5 days felt like a complete abandonment.

I know borderlines are all different to some extent but with my ex I can guarantee that if I had worked 2-3 weeks out of town and then been home for 2-3 days she would not have been able to handle that at all. I think with her current guy she at least knows she has him all to herself for an extended period of time before he goes back to work. God only knows what she does to fill the void for the 3 month stretches while he's away... .

My exgf is in a relationship with a girl that lives 400 miles away. She is a model and has lots of male orbiters but hasn't had a stable, close relationship for more than a year. Looks like deep intimacy is the biggest trigger.

Deep intimacy doesn't seem to be a trigger with my ex, or at least not to where she avoids it. She frequently gets deeply intimate with people, much too fast. That's not to say her relationships are ever really stable. We dated for 4 months and every two or three weeks she would either break up with me for a short period or talk about breaking up or how she wasn't feeling like things were working out. Then in between those periods she'd be talking about marriage, moving in together, etc... .I have no idea how someone can bounce back and forth between such extreme highs and lows so quickly.

The deep intimacy may have been a trigger but it didn't stop her from craving it and actually being deeply intimate. It's possible that once she gets deeply intimate her abandonment fears creep in and she sabotages things. It's the push-pull thing I guess. From what she has told me about her two relationships prior to me (3 years and 1.5 years) they weren't stable at all either, but it shows that she was able to have relationships for more than a year.

We knew each other and had mutual friends for 5 years before we dated long distance.

It is the intimacy that brought out more and more BPD behavior. And the more time we were married the deeper the downward spiral.

She is also ":)eeply intimate with people much too fast" Just like Alberto said. She's just like that, telling everyone all her "problems" with my family and everything. How everybody "treats her so bad" and has "mandatory dinners" when someone has a birthday. Totally nuts.