Stamp
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What is your sexual orientation: Gay, lesb
Posts: 41
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« on: January 01, 2014, 09:46:07 PM » |
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My uBPD partner often says things that are not true, or tells other people my stories or experiences as though they were hers. Often these are really inconsequential, I tell her something funny the dogs did in the morning when I put them in the yard, and an hour later I hear her recounting the same story to a client as thought it had happened to her. Sometimes the lies are more difficult, when she takes credit for something I did (we have a business together teaching competitive dog sports) or something I thought of, making it look like she is the one who does all the work and has all the inspirational ideas. She does this with other people too, it's nothing personal. I have written about it before, and was working under the assumption that she just had her own BPD view of reality.
Tuesday afternoon my partner and I were just having a calm conversation when she said there was something she wanted to talk to me about because I had done something that made her really uncomfortable in front of her students and made her feel as though she had lost control of the class she was teaching the night before. It turns out that she was upset because she had told them a lie about putting together a new heater (a lie I just let go, I would not correct her in front of clients) and then gone on to say that she did not know when she would be able to find the time to put the second heater for class together because she was so busy working since she was the primary breadwinner in the family, and I had said, 'don't worry, I'll put it together tomorrow' and when she mentioned again, later, to everyone how she was so busy and did not know when she would find the time to build the new heater, I again said 'don't worry, I'll do it.'
She was very upset that I had said that in front of her students, because, in her words 'If I want to lie, I don't want to have to worry about you telling them something I don't want them to know. If I want them to think i do everything around here, then I should be able to do that without you saying something that calls that into question.' This is the first time we've ever talked about her lying. It's something I have never brought up because I honestly thought she just did not have a good grip on reality. She is an excellent coach and wonderful with her students, so I have never worried about it from a business point of view, her lies are never the sort of lies that would cause problems other than lack of trust. When she said this to me I was dumbfounded, she was angry with me because she had lied and not realizing she was lying, I had made this innocent comment that I would build the heater. I did not engage her, I just said that i understood her frustration at feeling loss of control and I would be more cognizant going forward of things I said that might make her feel a loss of control. Upon further reflection later, coupled with other things she has said in the past about not wanting people to feel as though I do everything and she does nothing, that I am constantly taking care of her, I realized that all of this is probably stemming from insecurity, from feeling that people look down on her. Even the lies that involve her telling my stories as though they were her own seem to be ways of validating to people that she has done things she has not, i.e. that she is the one who put the dogs out in the yard in the morning. Interesting.
Then there are a different kind of lies, basically broken promises, that I have a really hard time coping with. These are personal, and so it is hard for them not to hurt. The most recent case in point was yesterday. Today is our anniversary, but since we both have to work, we generally celebrate on January 1st. In November I had planned a night on the town to celebrate the anniversary of our first date and during dinner she had said to me 'This is so lovely, thank you for planning it, I will take care of planning our real anniversary in January. She put the event down in our shared online calendar so that she would not forget. In mid-December we talked about it briefly again, and again she said she was going to take care of making plans. She is constantly using the shared calendar as we use it to book lessons with clients etc. so she was looking at the reminder for our anniversary every day for, at the very least, the entire week before it.
On New Year's eve we are having a quiet dinner and talking and she says that she was thinking we should go for a hike with the dogs the next day. It was not exactly what I had in mind as a romantic way to spend our anniversary, but I could see that it could be fun, and it was up to her to make the plans, so I said that I would enjoy that. In the morning we talked about the hike and she said that she had invited a friend of hers to go along and that they had decided to do the four and a half mile hike. I reminded her that my leg was still stiff from a hike a couple days ago and that I'd rather do a shorter hike. She said I could do just a little bit of the hike then go back to the car and wait for them. I said never mind, I'll be tough and do the whole hike, I am so excited that you remembered and took the time to plan something for our anniversary. (she has a history of making promises to do things for my birthday, Christmas, our anniversary, etc. and not doing them) She immediately got angry with me and said that she had no idea what I was talking about, that she had not made this plan as a way of celebrating our anniversary, that she just wanted to get out and hike with the dogs and it had nothing to do with me or wanting to do anything with me, and why did I expect that she would have planned something for our anniversary when I know that she hates doing that and hates celebrating things.
I knew it was pointless to respond, but I could not stop myself. I said that if she had not done this for our anniversary, that was fine, but that the reason I thought she had was because she had told me twice in the last six weeks that she would. She said that I was impossible to live with, that just because she mentioned something did not mean that it was guaranteed to happen, that she was way too busy and too broke to plan anything, that the reason she had not planned anything was that we had had a big fight in December os obviously anything she had committed to before that was null and void, and half a dozen other reasons why I should NEVER have expected her to do something for our anniversary. I told her that was fine, that I had misunderstood and that it wasn't a big deal, but of course it was too late, once she's angry, that's it for the day, or, usually, for several days, if not for a week or more.
We went for the hike with her friend, which was pleasant enough because with a friend around she's on good behavior, then she said she was going to go out to dinner with me for our anniversary so that there was no way I could bhit at her and complain that she had not done the right thing. She was very belligerent and I said I'd rather not go out to dinner if it was going to be so negative, but she became unglued and said that I was doing it on purpose, that the moment she tried to do the right thing, I would not let her, so I agreed to dinner. She took me to a restaurant we had never been to, we only went because a student had given us a gift certificate for it. It was a Japanese restaurant in the style of Benihana, so we had the cook 'entertaining' us for most of the meal which was excruciating since she never said a word to me during the entire dinner and did not even lift her head to watch the show of the cook preparing the food. The dinner cost a little bit more than the gift certificate, and of course, when they brought the check I paid the difference since she did not even pick up the check to look at it.
We drove back home in silence and when we got home, even though it was only 7 PM, she announced that she was going to bed. I asked her whether she'd sit with me for a few minutes if I lit a fire in the fireplace and she said no, I asked if there was anything we could do for just a few minutes together (chat, have desert at home, whatever) because I did not want to go to bed angry and I wanted to try to make peace. She roared at me that 'Absolutely no one cares what you think or feel or want, I just want to go to bed, leave me alone.' and she went to bed, leaving me to do all the rest of the things that needed to get done, like taking care of the animals, shutting down the house for the night, etc.
I know that when she gets that angry, it is usually because she feels like a failure, whenever she thinks she has let me down she lashes out at me, and she is terribly insecure, despite constantly telling me that she is incredibly secure and i am the one who is insecure. I understand that she feels that she has failed because she 'forgot' to plan anything for our anniversary, but I still don't know how she manages to forget something that is right on her calendar. This has happened before any number of times, and it seems as though she is, consciously or unconsciously, choosing to ignore events that require her to plan something because she is worried that if she does plan something it won't be good enough.
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