Does my GF who cheated on me have BPD? Can anything be done?

[Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse...]

     Hi, a lengthy post, I apologize, but I need to type this out, to process what is happening. I posted this on another forum for spouses of people with Bi Polar disorder, but the more I read about it the more I think my (ex) GF may have borderline personality disorder instead.  I don't know why I am trying to "diagnose" her like this, but I think I am just looking for solace and the explanation of mental illness would give me some understanding as to why this is happening.  Basically my girlfriend (F, 23) recently made out with another guy and then and broke up with me (M, 26), and for the last 3 weeks I have been absolutely devastated.  I would like to summarize the general arc of our relationship before I get to that part, so as to contextualize what has been happening.

     In retrospect, there have been a lot of red flags while dating her. I think I just chose to ignore them because of how loving and sweet she could be and how much I loved her. On our first date (1.5 years ago), she told me that she loved me... .I told her that she shouldn't say something like that because she can't possibly mean it, but she nonetheless insisted that she did. We went back to her place and had sex, which is atypical for me because I don't usually do one night stands, but she wanted to really badly so I acquiesced despite my anxiety. So from there things moved rapidly, after only a few days I basically started staying at her place all the time and we had a very intimate and physical relationship, though I was still uncomfortable about how overly clingy/loving she seemed after only a few days. By the end of week 1 she tells me that she wants to get married. I of course say no, thinking she is just being immature, but am flattered by how much she likes me. I am usually really anti-social, I have maybe 2 or 3 friends but that is it, and I hadn't dated for about 2 years, so even though things are moving so fast I am just glad to have found someone who likes me and wants to date... .it seemed really perfect in a way.

     Week 2 we are at a bar and she asks me if I want to have kids when i'm older; I say no and she gets really pissed out of nowhere, saying I am depriving her of her "biological right." We get into a fight and don't see each other for a day or two, but things cool off and she apologizes, I brush it off to her being drunk.

     Week 6, we are at a bar with her roommates. Like I said I am a pretty anti-social person, but I am trying my best to make conversation so as to not make a bad impression, and my GF just gets up and leaves the bar. I follow after her and apparently she is pissed at me because she thinks I was paying too much attention to her roommates... .while really I was barely saying anything, and I was being cordial so at to make a good impression for her sake; I figure she is just drunk so I walk her home, despite her protestations, and then go back to my place. Next day I get a call from her, she says she is going to kill her self by jumping out her bedroom window (she lived on the second story so I didn't take this too seriously... .); I tell her I need a few days and that she was unnecessarily cruel towards me. She then tells me that she told her roommates she is moving out of her apartment and is going to have to find a new one. She was on good terms with her roommates otherwise, she just impulsively decided to make a break from them out of nowhere, I think because she wanted to live with me instead... .

     Basically, against my better judgment, she persuades me to move in with her into this new apartment—I think I was really infatuated with her, and things had been good otherwise so I went ahead. This is weeks 9 or 10 that we move in together, so things are moving really fast obviously. The relationship becomes really intense and by around this time I tell her that I love her. Something I notice about her though is that whenever she drinks she becomes a radically different person, really impulsive, kind of cold, yet hyper-sexual. My friends don't really like her because she is controlling of my time and always pouts and becomes gloomy if I go to hang out with them. Whenever we go out to bars or shows, and my friends are around, she ends up getting pissed at me and has a kind of temper tantrum, like she's a little kid or something; its really embarrassing and annoying so I figure she must have a drinking problem. I tell her that I really love her but she needs to stop drinking or at least cut back if we are going to keep on being together.

     She agrees and things are ok for a while, she cuts out drinking for a little bit, but it doesn’t last long, and there is often an underlying menace to my interactions with her. For instance, when I tell her that I love her she often says things like "I don't believe you" or "how can I know that's true," and she complains that I am not affectionate enough when I actually spend pretty much all my free time with her cuddling and hanging out—its like she is this emotional black hole and no matter how much time I spend with her she is complaining I don't give her enough attention.  She gets mad because I won't tell her the password to my computer and email.  She also has this annoying habit of always making a point of telling me if a guy looked at her or talked to her or hit on her, as if to make me jealous and get an emotional rise out of me. Despite all this she is otherwise really sweet and loving, so I try to ignore these more unsettling aspects of her behavior.

     Around month 10 or 11 I move to another city for graduate school, and she comes with me. This time she gets her own apartment because I am living on campus. She was really disappointed about this, thinking that we were moving "backwards," but I thought it was for the best because of how fast things unfolded in the beginning. One weekend she goes out of town to visit her best-friend (female) and when she comes back she is really weird; Immediately upon returns from her trip, she is really distant and doesn’t want to talk. I take her out to a nice dinner and she is just kind of absent and not herself. When we head back to her place she starts talking about how she is sexually unsatisfied with me, which is a bit out of nowhere for me because at first she was telling me the sex is the best she's ever had, and she always orgasms when we have sex (in retrospect, I wonder now if she hooked up with someone when she was out of town, and that is what prompted this comment). We get into a fight and she drives me home; in the car she tells me that she is also really unsatisfied because she wants to have kids but I don't want any, and how she thinks I can't satisfy her needs. Things kind of blow up and she drops me off at my place, and we take a break for two weeks, not talking to each other.

     After two weeks we meet to talk about the relationship, and she is back to being super affectionate; it is bizarre, but its like nothing even happened as far as she is concerned and she acts super happy to see me, so we end up getting back together. She also drops the kid thing, and talks about how she thinks they are annoying. I really loved her at this point so I was glad to be back together, despite how weird it was that she was acting like nothing happened.

     Anyway, things persist like this, we have our usual ups and downs, and we have a few more incidents where she "blows up" in front of my friends when we go out, so at this point my friends pretty much hate her and I avoid going out to shows or bars with her. But otherwise things actually seem better overall and it feels like the break brought us closer together. Other than when she drinks the relationship is solid, and she acts super loving towards me.

She does confess to me after the break that she wonders if she is bi-polar; I say I don't know, I can't make that call, but its possible. We don't really explore that possibility from there, but in retrospect I wish we had  tried to get some psychological help if indeed that is what she needs.

     Fast forward to about 2.5 weeks ago, 1.5 years into the relationship, and this whole break up thing happened that I'm trying to cope with now. 2.5 weeks ago she breaks up with me out of nowhere by sending me a Facebook message saying she wants to break up because she feels like she is always "my audience"—i'm not entirely clear what that means, but I think basically that she feels like I’m not giving her enough attention. Keep in mind this is during finals week and I am in an intensive PhD program, so its not really reasonable to expect a lot of extra attention from me during this time. I found the whole thing to be incredibly disrespectful and demeaning, because we have been dating for 1.5 years and hanging out almost every day, and rather than wanting to work out whatever problems she had with the relationship, or at the very least break up with me in person, she just sends a FB message from her smartphone... .Following this, she doesn't talk to me for one week, until she sends me a text message saying that she is "only 23" and therefore cannot commit herself to me; to this I said, "is that your way of saying you want to date other people?"; she says "yeah, kinda." I request to please meet in person so we can talk about what she is feeling, but she refuses. A rather agonizing week passes, and I send her a message asking to meet in person again, saying that I have been hurt by how she handled the break up and I would just like to talk to her in person. She replies by saying that she has "no sympathy or pity" for me. I then confront her, and ask if this is happening because she hooked up with someone else—the break up occurred the day after she went to get drinks with her co-workers, so I figured that was a possible explanation. She comes clean and says yes, a co-worker kissed her and she made out with him. She says she took is to be "symptomatic" that our relationship wasn't working for her, and that she wants to date other people.

(continued below)

     

[heartbroken89]

     Hi, a lengthy post, I apologize, but I need to type this out, to process what is happening. I posted this on another forum for spouses of people with Bi Polar disorder, but the more I read about it the more I think my (ex) GF may have borderline personality disorder instead.  I don't know why I am trying to "diagnose" her like this, but I think I am just looking for solace and the explanation of mental illness would give me some understanding as to why this is happening.  Basically my girlfriend (F, 23) recently made out with another guy and then and broke up with me (M, 26), and for the last 3 weeks I have been absolutely devastated.  I would like to summarize the general arc of our relationship before I get to that part, so as to contextualize what has been happening.

     In retrospect, there have been a lot of red flags while dating her. I think I just chose to ignore them because of how loving and sweet she could be and how much I loved her. On our first date (1.5 years ago), she told me that she loved me... .I told her that she shouldn't say something like that because she can't possibly mean it, but she nonetheless insisted that she did. We went back to her place and had sex, which is atypical for me because I don't usually do one night stands, but she wanted to really badly so I acquiesced despite my anxiety. So from there things moved rapidly, after only a few days I basically started staying at her place all the time and we had a very intimate and physical relationship, though I was still uncomfortable about how overly clingy/loving she seemed after only a few days. By the end of week 1 she tells me that she wants to get married. I of course say no, thinking she is just being immature, but am flattered by how much she likes me. I am usually really anti-social, I have maybe 2 or 3 friends but that is it, and I hadn't dated for about 2 years, so even though things are moving so fast I am just glad to have found someone who likes me and wants to date... .it seemed really perfect in a way.

     Week 2 we are at a bar and she asks me if I want to have kids when i'm older; I say no and she gets really pissed out of nowhere, saying I am depriving her of her "biological right." We get into a fight and don't see each other for a day or two, but things cool off and she apologizes, I brush it off to her being drunk.

     Week 6, we are at a bar with her roommates. Like I said I am a pretty anti-social person, but I am trying my best to make conversation so as to not make a bad impression, and my GF just gets up and leaves the bar. I follow after her and apparently she is pissed at me because she thinks I was paying too much attention to her roommates... .while really I was barely saying anything, and I was being cordial so at to make a good impression for her sake; I figure she is just drunk so I walk her home, despite her protestations, and then go back to my place. Next day I get a call from her, she says she is going to kill her self by jumping out her bedroom window (she lived on the second story so I didn't take this too seriously... .); I tell her I need a few days and that she was unnecessarily cruel towards me. She then tells me that she told her roommates she is moving out of her apartment and is going to have to find a new one. She was on good terms with her roommates otherwise, she just impulsively decided to make a break from them out of nowhere, I think because she wanted to live with me instead... .

     Basically, against my better judgment, she persuades me to move in with her into this new apartment—I think I was really infatuated with her, and things had been good otherwise so I went ahead. This is weeks 9 or 10 that we move in together, so things are moving really fast obviously. The relationship becomes really intense and by around this time I tell her that I love her. Something I notice about her though is that whenever she drinks she becomes a radically different person, really impulsive, kind of cold, yet hyper-sexual. My friends don't really like her because she is controlling of my time and always pouts and becomes gloomy if I go to hang out with them. Whenever we go out to bars or shows, and my friends are around, she ends up getting pissed at me and has a kind of temper tantrum, like she's a little kid or something; its really embarrassing and annoying so I figure she must have a drinking problem. I tell her that I really love her but she needs to stop drinking or at least cut back if we are going to keep on being together.

     She agrees and things are ok for a while, she cuts out drinking for a little bit, but it doesn’t last long, and there is often an underlying menace to my interactions with her. For instance, when I tell her that I love her she often says things like "I don't believe you" or "how can I know that's true," and she complains that I am not affectionate enough when I actually spend pretty much all my free time with her cuddling and hanging out—its like she is this emotional black hole and no matter how much time I spend with her she is complaining I don't give her enough attention.  She gets mad because I won't tell her the password to my computer and email.  She also has this annoying habit of always making a point of telling me if a guy looked at her or talked to her or hit on her, as if to make me jealous and get an emotional rise out of me. Despite all this she is otherwise really sweet and loving, so I try to ignore these more unsettling aspects of her behavior.

     Around month 10 or 11 I move to another city for graduate school, and she comes with me. This time she gets her own apartment because I am living on campus. She was really disappointed about this, thinking that we were moving "backwards," but I thought it was for the best because of how fast things unfolded in the beginning. One weekend she goes out of town to visit her best-friend (female) and when she comes back she is really weird; Immediately upon returns from her trip, she is really distant and doesn’t want to talk. I take her out to a nice dinner and she is just kind of absent and not herself. When we head back to her place she starts talking about how she is sexually unsatisfied with me, which is a bit out of nowhere for me because at first she was telling me the sex is the best she's ever had, and she always orgasms when we have sex (in retrospect, I wonder now if she hooked up with someone when she was out of town, and that is what prompted this comment). We get into a fight and she drives me home; in the car she tells me that she is also really unsatisfied because she wants to have kids but I don't want any, and how she thinks I can't satisfy her needs. Things kind of blow up and she drops me off at my place, and we take a break for two weeks, not talking to each other.

     After two weeks we meet to talk about the relationship, and she is back to being super affectionate; it is bizarre, but its like nothing even happened as far as she is concerned and she acts super happy to see me, so we end up getting back together. She also drops the kid thing, and talks about how she thinks they are annoying. I really loved her at this point so I was glad to be back together, despite how weird it was that she was acting like nothing happened.

     Anyway, things persist like this, we have our usual ups and downs, and we have a few more incidents where she "blows up" in front of my friends when we go out, so at this point my friends pretty much hate her and I avoid going out to shows or bars with her. But otherwise things actually seem better overall and it feels like the break brought us closer together. Other than when she drinks the relationship is solid, and she acts super loving towards me.

She does confess to me after the break that she wonders if she is bi-polar; I say I don't know, I can't make that call, but its possible. We don't really explore that possibility from there, but in retrospect I wish we had  tried to get some psychological help if indeed that is what she needs.

     Fast forward to about 2.5 weeks ago, 1.5 years into the relationship, and this whole break up thing happened that I'm trying to cope with now. 2.5 weeks ago she breaks up with me out of nowhere by sending me a Facebook message saying she wants to break up because she feels like she is always "my audience"—i'm not entirely clear what that means, but I think basically that she feels like I’m not giving her enough attention. Keep in mind this is during finals week and I am in an intensive PhD program, so its not really reasonable to expect a lot of extra attention from me during this time. I found the whole thing to be incredibly disrespectful and demeaning, because we have been dating for 1.5 years and hanging out almost every day, and rather than wanting to work out whatever problems she had with the relationship, or at the very least break up with me in person, she just sends a FB message from her smartphone... .Following this, she doesn't talk to me for one week, until she sends me a text message saying that she is "only 23" and therefore cannot commit herself to me; to this I said, "is that your way of saying you want to date other people?"; she says "yeah, kinda." I request to please meet in person so we can talk about what she is feeling, but she refuses. A rather agonizing week passes, and I send her a message asking to meet in person again, saying that I have been hurt by how she handled the break up and I would just like to talk to her in person. She replies by saying that she has "no sympathy or pity" for me. I then confront her, and ask if this is happening because she hooked up with someone else—the break up occurred the day after she went to get drinks with her co-workers, so I figured that was a possible explanation. She comes clean and says yes, a co-worker kissed her and she made out with him. She says she took is to be "symptomatic" that our relationship wasn't working for her, and that she wants to date other people.

(continued below)

     

[heartbroken89]

(continued)

On the one hand, while this is all is really painful for me, I can understand that she is young and maybe just wants to date other people—it sucks from where I am standing, and I feel emotionally eviscerated right now, but I can at least understand that. But if this is the case then she has been seriously leading me on for a while. Further, it doesn't excuse the fact she made out with someone else when we were still together and were in an exclusive relationship, and then tried to blame it on the fact that she is unsatisfied. My general thought is that if one is unsatisfied in a relationship and it cannot be repaired, then they should end the relationship first, before seeking another partner (I know they only made out, but I am not sure If I can trust her when she says that's all it was, especially because the only reason she told me is because I called her out on it).

     On the other hand, what is absolutely bizarre about this is how absolutely loving she was towards me before this incident. Looking at our conversations from only two weeks before, she was sending almost overly effusive texts to me about how much she loves me, how precious I am to her, how her world revolves around me, and how all she wants is to protect me from pain and suffering in this world. Sort of bizarre things like this, but they are sweet so I never really question it. What I am struck by is how radically her attitude towards me shifted: one week she says she loves me and wants to spare me from pain, and then the next she is making out with someone else, breaking up with me out of nowhere in such a cold, alienating way over FB, not wanting to speak or meet with me and saying that she has no "sympathy" for me... .when I did absolutely nothing to her. It feels really emotionally jarring, especially because things were good when I saw her last, only a few days before the breakup. After hanging out with her for almost every day for the last 1.5 years, I feel like a best friend just unexpectedly died out of nowhere, and I never got to say goodbye to them... .but worse because I have to think about how she is actually just probably having sex with this random co-worker guy how she is probably now telling him she loves him... .

   Anyway, in the last two weeks I talked to a friend of hers, the friend who introduced us in the first place, and she told me that at a certain point my (ex)GF was planning on not taking her birth control so that she could become pregnant and I wouldn't break up with her... .pretty crazy, and I suppose I dodged a bullet. Also, she said that my ex-GF had, when with her last boyfriend, had done the same thing, making out with another person,  but she did it when he was actually present with her at a bar. My GF then moved to another city out of nowhere, and only told the boyfriend the day before, and only so as to break up with him. Pretty cruel and f***** up. And apparently when we went on our first date (where she told me she loved me... .), she had only been single for two or three days... .

     Despite all this I still really love her. It is hard to convey how special things felt when things were good between us, I’ve never felt such a deep connection with another person before. That is precisely what makes this so hard for me to comprehend though, how she can be so sweet and loving and then so cruel and unfeeling. If she is bi-polar, as she thought she might be, or if she has borderline personality disorder, then I would like to try and help her get whatever kind of help that calls for... .but she has shut me out at this point and is not talking to me. I am not sure how to interpret this then: is she just immature and an emotionally manipulative/abusive person who has been leading me on by telling me that she loves me all this time, in which case I should just walk away (as hard as it is), or is this some kind of cry for help from her and should I then try and get her some help, maybe talk to her parents, even if she does not want to see me? Does my (ex)GF sound like she might be have borderline personality disorder? iIf she does but If she broke it off, am I out of line if I want to try and get her help?  Should I tell her parents or her one or two remaining friends so they can try and intervene?  I feel like I could forgive her for what was just a drunken kiss (supposedly); rationally I know this is a bad idea but I miss her so much and if she wanted to work on things I would consider it.  To be honest i don't know if this is even an option though, it seems like she moved on immediately and has not been talking to me since then.  Whatever happens with our relationship, I still would like to help her, at the very least so she doesn't hurt other people like how she hurt me and so she can live a happier life. 

TLDR: my (ex)GF made out with another guy and broke up with me, but had been leading me on, acting really sweet and loving only a few days before; Lots of signs in the past point to her being unstable. Does she just sound immature, or does it seem like she has a serious issue, like being bi-polar or have borderline personality disorder? if she has an undiagnosed mental illness, but If she is the one who broke it off, am I out of line if I want to try and get her help?  Should I at the very least tell her friends (I can only think one or two she hasn't alienated herself from completely) or parents, so they can try and intervene? 

[Turkish]

Hello heartbroken89,

I'm sorry that your gf cheated on you like that. Cheating and infidelity are a huge betrayal, so hurtful. It's even more confusing when it seemingly comes out of nowhere like that, especially with her telling you she loves you. I can related to a lot of what you wrote (though my r/s went a little slower).

Further, it doesn't excuse the fact she made out with someone else when we were still together and were in an exclusive relationship, and then tried to blame it on the fact that she is unsatisfied.

I agree with this, and here is where our values conflict with that of a partner. My Ex cheated on me in the end even though for years  I had to hear how hurt she was that her father continually cheated on her mother, and that cheating was a "deal-breaker" if I ever did it to her. It took me a long time to fathom how she could do that.

One can't rule out emotional immaturity here, but the impulsivity and love-bombing do sound very BPD-like; the desire to be attached, to be loved and validated, often hyper-focused through physicality.  It's a typical progression of behaviors:

Article 1: How a Borderline Personality Disorder Love Relationship Evolves

If you want to explore understanding BPD better, see here:

Article 2: The Symptoms and Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder

It's obvious that you still care about her a lot, despite the cheating and she splitting you black. It's understandable that no matter if she suffers from a clinical-level disorder or not, that her behaviors aren't healthy for her, and of course for people she's in relationships with. Many of us, including me, desire that the pwBPD (people with BPD) in our lives seek help for what ails them. I still wish it for my Ex, largely in part because she is the mother of my children (she would gladly have gotten pregnant the first time we were together if I hadn't taken precautions). Also, because in a way I still care about her.

We have many members like you who desire to reach out to family members. Most of the time, it makes no difference, even if we get sympathy from the families. Blood is blood, in this case, and I can't imagine that her family is unaware of her issues. With some families, it's part of a whole unhealthy dynamic. With others, they just cope and accept the family member with BPD as best that they can.

We have a set of lessons to the right of this board---> which you may find helpful to go through in processing what happened, what is going on, and where to go next, heartbroken89. An impulsive person is a moving target, hard to come to grips with. Stepping back a bit and listing our core values (which make us who we are) and comparing them to the reality of what's happening on the outside can help .

Turkish

[JohnLove]

Hello heartbroken 89, I read your story with sadness. You sound like you have a lot going for you. You also appear to be in a BPD FOG.

Your post was long enough to explain things for me to suggest this is right out of the BPD playbook. Intimate relationships with a pwBPD tend to struggle at the 1.5 to 2 year point and kinda unravel. It's a little like the 7 year itch "normal" couples go through but on a faster timeline that BPD relationships evolve.

Love is a reciprocal arrangement where words and actions align. There is a somewhat mysterious prediction that I have noticed with pwBPD and when they say "silly" stuff like wanting to save you from the pain of the world shortly after they then cause it themselves with almost the foresight that it will happen, but then no guilt or introspection regarding their actions afterward. It is unnerving.

The tools on here can be of much assistance but honestly the best advice I could give you is to focus much more on yourself and far less on her. If she wants a relationship with you and you both have problems she will return. Dont confuse this with a BPD recycle where she returns to you because she is needy and the make out session/fling/sexual relationship with another male doesnt "work out" for her. There is a big difference.

You sound like a good articulate guy and there is a good woman out there that will provide you with what you need. Don't sell yourself short with a woman that is an emotional mess. BPD or not.