First time my girlfriend having a shutdown towards me this long

[naakrakeb]

Hello everyone,
My BPD partner of two months, I mean we we are not official yet but we're getting serious with our relationship and our commitments and also we are best friends for three years and in the last couple of months she told me that she had feelings for me and then my feelings also evolved, and I noticed that I was being jealous when she was dating someone else, he was her FP and she told me she wasn't in love and still flirting with me, but he cheated and she was traumatized because she got cheated on in her previous relationships as well, so it was really difficult for her, then since we were best friends for a couple of years, I was always there for her, always listening to her, always comforting, supporting and eventually I figured out and educated myself have to talk to a BPD person so I was really good at it and then we started to get serious. I also became her FP but we were emotionally attached and i was her anchor. We were acting like boyfriends and girlfriends, but also not being official because we had distance (we were in different countries) and we had also met during my Erasmus. Like i said we were best friends for years then she told me she had feelings for me and even told her friends and family, even introduced me on video calls. she was telling me i was the first person that she was in in love with, and it was since the first time we met but she bottled those feelings up.
I don't know if it was the part of idealization, but she was always flattering me. She was telling me that she doesn't deserve me. She will hurt me because she always sabotage her relationships, but I had faith in our relationship because I was the first healthy partner in her life and I was doing everything right. Whenever she wanted space, I respected that and whenever she wanted to talk, I was always there and I was showing my love no matter what, we had healthy boundaries as well so we actually had a stable relationship (as much as possible), but she has also coke addiction and to cope up with that she became a Xanax addict, and sometimes she use both of them and sometimes she self harms, and all of these combined messes her mind up and she became dissociated and she tells me that she feels empty she doesn't feel real and stuff and while she was feeling like that one of the nights, I was feeling sleepy and she didn't ask for a call like she usually does when she needs me so I thought maybe it wasn't that bad so I said I was going to try to sleep because I was tired that day and then she told me good night and she told me that she will try to find another person to call (sometimes she does that because she can't sleep because of insomnia and all those drug combinations and can't stay alone) and I said 'okay, I'm waiting for you, if you can't find anyone else I will stay awake and we can have a call.' (because that's also another thing I usually do I stay awake for her till morning even though we have two hour differences) she said she found someone and it was one of her exes and I said 'why are you calling your ex? We can have a call' and then she went silent and I said 'okay nevermind, have fun' and then she sent me a screenshot after an hour of a call another female friend to comfort me. In the morning I wanted to express how I felt and why I was hurt because I didn't want our exes to become alternatives when we can't talk to each other, but I didn't accuse or didn't get angry. I was just explaining my feelings without pointing fingers and after that she said 'sorry I don't have time for this' and I said 'okay' and didn't push it. Then we haven't had a word for two days because I was waiting for her to contact me then after two days I sent her another text 'Can we talk when you feel ready? I've been thinking about you and I want to know you're safe' and after three days still nothing and then I sent another text saying 'I'm confused by the silence. I care about you, but this is the first time you disappear for days without saying a word and i don't know what is going on. I respect if you need more time to talk to me but even a short message to let me know you’re okay would mean a lot' and after a day still no responses and it's been six days without any communication and this is the first time we had this and yesterday she posted some selfies she was all dressed up and make up (but I think it was a mask because she looks so tired and her eyes didn't look alive) and at night I was stalking her Instagram account because I have anxious attachment and I saw that her followers and followings were going up so she was socially online, but she just didn't want to talk to me and I am upset because in 11 days I will go there for seven months we even made future plans and she was crying to me like how she needed me there so we were making this dream come true and I know how she wanted to be with me and I know how good I will be for her and she showed every affection every loving expression to me, so that's why I don't think it's anything about idealization or any other fake emotion. I really believe that she loves me and her feelings are real but too intense because i am the safest relationship she had she said. That's why she feels scared to lose me deeply I mean, that's how I interpret this kind of shutdown and avoidance right now.
Like I said, this the first time we are going through something like this because in the past, we always talked about our feelings about the problems and we always solved them by talking and she was also mostly understanding because i didn't overwhelm her but this time I think I triggered some shame and guilt more than before because ex issues have always been the main topic of our arguments.
I told her that it is about respect and boundaries and also that there is only one thing to ruin this relationship and it's cheating and I think she acknowledge that but she sometimes think that I don't trust her because in the past she got cheated on and then she cheated on the partners who cheated on her so I think my mind is following a pattern so every time we have a problem i het the feeling that she will cheat on me, that's why I become insecure, and every man around her is a trigger for me, even though I'm not usually a jealous person, but with her, I'm always alarmed. And also when the drugs are involved, she is like a zombie so I don't know how to interpret this kind of shut down and avoidance.

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[SuperDaddy]

Hi @naakrakeb , and welcome!

Sometimes, long wall-of-text posts don't get answered, but for me it's ok because I use text-to-speech (read-aloud extension) 

It's very nice that both of you were friends before and could talk about everything. That makes it a good start for the relationship, because you both got to know each other before getting intimate.

However, this is a very dangerous combination: her having BPD and having cheated back on her exes and you having insecure attachment. Honestly, it doesn't look like this will end well. Because it is clearly impossible for you to fulfill her needs, and it seems like eventually she will need more than just you. Being awake all night long to help her out by phone is definitely something I do not recommend. It sounds like going too far and committing yourself too much for someone with whom you aren't married yet, and I don't think it is helpful in the long run for either of you.

Be careful about the stories you were hearing from her. She was portraying herself as a victim, but even if she is being truthful, that's still her side of the story, seen through her BPD lens. Was it really always them who took the first step in cheating? Did she regularly provoke them? Why did she need to cheat on them as well, instead of just breaking up the relationship?

In the beginning of my relationship with my wife, she would keep talking to exes while in my place and did it so freely. And she added an extremely sexy picture to her profile on a social messaging app, in which she was showing her back in a bikini, and it was like the kind of pictures that prostitutes use. Also, she proudly told me that she had cheated on all of her exes. I then asked what she wanted from me, if she wanted a closed relationship, and she confirmed it, so I got confused. Little did I know, it was all pure provocation, and in reality the cheating stories were fake. But I took it as real, so I thought, "Well, at least she is being honest with me, and that's what matters." My solution for that was to propose a one-sided open relationship. That might sound crazy, but we actually signed a contract on paper specifying the rules.

For me, cheating is the betrayal, not the act of getting involved with someone else. In open relationships, being with someone else is allowed, within certain rules. The book "Sex at Dawn" has helped me a lot to understand that and change my way of thinking about relationships. It turns out that she never got to use her right to be with someone else and confessed her lies. But the simple fact of having made her a concession at the beginning gave me some comfort, because then she wouldn't have a reason to deceive me.

By the way, I have already experienced an open relationship in the past, and it was splendid, with zero issues ever. Because she had excellent emotional control, like me. I felt very involved and kind of in love but didn't have plans to build a family with her, because my attraction to her wasn't strong enough. Yet, sometimes I fantasize about having her as my secondary wife in a Y relationship. I fantasize that they would be close friends and that my stable secondary wife would help me to remain positive and joyful while handling the BPD wife (the primary one).

The book teaches us that most human couples weren't monogamous until the advent of agriculture, which began to split people into small nuclear families, creating land as their inheritable property and, moreover, instituting the concept of marriage.