SpaceButler
Fewer than 3 Posts
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What is your sexual orientation: Straight
Who in your life has "personality" issues: Ex-romantic partner
Relationship status: Single
Posts: 1
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« on: March 15, 2023, 11:12:06 AM » |
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My ex who I very strongly suspect is a quiet BPD left me after a 14 year relationship for her coworker that she has known for a few months, and for some reason I still believe that there is hope. I’ll get into the reasons why I feel that way in a moment, but first I’ll give you the backstory.
My ex and I were each other’s high school sweethearts. We have a rich shared history. Almost everything about ourselves is in some way based on the other person. We were best friends on top of being lovers. We lost our virginity to each other. We’ve been in what I though was a happy relationship for 14 years until one day, things started to change. We started having arguments which was unlike us. They always started when I would try to talk to her because I could see her growing distant toward me. Any questioning or recommendations I would make would set her off. Our recent alcoholism certainly wasn’t helping either. Toward the end she told me she wasn’t sure she was in love with me anymore. I also started noticing red flags about her male coworker during this time, including him giving her rides home from work and her being secretive with her phone and talking about this guy to me a lot. She also started talking about needing space and wanting to find herself. This was all escalating seemingly out of nowhere and I thought she was just depressed so I did all the wrong things to try and help. Often times the arguments would end up with her screaming at me and me being totally confused on how we got to this point. A few times I told he I was done with her and threatened to breakup in the heat of the moment, and even though I regret this a lot, I know it’s a core reason for her justifying her behavior.
Eventually I discovered an emotional affair. This was while she was pretending to work on us and future faking me for months. When I caught her it was almost like a relief for her. She told me she loves him. He’s her soul mate. This guy she’s known for 3 months, a serial cheater who’s dirt poor, works the same minimum wage job she does, has had 3 previous failed marriages and multiple kids and who is willing to leave his current family for my ex…she’s in love with this guy, apparently. She told me that she stopped loving me a while ago. Claims I mentally abused her when I threatened to break up with her on a few recent occasions after she had been acting belligerent toward me and gaslighting me for hours. Also says I was making her feel invalidated and like she wasn’t being heard in arguments. She explained falling in love with her new favorite person as “it just happened” and “you can only break a person down so much before they start seeking something elsewhere”. She moved in with him immediately and refused to give me any real closure. Took them a minute to scramble for a crappy apartment in the middle of nowhere but they made it work and she has been living with him for weeks now as they both live and commute to the same job together and spend every waking moment together.
That’s all pretty clear cut. She doesn’t love me like that anymore. She loves this new guy. She made her choice and she had been feeling that way for a while, even if I caught her before she had everything worked out with the new guy, it looks like it was late enough in the game that she was able to monkey branch safely. It’s over, most likely, and I’m willing to accept that if that’s the case, especially knowing that it would likely be much better for my health if she didn’t come back.
Here’s why I am still holding out some hope though. First of all, she has never done this before. Looking back I believe we always had communication issues and I was treated like a doormat in many ways because I never held her accountable for anything, but I was happy because I didn’t suspect that these were cluster B traits, I just thought she was timid and shy and I didn’t mind taking care of everything in our lives myself. It might have been unhealthy in a way but it worked for us for many years. She’s never been hard to live with otherwise and she’s never been mean or abusive to me. We really, really were compatible for a very long time.
I also know that she still has strong feelings for me. I believe I started the devaluation process by threatening to break up, triggering a fear of abandonment, and then our arguments were interpreted as criticism or attacks to the point that she felt like she had to push me away. Knowing what I know now, I realize that I more or less caused all of this to happen through my own actions, though I don’t dismiss her actions either. That being said, I think she is forcing herself to do this in some ways because she thinks she needs to. She even told me recently when she was moving her stuff out that she did still love me, and that I could do with that what I will, but admitted still that it had been changing for a while. She apologized for never communicating that to me. She cried every time she came over to move her stuff out.
She’s also done a number of questionable things that make me wonder how serious she really is about sticking to this decision. She hasn’t told her friends or family, still. She’s hiding everything on social media. Her new guy doesn’t even exist online. She dragged her feet for weeks picking up her stuff. I basically had to force her to move out. She kept leaving stuff behind and has now left even more things here so she keep having to come back to get things. She wouldn’t even take her name off the lease until I basically made her do it one day recently. She sends me texts sometimes with pictures of our cat, or to ask me advice about something trivial like which medicine to buy, etc. I have been grey rocking as much as possible and not texting her first ever. She hasn’t blocked me on anything. In many ways it seems like she is trying to leave tie-downs in some way, but at the same time it’s weird because she took my name off of all of her accounts in a heartbeat and even ordered a new debit card which arrived here for some reason, so I don’t know why the mixed messages. It’s been a week since she texted me last.
My friends and family keep saying she’ll be back. That this is just a crisis and she’ll come to her senses. I’m not so sure. I could see that happening but if she really likes this new guy, who knows? The only reason I’m even entertaining the idea is because of what a strong connection we shared. It wasn’t fake. If she has a disorder, it’s a lot lower-key than what I usually read about, even if she does have a lot of those traits. I think I screwed up and triggered all of this when I could have managed it otherwise. If she were to come back, we would go to therapy and agree on a lot of boundaries, so I’m not rushing to go back to the situation we once had, but if it’s possible to get her back and make an honest effort at reconciliation, I want to try. I’m not ready to give up on her yet. And my gut instinct is telling me that she is starting to feel the reality of her decisions.
I also don’t think she was actually future faking me all that much, looking back. I think in many ways she was still holding on to hope that we could work, right up until the end. I don’t think she had decided to leave yet when I caught her. There are a lot of little reasons, too many to list, but they all tell me that she is extremely confused right now, and I know for a fact that she thought it could work between us until I humiliated and exposed her.
Is there anything I can do other than no contact, which is what I’m doing right now? How likely is it that her new relationship will work out? Am I living on false hope?
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