Did you left someone to be with your BPD partner and do you regret it now?

[Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse...]

I sometimes feel that i have thrown away someone special because i got carried away and i chose my BPDex, because she (BPD) was so good with words. Now i regret that i rejected the woman who even warned me about my BPDex. Has anything similar happend in your life?

[happendtome]

I sometimes feel that i have thrown away someone special because i got carried away and i chose my BPDex, because she (BPD) was so good with words. Now i regret that i rejected the woman who even warned me about my BPDex. Has anything similar happend in your life?

[roberto516]

I did it twice. I sometimes wonder what I did pass up by not pursuing something a little more healthy (maybe). But I kept fooling myself into thinking the BPD relationship was right. The real funny thing is that the 3 years between my first ex BPD and the second BPD was how many women I told almost immediately that I didn't want to pursue anything. Even though they treated me really well, and showed early on a lot of positive qualities.

[blueblue12]

Well I left a bad marriage and ended up in a new marriage with what I now know is a borderline and it is a nightmare. Mind you it took me ten years to work out she is a borderline! Now that my second marriage is over I am in NC and it is the only way forward, as said as that is... .

[FSTL]

I left an abusive relationship/marriage and was lured/guilted into a relationship with someone with BPD. The fact I was leaving a bad relationship made me overlook all the red flags in the new one, even though I had known her for a while and observed various things that now would make me run a mile. I just chalked them up to part of being in a relationship as I had been in such a messed up relationship until that point.

[happendtome]

I didnt know anything about borderline thing and my ex is high functioning, so i couldnt really figure it out. All those red flags werent even red flags for me. Some things i thought to be cute and others i put it down to stress etc. In the end i felt myself used and cheap. I cant say directly that i left someone because of her as i wasnt in the relationship, but i feel that i have made some bad choices

[GuySmiley]

I was in a very loving relationship with a wonderful nonBPD woman for almost ten years. However, because of various medical reasons, sex was almost non-existent from the start plus she could be (unconsciously and undeliberatly) very selfish. The relationship was very, very loving but also very, very trying at times. Before the relationship ended I was a zombie, almost a shell - none of my physical needs were being met and a lot of my emotional needs were not being met, either by circumstance or by her choice. But my martyr-for-love hat was wedged firmly on so I stuck it out.

Then, 10 years after last hearing from her, my exBPD contacted me completely out of the blue. It was at that point I quite simply jumped ship from my current nonBPD relationship and walked out. Years of frustration in my current relationship coupled with very intense feelings stirred up by my exBPD made me miss the intense emotions and sex that I'd had with exBPD and I fooled myself into thinking that was the woman I loved more.

I didn't enter a relationship with exBPD as she was now married, but I thought the intense emotions meant I loved her more. What an idiot.

Now, years after I walked out I look back and I see that although I wasn't happy in my relationship I was stupid to leave for those reasons. It wasn't necessarily the wrong decision to make to leave the relationship (as I wasn't happy and the chances of the situation being resolved were almost zero) but it certainly was the wrong reason to leave.

Everybody tells me I was right to leave as the relationship had run its course, but no one will ever tell me the right reason to leave was because exBPD had resurfaced.

I miss my nonBPD ex every single day and constantly think if I did the right thing by leaving, but 'love conquers all' doesn't work in the real world and I simply wasn't happy at the end and had been teetering on leaving for a couple of months. exBPD turning up out of the blue just tipped me over the edge.

I regret leaving her and our hopes and dreams every single day and the guilt of breaking the heart of my best friend tears me up inside. But I also have to remind myself I wasn't happy every day also.

[OptimusRhyme]

I left a 9 year relationship with someone pretty great for my very high functioning exBPD. The exBPD came out of nowhere to try and convince me that we were supposed to be together, and while I loved my partner deeply, there were problems preexisting with the relationship (mainly that we were better friends than partners). I threw up a lot of initial resistance and boundaries, and there were TONS of red flags that I recognized as really strange and skewed thinking. She would say "I could make you so happy" (I'd respond with talking about how that's not what a partner does in a healthy relationship, I can make myself happy)  "I can't believe I'm not even an option" (I told you what the boundaries were and that I'd totally understand if that isn't what you want and you walk away) "you're the love of my life" (I don't think everyone has one predestined partner, there's lot of people you're compatible with deeply), etc etc. She started trying to use guilt, control, and projection to get what she wanted. She'd accuse me of manipulating her when I'd articulate my boundaries clearly, she'd say a lot of things like "I wish you weren't such a coward", etc. It was calm and non-aggressive, and she'd also end with "but I don't want to convince you of anything you don't feel" (which I think was her trying to mirror my efforts to respect her agency and not treat her like a child, whoops!), but her manipulation took more of a toll on me that I realized.

Part of me thought that by providing such a contrasting healthy role model to her immature views on relationships, I was helping. I was clearly also using it to build up a wounded self image. I actually broke it off pretty early on, but unfortunately had to see her a lot and we'd recycle several times. During all this, my primary relationship was deteriorating, and I had a lot of big life issues and changes going on. After months of me trying to tell her that it would take awhile for me to process the end of one relationship instead of dooming the next by jumping head-and-baggage first into the next one, and after the cycles of fights/she'd come around to understanding/fights/repeat, when I finally left my 9 year relationship, pretty much to the instant, and I was no longer a fantasy just out of actual emotional reach, she discarded me.

The nonsensical manner of the discard (I don't know why I loved you like a crazy person, or found any of your jokes funny, you've hurt me more than anyone you've ever hurt before, I'm sorry I'm such a disappointment) and her trying to avoid any sort of responsibility or negative consequences made a lot more sense when she told me she'd been diagnosed BPD, and made the decision to make good on my gut knowing to walk away for months pretty easy. Processing the whole episode has proven way more elusive and difficult.

So. Do I regret it? I don't think I do. It was a dramatic, immature, and painful way for me to finish my first relationship, and I can't undo those things. My partner deserved much better, but I didn't have the strength to offer better at the time, and while my exBPD has been the worst and painful mistake of my life so far, I have learned immensely, and my life is now in a much, much better place. I miss the relationship I left, I grieve for what might have happened if the energy I was heaping on my exBPD instead went to trying to fix that relationship, but there was a reason (amongst several) that I was susceptible to the nonsense my exBPD operated her romantic endeavors on.

I can't, or can't yet, bring myself to the viewpoint that the stoics and some of the senior (and wiser) members of this board have, that it was a fortunate thing to have happened to allow me to become aware and grow. But it did happen, and as unfortunate as it may be, I would rather focus on applying what I've learned and not making any of THOSE mistakes again, than regret the pain and injustice. One can only move forward, something like that.  

[g2outfitter]

I started going out with a girl who knew about me and my exBPD's relationship.  We started hanging out and things progressed but eventually came to an end because I kept talking about my exBPD and the trauma that I was going through.  Rightfully so, she determined that I wasn't quite over my exBPD and she was not going to be a rebound so she put some space between us, i.e. she would say she was busy every time I asked her to do something with me.  Well I quit asking her out and then about a week later my exBPD started to recycle me and we started seeing each other again.  About a week later the other girl texted me and wanted to know if I wanted to have lunch.  I told her I was busy and that was the end of that.  Six months later my exBPD ends our relationship again.

I may have missed out but who knows for sure.