new member - my story

[Lagarto]

Hi all,

I am new to this forum and I am going through a really tough time recovering from my most recent breakup with my ex-gf “Cathy”, whom I now suspect has many of the traits of Borderline Personality, although I didn't know a thing about BP until only last week! (We broke up for the second time just over two months ago). I am purposely refraining from calling her personality a disorder because I am not a psychologist, I can’t diagnose her. I am currently suffering the silent treatment – she is not responding to any letters, texts, or calls, and for the time being I am doing my best not to contact her, no matter how badly I want to – I still love her immensely. In an attempt to gain closure after this emotionally tumultuous relationship which left my self-esteem in the dumps, I will write up the whole story about our relationship. I hope that by writing this all down and sharing it with the community, maybe someone else will benefit as well. And of course I am still just trying to make sense of it all. Especially whether or not she really is a borderline – again I am not a psychologist – but reading about it online, she definitely demonstrated many classic borderline traits, particularly the fear of abandonment, lashing out in anger, drinking, obsession with her appearance, blaming, projection, splitting, manipulation, and possibly verbal/emotional abuse. Of course she also has a very fun, sweet, loving, caring side too that attracted me in the first place – and our sex life was fantastic – that’s what makes it so hard for me to let go and move on. Her good side dominates most of the time, but when she gets triggered or upset, a darker side emerges. I think she is what some would call a “high-functioning” BP who successfully maintains a good career and many close friendships (even her closest friends don't seem to see her darker side), but she certainly suffered in her previous romantic relationships and relationships with co-workers and family. Certainly she is not nearly as bad as many of the horror stories I have read online – I had it relatively good – but she was still a very difficult person to have a healthy relationship with based on mutual respect and trust! However, I am feeling VERY MUCH in love with her still, and it is agonizing to have her out of my life now. I believe my love for her is genuine love, not infatuation – I always trusted her (never worried she would betray me) and always felt a deep respect for her. I’m not sure, however, if she really trusted and respected me, although I believed this to be true when we were together.

This is a story of how romantic love went wrong, both through my addictive personality and her emotional rawness. It is pretty long, I’ll warn you.

Disclaimer: Like any human being I am definitely not perfect, not even close. I can be very aloof, sometimes selfish, sometimes passive-aggressive. But deep down I try not to be a selfish person. I have an addictive personality and marijuana was/is my drug of choice. I started smoking weed occasionally when I was 14 years old, regularly when I was 18 (I am 31 now). I used it frequently to cope with stress and loneliness, or to help me focus on writing/reading, or just to chill. Although I am what I consider to be a “high-functioning stoner,” that is, I was very successful in getting top grades, getting into grad school, and succeeding academically, later this bad habit of mine would prove to be a big problem in our relationship and in my personal life – at least according to her (I didn’t really feel like it was that big a problem myself, at least at first, now I take a different view). Essentially, I don’t want to pretend that everything was her fault, I want to take responsibility for where I messed up too, and this was and still is a personality flaw of mine. I’m sure her take on all these events would be much different!

A bit about myself. I am a mellow, mostly even-tempered, shy, nerdy, introverted, essentially nice guy. I suffered from low-self esteem especially in middle school, high school, and early college, I had trouble making friends sometimes. I came “out of my shell” when I was 20 and studied abroad in Australia. Being on my own, scuba diving with sharks on the Great Barrier Reef and catching snakes in the bush, and having my first intimate relations with women, really got me passionate/confident about life in a way I never experienced as an adolescent. My parents divorced when I was 20 when my dad had an affair, which was tough on the family and shook my faith in the institution of marriage a bit. Later in college and graduate school I quickly gained self-confidence and was more and more successful in my dating life and making friends. I majored in marine biology, then went to graduate school to earn my master’s and then PhD in evolutionary biology. I researched lizards in Baja California, Mexico, and I was/am very passionate about my research and especially nature conservation. I was overall pretty happy when I met Cathy, but deep inside, I was rather lonely after exiting my last tumultuous relationship with an ex-gf with depression/bipolar disorder (maybe BP too) and looking for a stable girlfriend to eventually marry and have children with.

[Lagarto]

PART I: THE HONEYMOON PHASE

How did it all begin? It started in February 2013, when I met Cathy at a dinner party with mutual friends in San Diego, California, where we lived at the time. I never believed in love at first sight until I saw her. There was this absolutely beautiful, tall, curvy, well-dressed, well groomed blonde woman sitting across from the table from me. Right off the bat I was hooked! Not only was she stunningly beautiful, but the way she looked into my eyes and hung onto my every word just enthralled me. After dinner we went outside and I got her phone number. From that day on, she was a central figure in my life whom I thought of many, many times a day.

We went through a rapid romance, an intense honeymoon phase. Our first kiss two weeks later was magical. We went on amazing romantic dates together, I was on cloud nine, the happiest I have ever been. She was an ICU nurse, I felt that she was such a good person who helped other people, I thought that she was THE ONE for me. After a month of dating we slept together for the first time. My sex life hit a whole new level – it was fantastic. The best I’ve ever had, hands down. I felt a sense of deep contentment and happiness that I never felt before. I had so much respect for her as a person too – I felt like in many ways I wasn’t really worthy of such a “prize” that I almost had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming! I felt like that nerdy kid in high school that actually got the hottest girl on the cheerleading team – too good to be true. How could I, a lowly grad student, get such a great-looking, fun, intelligent professional woman who helped save peoples’ lives for a living? Looking back, I am beginning to see that this attitude of mine, putting her on a pedestal, was part of the problem. She became used to it – she was already used to being the center of attention and adulation – but it was unsustainable in the long-term.

A great early memory was when I was teaching a zoology lab at the university and I took her along on a field trip to the desert with my students and professor. Along with the students, I taught her about the lizards and snakes that inhabited the desert, she loved it. We had a blast together!

In the first few months I learned more about Cathy and her history. I found out she just got out of a toxic relationship only a few weeks before I met her. She played hard to get a little bit. She told me about how her father left the family when she was a little girl, how she went through abusive situations when she was a child, especially how her brother was physically beaten by her mom’s new boyfriend (who she suspected was actually her real father). Her mom stole her and her brother away to the Caribbean for a few years as a child, during that time she witnessed her mom getting hooked on cocaine and dealt with neglect and abuse. She told me about her DUI that she got the previous year. She told me about her ex-boyfriends and all their flaws. She was with one guy for five years, but he was an alcoholic/diabetic who had a kid with another woman. (Only recently she admitted that they cheated on each other chronically, although she didn’t divulge this at the time). At one point she got drunk with friends and jumped off a bridge into the river and concussed herself. It was not a suicide attempt, just rash impulsive behavior. She spent a lot of time babysitting her boyfriend’s kid before she decided to run away to San Diego and leave all that drama behind (a year or so before I met her). In San Diego, she began intensive therapy but dated some asss too. She seemed like a cute little bird with a broken wing, who needed a good/loving guy to take care of her. I thought that guy was me. After all, I thought I was the nice, loyal, “good” guy right? One day in early June 2013, after she divulged a lot to me about her difficult past, her emotional heartbreaks and trauma, I told her I loved her, and she said she thought she was falling in love with me too.  She made me feel great about myself, called me her “tall, dark, and handsome man” in that loving tone that made my heart melt.

A couple weeks later was my 29th birthday. Cathy took me on a hike in north San Diego county, to the top of a mountain. We found a coast horned lizard, pretty rare to find these days, one of my absolute favorite species of lizards! She told me that she looked up online where to find these lizards, and was really hoping we could see one together. I was so touched that she did this for me!

The next month we went east (she was from Pennsylvania), and my grandfather just passed away, I went to his service in Cleveland too. I was really upset and she was very comforting in helping me deal with this loss. She met my family, I met her family, we watched the fireworks together. Everything was good, except for the passing of my grandfather of course, but her love and companionship made it easier to deal with. The romance continued.

In August 2013 was perhaps the most romantic period of our entire relationship. By this point we had been together six months, were in love, wildly in love. We had yet to have a single “real” fight – only minor disagreements. I took her on a road trip from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, Baja California, Mexico. Over 1,500 miles down the remote desert roads/highways in my 4x4 pickup in search of lizard specimens for my dissertation project. Perhaps the best day was when I took her swimming with the whale sharks in Bahia de los Angeles. She was afraid of the ocean, had never been snorkeling before, yet she jumped off the boat with me in deep water a half-mile offshore to swim with SEVEN giant whale sharks! She was terrified, yet she trusted me enough to do it, clinging to my arm like a remora! Her trust in me in that moment only heightened my love for her. After that we camped in the desert, under the stars, with the Perseid meteor shower on the new moon giving us a magical, spectacular display overhead. Nothing but desert silence punctuated by the howl of coyotes, isolation from civilization, and love. We off-roaded 120 miles through the desert without seeing another human being. We made love in the sea, it was amazing. Even today I regard that as the best 24 hours of my life!

We made it down to La Paz, where we met my dad, my brother, and their girlfriends. The six of us hopped on a rented sailboat for a week-long cruise to several islands in the Sea of Cortez in search of lizards for my research. Things went pretty well, although we ran into mechanical difficulties with the boat, and my dad was yelling and getting huffy, there was a lot of tension with six people on a boat for a week. (My dad is not an easy man to get along with sometimes, he can be very authoritative and short-tempered, in this respect the opposite of my passive self – don’t get me wrong, I love him to pieces and greatly respect him though). We caught a mahi-mahi trolling and we made ceviche, but we probably didn’t let it marinate in the lime juice long enough, everyone got a bit sick from eating it. We went ashore a desert island, we took a selfie together, later framed, that represents the best part of our relationship. We swam with the sea lions, she was bitten by a velvet ant (a wingless wasp) that really hurt, yet she was such a trooper about it!

At the end of the sailing trip I saw the first red flag that was a sign to come of our difficulties. It had been a rough night before, we had anchored our boat in a place that wasn’t too sheltered, as the easterly windswell picked up the boat started rocking violently, my dad was yelling, so we went ashore and camped on the beach. In the morning there were sea turtle tracks on the beach, I was so excited! We walked down to the end of the beach to a big granite outcrop. I had to pee, I was a bit shy about it, so I sneaked around the backside of the boulder for a minute. Next thing I know, she is storming down the beach like an upset child, throwing things and stomping away! What the hell happened? Turns out while I was peeing she encountered a swarm of bees (but wasn’t stung), and was furious I wasn’t there to “protect” her. But really I think the stress of the past couple days had really gotten to her. I didn’t really know how to handle this sudden rage! She gave me the silent treatment for a couple hours, drinking tequila, but once we made it back to the marina and had a margarita by the pool, things seemed to return to normal. The rest of the trip seemed to go by OK, and when she flew back up to San Diego to return to work, she left me a very sweet note, saying every day she was falling more and more in love with me.

I returned to San Diego and for the next few months the honeymoon phase continued. Often times I would meet her in the morning after work, she would smoke a cigarette and have a glass of wine at 8 in the morning, while I had my coffee, then before she went to work at 6 in the evening she would have her coffee while I drank a beer and/or smoked a little pot after work. Massages, great sex, great dates, hanging out with mutual friends, partying, enjoying life together.

She came home to my mom’s house for Christmas and it went pretty well. We went to the golden gate bridge, Point Reyes to see the elephant seals, and Muir woods to see the redwoods. Not too much drama that I can remember. Except when I shaved off my short-cropped beard and she totally freaked out. I was cut off from sex until it started to grow back to stubble. She could hardly even kiss me. I felt ashamed of how I looked without a beard.

By the time our first anniversary rolled around in February 2014, I was already considering proposing to marry her! However, she started criticizing me more and more for smoking marijuana, I felt more and more ashamed of my addiction/dependency/habit (whatever it is). In February 2014 I decided to take a break from it, but it was a real struggle to break a long-ingrained habit, and I was ultimately unsuccessful. I did manage to quit for about a month though. At this time, she was also (unsuccessfully) attempting to quit smoking cigarettes and was quite snappy herself. I began to see more and more that she also struggled with drinking, she used it to cope with her very stressful job as a night-shift ICU nurse.

[Lucky Jim]

Hey Lagarto, Welcome!  You have come to the right place.  We really get it when it comes to BPD.  Your story sounds familiar.  Do you have any specific questions or issues that we might be able to help you with?  LJ