Coping with lies and false memories.

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

I am interested to hear how people deal with situations in which their SO with BPD either blatantly lies about some past event or something said, or have simply convinced themselves of a version of reality that is very much different from our version (which might not be totally accurate but is certainly a lot closer to the truth).

I think I face this situation on a daily basis regarding all manner of subjects. In fact, it is even worse than that. The events according to my partner get twisted that little further every time one of these issues come up. More and more (in her mind), she is in the right and she is the victim and my behaviour has been bad and I have persecuted her.

There are dozens of issues like this (some on very important topics) but let me provide a trivial example:

In the three years that I have lived with my pwBPD she has cooked a meal no more than 5 or 6 times. Those were in the earliest months that we were together. She has done the shopping once (and that was with me) and she has ordered shopping online twice. She has also once or twice driven to the golden arches to get us something to eat.

However, in her mind she has absolutely pulled her weight as far as putting some food on the table is concerned. Admittedly, I don't often cook in the sense that I follow some recipe that has me sweating in the kitchen for hours, more likely I will boil some pasta, fry of some mince and use a ready made pasta sauce, or I will put a frozen lasagna or pie in the oven, something like that. It is hard, I work full time, she has worked a grand total of 20 hours in the past three years and spends 95% of her life in bed.

Gradually, via a series of in-between steps, she has managed to convince herself that she is doing her share. The in-between steps went something like this:

i) she stopped cooking dinner for me because she was physically unwell

ii) she stopped cooking for me because I said I didn't like her cooking

iii) she shouldn't have to cook because she is never hungry

iv) I don't cook proper meals, so they don't count

v) her daughter cooks as much as I do

vi) she always used to cook when we got together

vii) she has provided as many meals for us, as I have

viii) she has put on weight because of our eating habits since we have been together

So, not for this particular example, but in general, how do you reason with your partner or extricate yourself from a conversation when your partner has this type of thinking?

[snowmonkey]

I am interested to hear how people deal with situations in which their SO with BPD either blatantly lies about some past event or something said, or have simply convinced themselves of a version of reality that is very much different from our version (which might not be totally accurate but is certainly a lot closer to the truth).

I think I face this situation on a daily basis regarding all manner of subjects. In fact, it is even worse than that. The events according to my partner get twisted that little further every time one of these issues come up. More and more (in her mind), she is in the right and she is the victim and my behaviour has been bad and I have persecuted her.

There are dozens of issues like this (some on very important topics) but let me provide a trivial example:

In the three years that I have lived with my pwBPD she has cooked a meal no more than 5 or 6 times. Those were in the earliest months that we were together. She has done the shopping once (and that was with me) and she has ordered shopping online twice. She has also once or twice driven to the golden arches to get us something to eat.

However, in her mind she has absolutely pulled her weight as far as putting some food on the table is concerned. Admittedly, I don't often cook in the sense that I follow some recipe that has me sweating in the kitchen for hours, more likely I will boil some pasta, fry of some mince and use a ready made pasta sauce, or I will put a frozen lasagna or pie in the oven, something like that. It is hard, I work full time, she has worked a grand total of 20 hours in the past three years and spends 95% of her life in bed.

Gradually, via a series of in-between steps, she has managed to convince herself that she is doing her share. The in-between steps went something like this:

i) she stopped cooking dinner for me because she was physically unwell

ii) she stopped cooking for me because I said I didn't like her cooking

iii) she shouldn't have to cook because she is never hungry

iv) I don't cook proper meals, so they don't count

v) her daughter cooks as much as I do

vi) she always used to cook when we got together

vii) she has provided as many meals for us, as I have

viii) she has put on weight because of our eating habits since we have been together

So, not for this particular example, but in general, how do you reason with your partner or extricate yourself from a conversation when your partner has this type of thinking?

[Cat Familiar]

Yowza. Definitely a different reality. Hard to say whether she is justifying her lack of participation or if she really believes this.

I've been through a similar situation and now I find myself on the other side. For years, I've done the bulk of the cooking. I was fine with this when my husband was working, but after he retired, I started to feel a bit used, since he had told me that he did all the cooking in his previous relationship.

He claimed incompetency when I asked him to do more than an occasional meal once or twice a month. He also said he didn't know how to cook the foods I eat, which is bullsh!t because he was married to a strict vegetarian and I have a much more varied diet than his ex; I eat fish as well as pasture raised beef.

Over time, I stopped cooking as much and now I cook three or four times a week and he has started to cook veggie tostadas. He makes such a big deal over how much work it is, even though I clean whenever he cooks and he makes a holy mess, even though it's such a simple dinner.

So tonight his story is that he cooks all the time! And that I'm unwilling to cook for him.

In the past, this sort of BS would make me angry and I'd try to set the record straight. Now it just amuses me, well it also still annoys me a bit too.

I don't know how pwBPD can have such a skewed take on reality, but they do.  

[Ceruleanblue]

I see this reality difference with BPDh, and also with his daughters, who hate me, and have convinced themselves that their lies about me are true. It's also possible that they realized they are lying, and just keep going with it. Either way, it's messed up.

I'm not sure how to best deal with it, and I deal with it too. It's NOT just perception though, as my therapist sometimes likes to say. I agree, everyone has different perceptions, and that's natural, but I feel those with PD create, or can see things not at all reality based. How do you deal with that? I've found the best way is just to not deal with it as much as is possible. His reality is real to him, even if it's not based on any actual reality or facts.

It's very frustrating though. The part that frustrates me the most is he tries to tell ME what I'm thinking, or feeling, or that I'm lying. He rarely believes me. His own therapist asked him "why don't you just believe her", and BPDh admits he's never caught me lying. I hate lies, and will only do it to spare someone's feelings. I used to try to state my truth, you know, when I was using S.E.T, but the "truth" part, my truth, always made him very angry. It's like if I don't agree to his "reality" he rages. It gets old.

[Lucky Jim]

More and more (in her mind), she is in the right and she is the victim and my behaviour has been bad and I have persecuted her.

Hey snowmonkey, Yup, that's the way it is.  In my experience, it's unlikely that you are going to convince your BPD SO that your version of reality is the accurate/truthful one, no matter how hard you try.  Perhaps you might want to review the Serenity Prayer?

Switching gears here, let me ask you a question: why do you stay?  Presumably you get something out of the r/s or you wouldn't have lived with your SO for the last three years.  What is it that keeps you in it?

LuckyJim

[snowmonkey]

Hi LJ,

That's the $64,000 question isn't it? That's why most of us are here I guess. I'm sure many people encounter pwBPD everyday, even enter into relationships with pwBPD, but I'm guessing that the vast majority of people walk away at a quite early stage of the relationship simply thinking that she's screwed in the head or maybe that she's just too much hard work (the term high maintenance springs to mind). And those that stay (us), well I guess there is something wrong with us in the sense that we allow this to happen to ourselves. There must be something wrong with someone who has accepted all that has transpired and knows that there is little chance that things will ever be normal again.

So my overarching answer to your question is that there is something amiss in my emotional/mental state that keeps me coming back for more pain and suffering.

How do I reason such a situation to myself? What is it that is going on in my head that allows this to keep going? Well, I guess I would offer all of the reasons below;

i) I am fearful of change and the unknown. What do they say? It is better the devil you know... .

ii) I don't like being on my own, I get bored, I get restless, I get lonely. Not that I really have spent time on my own, I'm 42 and have never been single for more than a couple of months since I was 15 or 16.

iii) When things were good, I'd never been loved like that. I feel that I will never have that again unless I am with her.

iv) My dreams and hopes for the future all include her.

v) I am haunted by the thoughts of her going off with another man. No matter how bad she is today and believe me, she is bad today, I know she will find the strength to pull herself together to be with someone else within a week, 2 at the most. Indeed, this happened in our 4 day breakup and seems to be a recurring theme for many who post here.

I think reason number v) is a really frustrating one. On the one hand I know she will always have BPD and thus, will never be able to have a wonderful relationship. But simultaneously, I know she can pull herself together temporarily, she is capable (when required and when she desires) to be that amazing person that made me initially fall so deeply in love with her.

[HurtinNW]

As others have said, I don't think you can change this. The question is how to navigate it.

One thing that has helped me is understanding the whole feelings = facts for a BPD/NPD.

If you wife feels something, she looks for evidence to support her feeling. Even if she has to create the evidence! Say she feels upset. She needs to feel like a victim. Her mind hunts for proof to support the feeling. People with disorders cannot accept mystery. They must have everything ordered into right and wrong, black and white. So she is feeling upset, looks for a reason. Bingo. Dinner! Now she begins collecting her evidence.

What if there is no evidence? She will create it.

For my ex, it was very important to him that he was the victim and I was the persecutor. This held true even if he was in fact persecuting me. He completely rewrote history to maintain his narrative. He would deny abusive things he had done, or reinvent it so it was, of course, my fault. For far too long I did the whole JADE thing of trying to argue with him. Doesn't work. It just caused more rages.

You ask how to reason with your partner about it. I don't think you can. It's like charging a machine gun nest with a plastic toy pistol. You can practice other tools here, such as not enabling or feeding the behavior.

You can also, as you describe, look at what keeps you enmeshed in the relationship. Hugs to you!   

[Lucky Jim]

Hello again, snowmonkey, Yup, that's the $64K question.  Though everyone's situation is a little different, I would venture a guess that most of us Nons have codependent tendencies.  Indeed, I think you have to be codependent to stay in a r/s with a pwBPD.  It runs with the territory, so-to-speak.  By codependent, I mean that you care more about meeting the needs of others than you do about taking care of yourself.  You put other first, to your own detriment.  You use caring for others as a way of avoiding self-care.  You look for your self-worth from others, rather than from within.

Does this sound familiar?  I'm guessing Yes.  Certainly those characteristics applied to me, before I emerged from the BPD swamp.  I was just as enmeshed as you, maybe more so, in the course of a 16-year marriage to my BPDxW.  I nearly destroyed myself physically, emotionally and financially.  If I had stayed, I would probably be dead.  If that sounds melodramatic, it's not.  Many here know exactly what I'm talking about.

You seem to have a lot of self-awareness so I think you have the ability to make necessary changes.  Only you can find the right path for you.  Suggest you listen to your gut feelings.

LuckyJim

[Moselle]

Hi Snowmonkey,

It sounds like you bave significant self awareness around your role in the dynamic.  Well done for that... Every relationship has its own  dynamic and level of dysfunction.  And each of us bave our reasons for staying. 

You mentioned that you havent been single for more than a few months since you were 15 or 16. Are there similarities between your exes?

[flourdust]

Been there, done that, read the book AND saw the movie.

One example that pops to mind is my wife's refusal to do laundry. When we divided up household chores, laundry was one of hers, because she didn't like how I did it.

But, over the past three years, as she began to break down, she stopped doing laundry. The phases went something like this:

1) I would ask her to do the laundry, she'd agree, then not do it.

2) I'd nag her, and she'd do it, but she wanted me to thank her profusely for doing a big favor.

3) I started doing the laundry. She rationalized that she had vertigo and couldn't bend down to get clothes out of the dryer. She would also point out times when she became dizzy and stumbled as proof that she was medically incapable of doing laundry.

4) She claimed that she was always on the verge of doing it, but I swooped in and did it first.

5) She said she was doing some laundry, just not when I could see. (Sure thing, Laundry Batman.)

6) She said she didn't want to do laundry. (This one was probably honest.)

7) She said she was offended and hurt that I would bring up chores and make up lies about her.

8) We separated, and she has her own place. She asked if she could bring her laundry over to do it to save money.  

The common elements are the need to avoid any accountability that might make them feel any shame or inadequacy ... .and indifference toward their own credibility with the constantly shifting stories.

[snowmonkey]

Hi all,

thanks for the responses. I do agree that there is little that can be done to convince a pwBPD that their reality is often far from the truth. This relates to something that I have been thinking about for a very long time.

My BPDgf refuses to accept a diagnosis of BPD despite having had two psychiatrists give such a diagnosis. In the reality of a pwBPD they are the victim, the issue is always with other people and how they have behaved and what they have said. If your mindset is so strong that you are always in the right and a victim, how could you possibly accept a diagnosis which fundamentally indicates that actually it is you that have the majority of the issues and are causing most of the problems?

One could go so far as to say that: if you believe that you have BPD and truly understand the nature of BPD, then you probably don't have BPD at all. It is almost a paradox, a pwBPD can't accept that they are 'wrong' and thus, can't accept that they have BPD.

@Moselle, apart from being pretty, mostly blonde and blue eyed there is not that much in common between them. Some have been family orientated, some not so, some have been very independent and others very relationship-orientated, some have been academic and others barely completed high-school, some have been English, Australian, German, Braziliian, some have been my age some have been younger, some have been sporty and others have been bookish. The last two have had the most in common (single mothers, from reportedly abusive exes, both were the youngest child from broken homes with grown up siblings, both had slept with me within hours of meeting, met both online, lived with both at a very early stage of our relationship, both imho have BPD).

[Lucky Jim]

One could go so far as to say that: if you believe that you have BPD and truly understand the nature of BPD, then you probably don't have BPD at all. It is almost a paradox, a pwBPD can't accept that they are 'wrong' and thus, can't accept that they have BPD.

Right, it is a paradox.  Sort of a Catch-22.  I would like to add some other paradoxes that I've observed in those w/BPD:

They want love yet behave in unloveable fashion.

They fear abandonment yet will push you away hard.

They seek stability yet will behave in chaotic fashion.

They crave attention, yet will hurt anyone who gives them attention.

They are quick to criticize, yet can't handle criticism.

They will try to convince you that the sky is green, even when you know that it is blue.

And on and on . . .

LuckyJim

[Grey Kitty]

snowmonkey, there are two problems here:

1. Your SO doesn't do anything about meals today.

2. Your SO has a long list of justifications and history modifications that back her up on issue #1.

My suggestion is to let problem #2 go. Forget about it. Sure, roll your eyes, and grumble here about it now and again. But acknowledge that you cannot change her mind, and if you convince her that one thing she says about it is false, another will pop up, making a dysregulated game of whack-a-mole out of it.

Stop playing whack-a-mole. You'll never kill them all!

So back to problem #1. How do you want to deal with it?

Are you willing to provide food in some form or other? Or divide the cooking responsibilities with her daughter?

Is having appropriate food for you and family to eat more important than her pulling her weight?

Look at those choices, look at your values.

[formflier]

 

And a suggestion to follow up Grey's post.

Provide and serve your family, let the food thing go.  Just do it.

Here is the key.

Do it on your terms and in a way that you can best do it.

Do NOT cater to the whims of a pwBPD that won't pull their weight.

What does this look like?  You set the menu and the schedule.  If she wants to influence that, let her know you are willing to give up cooking on a few nights to meet her desires.

Put the choices back in her hands.

Grey, I like the whack a mole analogy, it is so true.  I wacked a couple this morning, and they kept coming.  Once I quit focusing on the moles, and focused on emotions, she eventually relaxed.

FF

[snowmonkey]

Hi GK and FF,

thanks for your input. It isn't really that she doesn't cook that is the problem. If you look at my first post I say that this is just one of many issues for which her perception of reality is way off. And some of the others ARE more important and not solvable by just putting food on the table every night of my life.

I guess I am looking for a technique or a strategy that in general will help her gain insight. I don't expect to sit there and argue with her about some matter or another and her to suddenly say "yes, you are right, what was I thinking?". I'm hoping we can talk about things and she would go away and reflect on the conversation and start to question herself.

But, I guess I am asking too much. More like she will go away and ruminate on things and find even more reasons for why she is right and why I am wrong.

[gotbushels]

Hi snowmonkey. I used to cook for my ex. Anger = dysregulate + violence = I should just cook. So I can guess what you're feeling from time to time.

I guess I am looking for a technique or a strategy that in general will help her gain insight.

[... .]

But, I guess I am asking too much.

You might be asking too much to magically make a BP "get insight". But if a my BP is lying to me and using false memories, isn't the one that needs insight me? I hope this is helpful. I saw my lack of clarity as the big problem with this. So I'd like to help by making two suggestions.

1) Calendaring. Write down when specific events happen in a private calendar. I strongly recommend it. I took this advice and it helped me massively. I simply calendared specific problems that I pre-defined, so it was very easy to do.

2) Chain analysis. It's more complex, but it helps you see details, get clarity, see what is a fake memory, and it shines when someone is lying to you.

How to Do a Chain Analysis to Change Problem Behaviors. The "how to" is for PTSDs, but the technique itself is and has been applied both nons and pwBPDs.

www.ptsd.about.com/od/selfhelp/ht/fxanalysis.htm

If you aren't convinced on its application for "non"s, here's a doctor describing how he used it to troubleshoot with his team:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvI6qstjdn8

If you want a song about how good it is, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbFGsZ16aRQ

Good luck!

[formflier]

I guess I am looking for a technique or a strategy that in general will help her gain insight. 

Wrong goal!  You want to change the dynamic in your r/s.  You can do this, all by yourself.

We can't guarantee exactly what she will change in response to your change, but she WILL change.  If you are using good tools and reinforcing good behavior, then it is likely she will change for the better.  Especially if she is in counseling.

And, food is a great one to do because it is not the most important.  You will mess up at first.  But you will learn.

Once you have mastered some skills then, and only then, should you try them on the more important stuff.  If you go for the gusto now, without mastering the skills, she will eat you for lunch and you will be worse off.

How does this sound to you?

FF

[APB0613]

I am incredibly hurt and angry because of the lies and false memories. My uBPDxbf left me for an older woman (our next door neighbor) before leaving we had one last conversion in which he said i abandoned him. I hadn't. All i had left to give was my love and support. I couldn't continue  contributing financially to his problems which i guess is what he really needed money to get out of legal trouble. I had taken out loans to help in the past that he never helped pay off and now my wages are being garnished and I'm struggling to make ends meet. In his world I'm refusing to help i want to see him fail. This is going back to feelings=fact. There was no reasoning with him. He didn't even offer to be there for me in my time of need bc it was never about us and our 5 year relationship or our home it was all about him and his needs.  I'm struggling letting go it's been maybe a month NC and all i want to do is reach out to him or his family to tell the truth but i know i shouldnt. Any insight as to how to let this go? I know he's spreading lies about me and why he left. It just isn't fair that he gets a clean slate with another woman while I'm an empty shell of the person i used to be.

[Grey Kitty]

thanks for your input. It isn't really that she doesn't cook that is the problem. If you look at my first post I say that this is just one of many issues for which her perception of reality is way off. And some of the others ARE more important and not solvable by just putting food on the table every night of my life.

I get that you WANT that so badly it is tearing you apart. And I'm telling you that you can accept that, or fight it, but it isn't going to change.

Work on things you can control, like your own behavior. You *might* be able to control your own thoughts or feelings a little bit, but that is nearly impossible. Just nudging them a little bit is a big job, and can actually make a big difference.

You cannot control how she's thinking. You can't make her understand anything. She may get there. She may not get there. If she does figure it out, it is up to her whether it takes an hour for her to "get" it or a decade.

You have full control over your choice whether to throw together a quick dinner tonight, grab take-out tonight, or just go to bed hungry because you don't feel like bothering.

You have full control over what you say to her about cooking, how you respond if she tries to justify why she's not cooking, etc.

Her perception doesn't match reality. It isn't your job to fix that. It is your job to live with it, or decide you can't live with it. If you are willing to try living with it, we have tools here to make it work better. And some of them even help get her closer to reality a tiny bit. If you let her turn things into a fight between you and her about the nature of reality, you both get stuck in that fight... .and she is too busy to even consider whether the world is behaving the way she thinks it is or not!

[Claycrusher]

I am interested to hear how people deal with situations in which their SO with BPD either blatantly lies about some past event or something said, or have simply convinced themselves of a version of reality that is very much different from our version (which might not be totally accurate but is certainly a lot closer to the truth).

I developed a habit, early on, of journaling the facts as I percieved them with respect to my BPDw's episodes of dysregulation.  This proved helpful to me in dealing with the "gaslighting" behaviors she engaged in while trying to get me to "buy in" to her alternate reality.  It still is.  I don't just journal what she says and does, but what I said and did, too.  The point isn't really to help her, and it never was.  It is to help me keep my sanity in the face of her gaslighting, splititng, and projection behaviors.

I think I face this situation on a daily basis regarding all manner of subjects. In fact, it is even worse than that. The events according to my partner get twisted that little further every time one of these issues come up. More and more (in her mind), she is in the right and she is the victim and my behaviour has been bad and I have persecuted her.

Yeah, I know I face it on a daily basis, too.  She twists facts pretty much daily, over things great and small.  Journaling helps me stay true to my perception of them and not get mired in her false and highly labile reality.

In the three years that I have lived with my pwBPD she has cooked a meal no more than 5 or 6 times. Those were in the earliest months that we were together. She has done the shopping once (and that was with me) and she has ordered shopping online twice. She has also once or twice driven to the golden arches to get us something to eat.

However, in her mind she has absolutely pulled her weight as far as putting some food on the table is concerned. Admittedly, I don't often cook in the sense that I follow some recipe that has me sweating in the kitchen for hours, more likely I will boil some pasta, fry of some mince and use a ready made pasta sauce, or I will put a frozen lasagna or pie in the oven, something like that. It is hard, I work full time, she has worked a grand total of 20 hours in the past three years and spends 95% of her life in bed.

Gradually, via a series of in-between steps, she has managed to convince herself that she is doing her share. The in-between steps went something like this:

i) she stopped cooking dinner for me because she was physically unwell

ii) she stopped cooking for me because I said I didn't like her cooking

iii) she shouldn't have to cook because she is never hungry

iv) I don't cook proper meals, so they don't count

v) her daughter cooks as much as I do

vi) she always used to cook when we got together

vii) she has provided as many meals for us, as I have

viii) she has put on weight because of our eating habits since we have been together

So, not for this particular example, but in general, how do you reason with your partner or extricate yourself from a conversation when your partner has this type of thinking?

I've lived a similar adventure.  For half of our marriage, she did zero cooking, zero grocery shopping, zero domestic chores.  I was self-employed at the time and had the flexability with my time to keep my career obligations met and keep up my work output and be "Mr. Mom" at the same time, and I didn't mind at all.  I'd be scrubbing toilet bowls and shower enclosures whether I was cohabitating with anyone else or not, and I enjoy cooking, always have, and am very good at it.  During that time, she quickly rose through the ranks to hold a very demanding senior management position in the homebuilding industry, and worked a lot of 12 hour days, with communiting times making for an even longer workday.  She really did have her work cut out for her just going to work.  Anybody would have, disordered or not. 

But when she lost her job to the burting housing bubble and we moved half-way across the country for a lower cost of living neighborhood, I took on a job in the health care industry primarily to secure health care benefits.  I worked in the clinical care enviornment 12 hours a day, AND still kept my self-employment gig going.  Iwas essentially working two more than full-time jobs.

She did nothing. Our paradigm had changed, but she didn't change with it.  It took nearly two years to get her take on household running, but her idea of taking it on was to have seven and nine year olds scrubbing toilets and cleaning showers and doing laundry and vaccuming and mopping floors and so on, including doing a lot of their own cooking.  Once I found out all of that was going on, I convinced her that delegating these tasks to minor children who shouldn't be allowed near household chemicals or kitchen equipment without close supervision was not a tenable option.

A few years of domestic engineering was enough to convice her to make the unilateral decision to return to college when she did.

In the aftermath of my BPDw's latest attempt at marital infidelity on December 21st of 2015, I immediately seperated our finances and undertook all of the grocery shopping and weekend meal preperation.  I do some of the weekday meal prep, too, by cooking meals in advance so all that needs to be done is "heating and serving."  Our chidren fend for themselves two days out of the week due to my BPDw's school schedule.  But over the weekend, I tell them what I've planned for them to prepare and what order their two meals need to be prepared in, e.g., which one has to get prepared on Tuesday and which ones can wait until Wednesday.  I try to give them a choice of two options for Wednesday and leave it up to them to pick. 

This current arrangement wasn't for her sake, but for mine.  If we wind up in divorce court after all, I will have a record from January 1, 2016, of all household expenses coming from my earnings -housing payments, utility payments, food, clothing, and other miscellaneous costs.  Basically, I'm living my life as though I am a single parent to three depenent children instead of two.  I set this routine up in order to be well prepared to cope with single parenthood in the aftermath of divorce, but it works just fine while my college co-ed BPDw remains in my home and we remain legally married.  Stuff needs to get done whether she is able or willing to do any of it, or not, and it will still need to get done whether we continue to cohabitate, or not.  And if we do stay married, when she graduates with her degree achieved in the very near future, she will be likely landing a job very similar to the last one she held in the homebuilding industry.  In fairness to her, when that happens, she'll have enough on her plate just going to work, doing what she has to do there, and getting back home again.  That's all anybody would have time for, disordered or not.  So the routine should work well if we stay married, too.

Basically, I've set thing up for household running so that she need not be involved in any of it beyond doing her own laundry and cleaning up after herself in the kitchen.  Oddly, my bathrooms have never been as hospital clean as they are now.  To her credit, she has taken on the duty of keeping the bathrooms looking great, even though she has been officially relieved of the duty.  When her studies and part time job aren't in her way, she's actually doing some household chores even though she's been relieved of all of them beyond doing her own laundry.  The latest one she's undertaken is tending to our bedding and keeping it freshly changed.  She hasn't had some sudden dose of empathy, though.  To her, these chores are the closest to enjoyable, and they help her keep boredom at bay.  She flat-out admits that she does them more for her own sake than mine, but seems pretty sincere when she says that she is glad if her doing them lifts my burden a little.  I'm not too proud to let her know that her doing these chores actually lifts my burden a lot.  She's a more efficient bathroom cleaner than I am, taking about half the time I do to get the same result, something I am also happy to concede to her. 

Anyhow, in my situation, if she never cooks a lick going forward, that won't be the end of the world to me.  I'm a more effecient grocery shopper than she is and our monthy food bill is subtantionally lower than I am in charge of it again, and there is less waste.  I actually enjoy cooking and she, with rare exceptions, loathes it.  Lots of non-disordered people feel the same way about the thing.  I'm just working one full-time job now, so I have plenty of time to do all of the Mr. Mom stuff and don't really neeed her help with any of it.  I'm grateful for it when she does offer it, though.