...
Can anyone share at what point they knew they had had enough and there was no going backwards?
...
It's complicated. For me, I had a gut feeling about a year and a half into our marriage that it was hopeless (I was married four more years after that though, or 5 1/2 years total); her behavior was just so angry, unhinged, and what I found most troubling, completely nonsensical. Because I could not understand what her problem was, I had no idea what I could do to keep her happy. I knew the best case scenario was a life of caretaking her emotional needs to minimize the fighting and screaming matches. But I still did not know about BPD, and did not even know what it was.
at that point, if you said to me "
I have a magic wand you can wave and make your wife disappear, and you just raise your kid as a single dad" I would have done it. But there was no magic wand and I received some lousy legal advice that a divorce would ruin me, so I decided to put forward a good faith effort to fix it. We tried marital counseling, on and off over the next couple years. She went to counseling, and then I went to counseling (without telling anyone) for a few visits to see if I was going crazy. Her behavior was that awful to deal with.
Around this time, I learned about BPD, and behavioral disorders in general, and as I read more about them and compared the symptoms to the things my wife did and said, I began to realize how hopeless it was. From then on, it was only a matter of time before I pulled the plug.
We nearly got divorced about a year after I learned about BPD (4 years into our marriage) after she threw out divorce as a threat and I was like "
Okay, great, let's end this," but she begged me to call it off, and I did. However, after that, I think she felt more secure in her belief that I would not leave no matter how awful she behaved toward me. But I had in the meantime got better legal advice, and understood what the path ahead looked like if we divorced, e.g. what joint custody of our daughter would look like, how much I'd have to pay in child support, how our assets would be split, etc. and was okay with it. I made preparations for an end of it, and was ready to leave the next time we had a blowup fight. That was more or less inevitable, and when it happened and she threw out the "
we're getting divorced then" as an ultimatum because I refused to take responsibility for her behavior in starting that fight, I moved out, called my attorney, and filed for divorce. I think she was honestly shocked it really happened. Her behavior over the next couple weeks ranged from more threats and anger, to sadness, to begging me to reconsider... you could see the whole 5 stages of grief play out, but in random order.
Can love be restored when the pain that has been caused runs so deep?
I don't think so. To rebuild affection would first require her to atone for the things she did and said, and how she behaved for at least as long as she put me through them, and in a way that I could trust was genuine, not just an attempt to win me back because she felt like I was the best option for her.
Basically that would require a pwBPD to not be BPD, and that's virtually impossible. She would have to become a completely different person.
