Hi,
I just joined this board. My story is
here.
I'm over 5 weeks into No Contact from an ex I was in a love-triangle with who dumped me and said we need to not talk anymore for the immediate future (though that's happened before for longer periods than this... .)
I remain unclear whether this was an "anticipatory abandonment" move (though that seems less his style), a "fear of engulfment" move (I realize know that the undefined "dread" he expressed at the thought of commitment to me was really classic Borderline fear of engulfment), or if it was actually part of a frantic effort to avoid "abandonment" by his own ex, the other guy in the triangle (as he has, in the past, thrown each of us under the bus in response to the other one threatening to disappear; he broke up with that guy originally to stop
me from leaving his life, only to later cut me off in response to
the ex going no contact, only to come back to me once he had appeased the ex... .etc etc, in a swinging pendulum).
As I come out of the fog, I'm realizing more and more how obviously the whole situation fit BPD and how it explains the sense of frustration and "so close" I had the whole time. It's sad, and I will admit I am hoping for another chance to try armed with my new realizations, because it explains why I felt so sure he was in love with me, and yet how he would pull away at the thought of commitment and act so confused and dreadful.
Any normal person would have been happy to have fallen in love and found a soul-mate so perfectly matched in all other ways, and the course of action going forward would have been obvious. For a long time I thought maybe it was just that the situation was complicated by his codependency with the alcoholic ex, and that if he were out of the picture things would fall into place as a matter of course with me; in these sense I "fell for" the excuses he made for why things weren't going forward.
Occasionally I worried that I was delusion and that "he just wasn't that into" me in spite of lots of clear evidence to the contrary. But now I see why the mismatch between his evident feelings and the general incoherence of his actions (with his words going back and forth ambivalently: sometimes matching the feelings, sometimes matching the actions) was so intense, why getting involved with me seemed more of a
terrifying occurrence for him rather than the straightforward wonderful thing love and the chance at a stable relationship would have been for most people (though, of course, terror and intense confusion are strong emotions too... .)
I guess what I want to say in this post is that I've realized one thing I slipped into was being willing to argue things "on his terms" even though, looking back, they were crazy lines of logic and arguing was probably futile. For example, when I tried to tell him that he couldn't stay with (or go back to) the ex merely because the ex "needed" him, that pity and a fear of hurting was not the same as love, and in fact that he was enabling the guy's alcoholism codependently, I had "bought into" the excuse, I had swallowed the delusion that the reason he kept swinging back and forth was simply that he was being emotionally blackmailed by the ex.
But looking at that now in the wider context of his behaviors, I can see that he was more than happy to have the ex providing that "excuse" for pulling away from me when we'd get too intimate or close to commitment, just like I'm sure he was glad to have me to provide "breathing room" in the other direction from the ex. Setting up the love triangle like he did was simply a way to get intimacy (from two people) while also avoiding total commitment to either. Arguing against the love triangle or in favor of the need to choose or be decisive was basically talking to a brick wall, because not choosing was exactly what he wanted. Indeed, then, later he'd "use my own words against me" and use the the excuse of "You're right, I need to make a choice!" as one of his reasons for pulling away from me (even though he came back that time, and so obviously hadn't "chosen" at all, it was just words he found useful in the moment, though I'm sure he convinced himself that he believed them at the time.)
Another big example was the role of religion/philosophy in our dynamic. One of the big ways (besides ambivalence about gender and sexuality) that my guy manifested "instability of identity" was in his religious/philosophical commitments. He always seemed to be sitting on the fence between Christianity and Atheism basically. I was a Christian, the ex was an Atheist, and I think he tied his own leanings on any given day to our relationships. So, for example, when he'd swing towards me would also be when he'd be leaning towards religion, whereas when he'd swing back towards the ex he would also be leaning away.
I unfortunately allowed myself to be pulled into arguing on these terms, getting into a lot of debates trying to argue in favor of Christianity. Not because I really cared what he believed, except that I had been duped into thinking that if I convinced him about faith that would also mean him choosing me more definitively. Now I see that the causation was entirely opposite: it's not that his swinging back and forth about religion was causing his relational waffling, rather it was his relational waffling (or just identity waffling on a deeper and broader level) that was manifesting as the philosophical waffling.
Therefore, arguing the religious question was merely to engage a distraction, an accidental emanation from the BPD that was not actually doing anything to move him towards any sort of stability or commitment religious
or relationally, because his problem was never a lack of intellectual arguments or anything, the instability was never from sincere doubts or anything like that (and even if it was when it comes to religion, it was totally disordered for him to link that question to which relationship he chose! And I shouldn't have indulged it.)
There were lots of issues like this. The "reasons" they give, I think, are not the real reasons they act they way they do and pull-away and such, and so there is no reason to argue with these reasons, because the real reasons, the real cause, is in the BPD, and you can't argue with that by arguing with all the obfuscating surface constructs, no matter how sincere they seem, they're really just throwing up smokescreens, fumbling around looking for an explanation for their own erratic emotions. Sometimes, though, if they're intelligent, they can be very good at coming up with these explanations, and if you let yourself get sucked into the inner-logic of these rationales it can all seem to make sense "from the inside" until you get some time to reflect afterward and realize that the internal consistency was not what it seemed and that, certainly, from the outside, the whole thing was crazy.
