I'm going to venture a guess that in rapidly changing social situations, especially if there are factors you haven't considered before, you may feel out of your depth, but in situations where you're seeing patterns that are familiar to you, you may be able to outperform more emotional folks. Yes, it's true that pairing a highly emotional person with a highly analytical person can lead to difficulties, but you also have some "superpowers" that, if combined with empathy and a lot of hard work, can be used in your favor. Learning the coping tools is all about learning to recognize patterns and knowing what tools to employ in what situations. You can get very good at this.
One thing that is likely to be hard for you is learning not to
“justify, argue, defend, or explain” (JADE). It comes naturally to us analytical folk and definitely worsens conflict with our pwBPD. While it may be hard, your efforts in this area will be well rewarded with reduced conflict. You will avoid fanning the flames.
One thing you'll want to do more of is validating your wife. You'll also want to understand how the words from a logical thinker can be unintentionally invalidating (think of times when you said something completely reasonable and she flew off the handle). To learn more about validation, take a look at this excellent page on
how to validate and avoid being invalidating. Learn to recognize the patterns -- when a situation happens where validation is called for. Then apply validation. It doesn't always work -- you're playing the probabilities -- but on average it's a very useful tool. It feels good to succeed at it, and can help your marriage. An analytical person who's mastered validation and is as analytical as ever on the inside can appear to an outsider to be pretty darn intuitive. It's a neat trick ;)
One of the most powerful things about this community is the support you can receive for practicing the tools and getting good at them. It involves a lot of trial and discouraging error. Members get the most out of this site by talking about situations where they want to apply the tools, trying it, then discussing successes and failures afterwards.
Have you had any successes or failures recently at applying the tools? Do you have any questions about them?
RC
