Long-term BPD relationships. More than we think...

[mrclear]

Hi,

As I was reading through the boards, I have discovered that, in contradiction to the “average lifespan” of a BPD relationship, there are lot of people (like myself) who have been in long-term BPD relationships/marriages. Some over 30 years! This surprised me and I think it would be very interesting to share our experiences on this. I've come up with a little questionnaire which might allow us to compare and help us to analyze what we have been through and how we can use this to heal.

1. How did your long-term relationship start and how quickly were you hooked into believing he/she was the “one”?Were there indications of her/his BPD early on?

2. How did you experience the honey-moon phase and how long did it last? When did you see a shift?

3. When did the devaluation phase start? Did it proceed gradually or abrupt? How did you/they deal with this?

4. When did your needs stop mattering? Did you adopt coping-mechanisms during the course of the relationship?



5. How did the BPD react to being confronted with problematic issues in the relationship?

6. When/how did the relationship end? Were you “recycled”?

7. How did you deal with post-break-up? How did you deal with communication afterward? (i.e.: if there were children involved).

8. What is your status now?

Ok, I'm sure there a lot more questions we could ask, but these would be the most crucial ones for me. What do we consider a “long-term” relationship? I would say anything past 3 years would qualify :-)

I'll make a start:

1. My relationship with my udexBPDw started 15 years ago. She was a classic BPD waif/hermit/witch. Slender, beautiful and intoxicating. We started out with a date during which I talked a lot and she watched (probably assessing if I was an adequate new match/victim). She left the date saying she was currently involved with someone else (married) and was confused about whether she should continue the affair... . (first warning sign!). She spent a hot weekend with him and decided she wanted to pursue me... .   Things moved very fast from there. Endless sex, spending (too) much time together etc. She quit her job for me and we moved to another town together. Her adoration/commitment convinced me she was the “one”. The first sign of instability occurred when I was forced to deal with the financial issues of my ex before her. I was being fair and my BPD hated it. There was a fit of rage (scary), but in a way I was flattered by her jealousy and paid no mind... .  

2.The honey-moon phase was amazing and lasted about 6-8 months. There were romantic evenings, days of staying in bed, never-ending sex and wonderful plans for the future. The first shift I encountered was due to an unhappiness with her professional life. She decide to move back to her own country and I was to follow... .   I did... .  

3. My devaluation-stage proceeded very gradually. I was still kept hooked, but my needs had stopped mattering. I had given up my successful job and moved to her country. What I did there was up to me. I received no support, because she was (professionally) happy and I just had to make it work. We married and had our first child. Occasionally there were still good moments. I was unable to keep a steady job, because of the poor offers I was receiving. My ex was indifferent. I was just supposed to take any job, so we could be together. She was out having a great time with friends and colleagues and I stayed at home. I was not encouraged to be a part of her life. I became lethargic and had bouts of depression.

4. As said, my needs stopped mattering early on. I adopted coping-mechanisms such as smoking, the occasional drink too many and emotional distance.

5. When I confronted my ex with our problems, she said everything was my fault and I would have to make things work. She would frequently just leave the room in a fit of anger. She lied to me frequently about past relationships and refused to discuss it. There was no healing, no emotional closeness. Financial/family stress added to her inability to be close and resolve problems.

6. The relationship ended when I had changed my job and was becoming more successful. She hooked me with a second child. Please note that I love them both dearly! After a while, her abandonment issues started and my job was labeled as superficial and a world she could not relate to, although it was a profession she herself had been in for 10 years! She was clearly scared and didn't see any use in continuing the marriage. I moved out and was left sorting out and paying for every debt we had made together. I was in T and first heard the term BPD. I heard nothing for 4 months. Then separation-papers... .     I decided to move on and start a new relationship. My ex found out and reeled me back in. I broke off my new relationship and was full of new hope for our new-found love. The same drama happened within a span of 10 months. Depressed, exasperated and near nervous break-down, I finally made the decision to leave.

7. Post-relationship, my ex found someone new within 3 weeks. (probably already lined up). I was back in T. I read everything I could on BPD and finally started to really heal because there was no going back for me. Communication straight after was difficult, because there was so much pain and anger involved.

8. My ex is on her 3rd relationship. She's deeply in love and limits all contact with me. Also regarding the kids. She makes messengers out of the kids to update me on her progress. I Skype with my kids and they visit me about 6-8 times a year. I'm still struggling with her lack of empathy and closure, but getting better everyday. I'm in a new relationship (1 year) and am starting to find out what love, safety, trust and harmony really mean 

mrclear

[Free One]

Good post. I think it is important to acknowledge that a long r/s with pwBPD can be much different and leaving much more difficult than a short term one.

1. How did your long-term relationship start and how quickly were you hooked into believing he/she was the “one”?Were there indications of her/his BPD early on?

We were in high school when we started dating and were together 17 years. I was a teenage girl looking for someone to love and adore her. I was hooked quickly. In retrospect, there were signs he was BPD. Stalking behaviors, controlling behaviors, suicide threats, jealousy. I had no r/s experience and didn't no this wasn't normal, especially because of some genuine grief he was dealing with.

2. How did you experience the honey-moon phase and how long did it last? When did you see a shift? It felt like we were meant to be together. It was us against the world and nothing could stop us. We hit rough patches, particularly when I was less available while attending college, but we'd get through the rough spots and it would be honeymoon all over. The major shift came after he had a traumatic experience and I was starting a new career.



3. When did the devaluation phase start? Did it proceed gradually or abrupt? How did you/they deal with this? The devaluation phase, from what I can tell, started after maybe 13 or 14 years together, our late 20's, early 30's - an age at where I feel most people reach a certain age of maturity when you married, have a house and a child, ect. I matured; he did not. It caused a lot of tension.

4. When did your needs stop mattering? Did you adopt coping-mechanisms during the course of the relationship? To be honest, I'm not sure how much my needs really ever mattered. He did a good job for a long time of making me think my needs were being met, but over time it reached a point where I realized my needs were only ever met as long as it met his in the process. At the end of the r/s the biggest conflicts were centered around me asking for what I needed.

5. How did the BPD react to being confronted with problematic issues in the relationship? Legitimate complaints by me were either turned around on me or he would take a victim stance and declare he was a complete failure, didn't deserve to be alive, etc. I would end up dropping my complaint and soothe him. At the very end, he started to rage as I was forcing deal breaker issues to be dealt with.



6. When/how did the relationship end? Were you “recycled”? I ended the r/s with divorce when I discovered he was in fact having an affair (one of my complaints he would turn back on me and lie about). There was no recycles, however, I do believe that affairs were occurring for at least the last 3years of our marriage and during that time I was recycled without knowing it.

7. How did you deal with post-break-up? How did you deal with communication afterward? (i.e.: if there were children involved). It has been a process over the past year and a half. When you spend more than half your life with someone and it ends in such a painful way, it isn't so easy to break the ties. I work with a counselor to deal with PTSD from the r/s and break up. It was very traumatic. I've learned to set boundaries and keep communication limited to email when possible. We share a child, which complicates things. I can't just walk away and never deal with the man again. I haven't figured it all out yet.

8. What is your status now? I am healing. Slowly clearing the PTSD triggers. I am blessed with a super support system. I do struggle with whether or not I am doing the right things in order to protect my child and raise him to be emotionally healthy. I'm still grieving my losses. When you have so much time with someone, and not all of it was bad, there are a lot of memories, a lot of reminders and a lot of losses beyond just the r/s. I lost my home; time with my son when he visits his dad; the r/s with my ex's family; the freedom of raising my son the way I would like; a certain amount of financial security; trust not only in myself, but in others and more.

[irene76]

Hi,

I can't do the question thing, but mine reads much the same as yours.  Mine was a narcissist man, who manifested with charming eagerness, much like a puppy.  He was separated from wife (also narcissist) and fell in love with me right away despite a reconciliation with wife two weeks later.  He flirted with me but insisted he wanted marriage to "have another try".  What he really meant was he wanted both or neither. 

Wife eventually left, assumed he would miss her and their son, but once the ties were cut he never mentioned her again.  We dated for two years/lived together in as much as you could thirty years ago, and one day he announced happily that he'd gotten a new job in his hometown.  Without ever telling me.  He was honestly surprised that I asked why it hadn't come up.  I asked what about me, and he thought for a minute and then said that I could either stay there or come along.   

A normal person would have dumped him, but I was in a small town and lonely, and he was my first love, so along I went.  We got married, and spent two years doing whatever he wanted until he decided that his job was too hard.  Then we had more job changes, drinking, drugs, two kids, sex addiction, more job changes, affairs that I didn't know about and then he left me for someone who he felt was better for him.  We were together 27 years, and I was not a perfect spouse either ( irrationality and anger).

The hardest day was when he told me over the phone that he was leaving.  Couldn't tell me in person, had ignored me for weeks, and left me with every single bill.  Just like with others he "loved" he just lost interest. 

It took me a year of therapy to detach from worrying about the fact that his poor choices would now lead to financial disaster for both of us, and that emotionally he would miss me.    That didn't happen, of course, and after awhile I figured out that we were so far apart now that all of our good memories were just that. 

It is truly hard to love someone who either can't detach from you, or who detaches without emotion.  The best you can do is to realize that as it says on the page next to me, attachment leads to suffering and detachment leads to freedom.  Not the freedom I'd hoped for, but a different sense of freedom.  I don't dread for his life anymore, and that is a relief.  I now have to detach from my kids as well, which is just as hard but better for us all in the long run. 

Thanks for letting me share,

Irene

[mrclear]

In a way it all sounds so similar, doesn't it?

Free one : A great reply on question nr. 8! What I sense at at the end of each r/s is an enourmous sense of relief and hope, eventhough we still struggle... .  

mrclear

[Billa]

1) my relationship wit my exBPDbf started one year ago, we lived in different places, but we share the same group of friends. So, some months after we got to know (as soon as he ended his last relationship, as I came to know later... .   ) he began his "campaign" to get his new toy, using Facebook to reach me at first and then visiting me whenever his job drove him in the nearby areas (he's a tv journalist and sport telecaster). At the beginning he was wonderful. I've told him I wanted some time to get to know each other better before starting our relationship "physically" and he was so kind, patient, gentle... .   After a week, more or less, he told me "We are two people in love with each other, aren't we?" and speaking with mutual friends he said, in many occasions, that I was something different, I was "the one". The same he told to me (now he denies it... .   ), adding that for me he had ended all the various "situations" he had, and that having me and only me was for him wonderful. I think that being better informed I would have had a lot of hints about his BPD. Not only the fact that he wanted to pass all his spare time with me and he didn't stop texting and using whatsapp to send me red hearts and other romantic emoticons (he was 47... .   ), but also because he started telling me very personal things from the very beginning, much of them related to "mistakes" he had made in the past, i.e. cheating his ex-wife (separated but not divorced from 2007, after 9 years of marriage) from the very beginning of their engagement, which he left when he was told by his "favourite" lover that she was going to leave him, as she had a new boyfriend.  So he told her to leave him and move to his hometown (she lives 250 miles away). left his wife which was doing the second cycle of artificial insemination and was waiting to see if she was pregnant or not, and, after a month, left the other girl too. I was puzzled and a bit shocked to hear all those things, but he looked so full of repentance, a man who was deeply suffering for his mistakes... .   As a matter of fact, his ex wife and his ex lover were painted white, while he was painting his his last girlfriend black. 

[Billa]

2) our honeymoon phase was a marvelous period,  I've never had such a wonderful and perfect Bf in my life. It lasted more or less four months. The shift was sudden and unexpected/unexplicable. He began the first cycle of false accusations, accusing me of having told someone I barely knew (and who was in the USA, while I was in Italy) that sex with him was no good at all (it seems that all this absurd stuff was in some way related to a conversation that his ex Gf he is now recycling had with whom he cheated me, had with another woman  -I ignored- he was having sex with when we began to date... .   all people in some way belonging to the same group of friends. I was in no way involved in their conversations, but in some way in the end I was the only one to blame... .   ). It was a nightmare. Three days of phoning and texting, then he forced me to go to his hometown to talk about it. In the end he seemed to have understood I had no guilt at all and our relationship went on, but I think this was the beginning of the end... .   Something had changed.  As a matter of fact, in our last texting, on march 14th, he wrote that " his loved had faded away since what had happened in August."

[Billa]

3) I wrote above about the first episode of devaluation, but in the final part of our relationship devaluation was one of his favourite daily activity. I was no good,  my accent was no good, my hair were no good, my clothes were no good, he never paid any compliment to me and i was a bad person. On the other hand, his exGf was beatiful, nice, smart, a saint and had all his attention.

4) I think my needs stopped mattering soon after the honeymoon phase. From that moment on, it was all a about him.

5)If confronted with problematic issues, at first he would react refusing to discuss them, saying that he was not interested in debating about such unimportant things, as he had no time. He would not answer the phone and then he would accuse me of being mentally unstable. Then he would began to text, trying to have me back, accusing me of being the one who wanted to leave relationship and so on.

6) we had various break-ups and make-up. In the end he used one of his ex-gf to sabotage our relationship, a real torture, very cruel. He was cheating me ouvertly, humiliating me in front of all our friends and giving her the possibility to do the same, claiming she was only a friend and expecting me to agree and give him positive reinforce about it.

7)atthe moments, 40 days after the last break-up, I think he hates me. I was blocked on Fb and whatsapp and he "ordered" me to delete his number from my phone. That is to say: we are NC on his own will. He is happy with his recycled "only-a-friend" ex GF. And I'm desperate.