BPDFamily.com

My story is a lot like other stories on here, but we are all facing an important journey.

I was engaged to someone who was undiagnosed BPD. It was a relatively short long-term relationship, about 9 months total. I met her on match.com after she moved from another state and was very recently divorced with a small baby girl. All should have been red flags, but oh well, who doesn't want to be wildly in love? Sometimes I look back and read emails, etc., just to remind myself that it really did happen. Odd, is just about the best way I can describe it now. It blows my mind how things seemed so great in the beginning, at times, and then it blew up completely just as quickly as it started. It does fit the pattern of her relationships up to ours anyway. We met for our first date and passion and romance heated up quickly, and she seemed to be so excited to wedding plan, look at houses, she wanted to get a dog, have a baby of mine, etc. It seemed like a dream come true (if you didn't know that things that are too good probably are for a reason). I still get those wow feelings when I think about how I felt at the time. We did have some heated discussions that I couldn't figure out at all, but overall things seemed to be humming along.

How are things different with me now? What would I have done differently?

Now I'm in much better physical health. I do have a chronic illness which can be moderate to really hard to manage depending on work/life stress. When I met her my health wasn't as good, so low-hanging fruit was more attractive than it would be now.

I learned a lot about red flags and what I'm really looking for. The last girlfriend I had before I proposed to my wife seemed a lot more like my exfiance. When she told me she had a history of anxiety and had been hospitalized I didn't judge but I moved slower emotionally. Eventually we mutually ended things because I didn't seem quite religious enough for her... .even though she liked kissing and initiated the first kiss. Now I'm a happy newlywed with someone I've spend a lot of time and I've seen how kind and gentle she really is, and very consistently. I've seen her upset, and there's nothing wrong with being upset, but we are able to communicate and resolve things and get back into harmony with each other. Her level of upset is more similar to mine in that we don't like to get too worked up... .though it can happen.

What would I do differently now if I saw my exfiance's profile online?

For one thing, I probably wouldn't respond. At the time I just felt like taking a risk. I saw her pictures and remember thinking that she seemed sad and just needed some TLC. I saw that she had a 1-year old daughter and that she was divorced. That should have been like a party of red flags!

If I did respond, I would have moved much slower physically. I grew up conservative and I was actually saving myself for my wife to be. But my exfiance seemed to base her attractiveness on others' sexual desire for her. I gave in to the pressure. Maybe not too surprisingly a lot of the episodes/tantrums revolved around whether or not she was getting what she wanted sexually, or not. My feelings or desires didn't seem to matter. If I wanted it and she didn't, then I was at fault. If she did, and I didn't, then I was at fault. And it was a major upset either way.

I would have pushed for counseling right off the bat given how quickly she was just divorced and ready to get married again. My guess is that she would have gotten tired of me, or accused me of not loving her, or would have found another lover sooner rather than later if I didn't give in physically and/or pushed for counseling. At the time I was trying to be accomodating to her, instead of taking care of myself.

I do think a lot my co-dependency, enmeshment issues were due to my parents' divorce, and a difficult relationship with my mother. I can see now how it's made me a little fearful even of close friendships with certain personalities. I've learned a lot and pushed myself to grow by hosting parties, joining groups from meetup.com, planning events, and having stronger boundaries with my time, etc.

I don't like to forget about the relationship completely. It reminds me to be a lot more careful in the future. It also reminds me of the progress I've made. I'm not as angry with my exfiance. I realize now that she feels things a lot differently than I do and that most people do. It's something she will probably always struggle with. I also know that we could not have a healthy relationship so the best thing to do is move on to healthier relationships and hope someday she finds herself in a better place.

It sounds like you have made some excellent progress.  Certainly something to be proud of.   |iiii


If you feel comfortable, can you go into more detail with regard to this?  I think it might help some members and I am curious as well.

Hi C,

I don't mind at all. It's a long story but may be very insightful. My relationship with my ex-fiance was mostly good except for a few tantrums that were hard to figure out. Just a few days after our wedding shower she went out with a male co-worker to "hang out". Our relationship went downhill after that and ended abruptly. It was the destructive break-up that caused me to do all kinds of soul-searching. Was it really love? What is love? What happened? How can I keep it from happening again, or phrased another way, What can I learn? It was a rough few years as I was pretty much at least mildly sad all the time. But I persisted in finding myself again and now I'm recently married to a woman who is looking for a strong marriage.

I started to go see a therapist shortly after it ended. For a long time after the b/u my dreams seemed to go back to when I was a teenager, high school, college. Several things popped up in about my mother in our conversations. For one thing, I still remember that she stopped letting me call her "mommy" when I was probably 3 years old. That hurt my feelings then. It's odd I still remember it 30 something years later. When I was in elementary school my mother would hide my readers (books we had to read for school). This is bizarre... .what mother want teachers to keep from finding out that her child is smart? Also, my fourth grade teacher had a conversation with her telling her I could go to a gifted school, but my mother always said she doesn't believe in that kind of thing. It just seems strange. I really liked playing basketball, too, but when I was old enough to play in high school I thought I would have been too much of a burden on my mother. She was a single mom at the time working to support my brother and I. What kind of kid doesn't think of themselves first? Why didn't I?

This is the first time I recognized that I didn't have such a good relationship with my mother. She often played favorites to my little brother even though I was nice kid and smart and teachers always liked me. So I think this is one reason why I was fearful of intimacy/dating in general. I was afraid I would be mistreated. My mother was also temperamental, and had a chronic illness, too. So this is the kind of woman I was most attracted to. My ex fiance was similar to my mother in a lot of ways. She was sickly even though she didn't have a diagnosed illness. She was also a single mom. I felt like I knew my mother's story and how she was disappointed by my father, too. So I wanted to be the hero. Unfortunately, I didn't really know my mother's true story. I've found that my father is actually a very nice person and he has always been there to help me out. My mother led me and my brother to believe otherwise. Now I see that it was probably due to her insecurity or her temper. My father was probably doing the best he could in a difficult marriage. If my relationship hadn't imploded when it did then I probably would have found myself in the same boat as my father.

Also, it seems like "rescuing" runs in my family. My grandparents lived next door to us and they did everything they possibly could for my mother. My mother rarely cooked or cleaned house. The house was always somewhat messy, but even worse so after my grandparents passed away. Her apartment, though it was only a one bedroom, was even worse. My brother would have to help her clean before we went over there for the holidays. My father also somewhat rescued my mom when they first met. Someone was bothering her at a basketball game, so he offered to sit with her. Soon they were dating and married after she graduated from high school.

"Rescuing" is almost something I was trained to do. To this day my father is always willing to help out even if it's really inconvenient for him. Several relatives' cars are in his backyard needing work even though my dad has plenty of projects of his own to work on. He has driven several hours to rescue one of my cars at 3am, and he is always willing to help me out with my cars even though I'm several hours away from my hometown.

In a nutshell, I was very hungry for love when I met my ex-fiance. I was hooked on the sex, passion, and romance despite red flags. Who doesn't want to fall in love? I hadn't had successful relationships up to this point because I was afraid of intimacy. I would talk myself out of seeing someone after 2-3 dates. I was a serial dater and only had one relationship over 4 months besides my ex-fiance. I was comfortable with the sickly, sad, temperamental woman similar to my mother, who was terrible for me and long-term relationships... .really any relationship if you pay attention to the red flags. My self-esteem had been wounded for a long time and I had a fear of intimacy that I didn't know about. So the woman who fell so quickly in love with me was so attractive!

I wouldn't say I'm happy at all that it happened, but it caused me to look at myself a lot closer. Now I can change my story and hopefully offer my future family and warm, loving home environment. And maybe that's worth it. The rescuing is almost like a "generational" sin for my part of the family. I didn't recognize it before and I can see how difficult it can be for anyone, pwBPDs included, to break free and stretch for growth.

Thanks for sharing that FMA.  It was very insightful.  You have done a great job in recognizing your own issues and how it has impacted relationships throughout your life.  It takes a lot of strength and will power to look deep enough into ourselves to see this and make sustainable changes for the better.   You seem to have found an inner peace with yourself and that will carry over to your current relationship.   Great work!