struggling with her revelations

[dobie]

One of the hardest things to hear and deal with was her confession numerous times after the BU that she had not loved me for over a year  :'(

Looking back at her behaviours this seems to fit but I find it extremely painful and feel so naive for being duped esp as she admitted early on in our r/s she did and felt the same toward her ex  

[Mister Brightside]

Anecdotal evidence, but the BPD I was involved with told me she wasn't in love with her ex-husband, and they were only married for two months! I asked her why she married him then. I don't remember her exact answer, but I'm sure it felt comfortable for her to have someone.

Her ex ended up in jail (which spurred the divorce), but she was upset he didn't get her pregnant first so that she wouldn't be alone. How messed up is that, wanting a child from a criminal you don't even love just so she won't feel alone. Quite extreme.

[cosmonaut]

Hey dobie.  I just wanted to say that  I'm sorry things have been so painful for you lately.  Hang in there, my man.  Things will get better with time.  Keep posting and keep letting it out about how you feel.  You've been making some ace realizations about things.  Keep going, buddy.

P.S.  Remember this is not your fault.

[jhkbuzz]

One of the hardest things to hear and deal with was her confession numerous times after the BU that she had not loved me for over a year  :'(

Looking back at her behaviours this seems to fit but I find it extremely painful and feel so naive for being duped esp as she admitted early on in our r/s she did and felt the same toward her ex  

Their emotional dysregulation leads them to love bomb - and then to devalue and detach.  Hot, then cold. It's part of the disorder.  DON'T feel naive - you weren't "duped."  This is the truth: you couldn't imagine that her emotional landscape existed because it's so very different from your own. That's not your fault.

On some level, I think pwBPD often recognize that their emotional landscape is not like everyone else's.  How in the world do you go from being completely in love to feeling nothing?  Sometimes I think they hang onto r/s's because they recognize this - at least I think my ex did. She wanted to be able to show the herself (and her family) that she was capable of a successful relationship - even as she had sex with other people.

That kind of behavior is not even on my radar to imagine. Don't feel bad that it wasn't on yours.

[Achaya]

I think that when pwBPD say "I don't feel anything for you," or "I love you but am no longer in love with you," they aren't talking about the same experience most non BPD people are having when they say the same words. I have been involved with more than one BPD partner in my life, and have lived with the misfortune of being attracted to them. (Yes, I am working on this very hard!) Anyway, I have had the experience of a former BPD lover come back after many years and tell me that the terrible things he said to me were not true. He said he "ran away" because he couldn't deal with his feelings about me, which were intensely ambivalent. At the time I was sure he was just back for a recycling in midlife, because he had married someone else after he stopped seeing me, and now they were alienated from each other. I challenged him about this, and he managed to tell me some detailed things that convinced me that he had progressed in his life and was contacting me to tell me the truth. It was a healing truth for me. I had prior to this been thinking that when this man left me, he was in a dissociated state and could not feel his actual emotions about me. What he himself told me about his understanding of what happened between us strengthened my belief that he was emotionally dissociated at the time he ended our relationship. Nevertheless, it also is true that he married another woman and stayed married to her for almost two decades before he called me. Even if I had known that he was pushing me away because of his fears I could not have reached him and induced him to come back to me. And I also know now that this was a good thing in the long run for me. During his midlife phone call to me he disclosed that he still drank as heavily as he had done when we were students in our 20's. He was handling the problems in his marriage by having girlfriends on the side. So, even though he said he was stronger and healthier than he had been earlier in his life, he had not outgrown some serious problems with his functioning.

That's a long drawn out way of making the point that what we are talking about when we say "I love you" or "I am not in love with you anymore" is not what people with BPD might mean when they say those things. Based on what people with BPD have told me, however, when they are saying words like "I don't feel anything towards you" they actually feel that way and they equate that feeling with the whole reality of the relationship.