BPDFamily.com

I have spent many years trying to make a relationship work with my BPD partner. I love her very much. She has been very sensitive to all my feelings over the years and I always was taken by this in a good way because I wanted someone who was sensitive and seemed extremely caring, it allowed me to trust her. I never really researched BPD traits until she left the 3rd time with our daughter. I have read much since then trying to understand and  think it comes down to this; She did not understand that she needed to understand me as well as she needed to be understood by me. Men do not always understand things the way you do or feel the same way about things like priorities in your life and what is more important according to you. It can be because you are different and come from different backgrounds or because we are all a little ignorant as life is a slow education as we go through it learning everyday. I became complacent not because I was tired of her but because when many of us are happy we tend to go into relax mode. This does not mean that we are ready to look in different directions but that we have finally settled in the right place with the right person. She instead became alarmed by this and I believe that her nature of sensing or over sensing that something will always go wrong kicked in. As always she experienced this within herself with very little outward emotion allowing me to believe that it was an insignificant passing phase or mood. Meanwhile inside herself she was becoming explosive to the point of leaving without even telling me even though others were made aware of this. I catered to her, I moved her into my home, I started a family at her request which I never regretted, I was going to marry as she wished but I put off a date since I wanted to be sure she could live with me a few more years comfortably without leaving again. She left, after telling me a month earlier that this was the happiest time of her life, I believed her and part of that was because I knew I had taken her further than any man had been willing to go with her up to that time, despite the evident signs of depression at times and scars. In the end I realized that even if I had added marriage to the list of all the things I had already done and been villainized for, that she would have left again. She wanted marriage badly in the end but she never understood that a man in his right mind could never understand how a great love could want to marry someone she could leave instantly. I could never have left her to go as far as I did and was about to go further. I believe she cannot be in a lasting or fully trusting relationship, that BPD which she is diagnosed for is also about living in a world of doubt despite all her sincere attempts to overcome. Even today at 50 years of age she is still combing dating sites while the years pass in endless attempts to hook up with the wish to find true love, loyalty etc., things that she is incapable of providing or maintaining. She will never achieve "the glass is full" existence, non us will, but she will never see the good in the "glass being half full" preventing her from reaching a happy or content platform in her life. She has been alone for several years now and back to the life she had before we met. She claims to want a loyal, loving honest man but I don't think most men who use her will be sold on this and if she found another willing person like myself she could not hold on anyway despite the man willing to overlook all the visible signs. I fought for custody and through months of adjournments making the court community much money, it was evident that nothing including medical records would attain father custody despite my having done nothing wrong as a provider, responsible, always there to the limit that a man or a humane being can be.

You are right, she will never find the perfect man... and she will never accept a reasonably healthy man as a long term spouse and father... unless she diligently works with long term intensive therapy.  (Yeah, for most of us that's when science discovers that the moon is made of cheese after all.)  What is said to work best is Dialectical (DBT) or Cognitive (CBT) Behavioral Therapy.  The hitch is that many people with BPD are so intensely in Denial and Blame Shifting that they can't let that sort of therapy succeed, or even start.

Lacking meaningful therapy, you're left with getting the best parenting order possible.  The order is what supports your boundaries.  Boundaries are not for her since she would just trample them.  Boundaries are for you in the sense that they determine your responses to her poor behaviors.  In general, they go like this:  "If you do or don't do ____ then I will do or not do ____ as in the court order (or seek resolution in court)."

We understand your frustration with the courts, so many have defaults that favor mothers regardless of their mental health.  In my case, I had gotten protection from one county court in a Threat of DV case, I even got temp possession of the home.  Yet she was able to rush to family court afterward and court let her keep temp custody and temp majority time until the divorce was final some two years later.  Domestic court didn't care about her spousal (adult) relationship, it did as most family courts do, it had no record of bad parenting and so defaulted the temp order in mother's favor.

Were you able to document her poor behaviors?  As I wrote above, it pays the most attention to the parenting behaviors — what impacts the children most — and seldom tries to 'fix' the adult relationship.  Statements like "he always..." or "she always..." don't carry much weight, they're too vague and unsubstantiated so they end up disregarded as hearsay.  That's why we encourage documentation of the poor behaviors as it relates to the children or your relationship with the children.  If you haven't been using a journal or other record to document the details of incidents then court may just see this as two bickering parents.

Never cry over a BPD that left you. It is the best gift the person can give you. The transition phase will be painful but it is better to experience it now than to be bounced between idealization and devaluation for years.