Male BPD weird "almost" Cheating Bx

[lisaea1523]

Ok so this is very unique and interesting to me- wondering if anyone else has encountered this and how you responded to it-

We've been in a relationship for 2 years now living together. He appears single on FB and deleted me as a friend a long time ago he then blocked me on fb. He is on fb dating and is constantly talking to women. The conversation usually never goes anywhere and I have found no evidence of cheating. I check his phone often when hes asleep. He does not know I have his password. He will often start texting some of the women so any conversations I have seen that discuss wanting to meet or seem to be going somewhere I text those numbers from my phone and politely let them know that he is not single and in a long term relationship. Surprisingly the 4-6 times Ive done this the women are very apologetic and they immediately stop texting him back despite his repeated attempt to engage. He does not know that I have texted them or have seen these conversations. He knows that I have looked at his phone just the screen notifications and that Im well aware he is talking to other women. Obviously he does this to have someone to talk to and a back up option just in case our relationship were to end BUT it makes me wonder if he would actually cheat if one of these women were persistent enough and actually interested in him. Many of them are not as the conversations are awkward and like I said it never goes anywhere. I know this sound ridiculous but I dont know how else to respond to this bx. Oh and of course he is constantly accusing me of cheating even though I have deleted snap chat and given him the password to my phone so he can check whenever he wants. He checks occasionally and of course there is no cheating or inappropriate conversations. He has been engaging in this bx talking to women the entire relationship so I dont think it will stop - it calms him down to know he always has someone to talk to- someone who cares.

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[SuperDaddy]

Hi

I have read your first post, and I see you both have a young baby. That brings more tension.

Do you frequently argue with him about his "almost cheating" behavior? Do you get angry? You have all of the right to be angry at that, but I'm asking because if you feed into the drama, it will make the behavior worse.

To be honest, I think things will only improve if he loses access to you as a consequence for this behavior. For instance, you could move away to a parent's house for a while. Or perhaps you could do it permanently. But it's important that the consequence does not feed into the drama, so you would need to cut off all contact with him and have someone else deal with him and his requests. Maybe someone else would request him to leave your house so that you can return.

The idea is that once you are not living together, you'll finally be able to have peace and set boundaries that protect your peace, so you'll be able to provide love while ignoring his drama, so he won't be able to force the drama onto you, and if that's accomplished, then gradually his recent drama should be reversed (settled down to the level it was in the beginning).

Otherwise, you'd have to go into an open relationship, perhaps one-sided. But I don't think you want that, and I don't think it would really end the drama.

[ForeverDad]

While he is not engaging in physical infidelity, so far as you know, he is pursuing emotional infidelity.  BPD is a mix of a variety of poor behavior and this reflects a weakness of the relationship, of where his heart and loyalty is.

Another pattern of PD is a propensity toward projection, with him "suspecting" you of behavior similar to what he is doing.  Perhaps he is seeking to keep you off balance so you are on the defensive and your attention is deflected from what he "might" be doing.

Frankly, no one wants to look bad but this perception is exaggerated in acting-out PDs.  He is willing to do - is doing - what he openly alleges you do.

Can these issues be addressed adequately for the relationship to continue?  That is your decision.  But meanwhile you educate yourself from our collective wisdom gained over the years and can learn more communication skills, tools, insights, strategies and more such as is found on our various boards... Tools & Skills Workshops board is a good one to browse.

[Me88]

What a strange situation. So he's been actively emotionally cheating on you the entire relationship, yet you seem to be ok with it because you have access to his phone? Has a single status on FB and deleted you? These are very horrible things that most people would immediately end a relationship over.

Why do you stay, because of the child? I assume you are hurt by all of this and are not ok with it. Like SuperDaddy said, at this point you should remove yourself...

[hiiumaa]

That sounds very familiar! My partner does the same thing on Facebook. He often likes selfies of random women with hugging emojis or even writes comments like ‘stunning!’ – but as far as I know, he doesn't meet up with these women in person. They are often very far away.

He does it particularly intensively when he has had an argument with me.
He then posts new selfies of himself every day – beaming with smiles! – and ‘collects’ hearts from his ladies.

I think it's about compulsive contact for self-affirmation and not really about a desire for a relationship with these women. It makes him feel „seen“ and he tries to fill the deep black empty hole inside of himself.

I've brought it up with him several times because I find it so hurtful. He then completely freaks out, calls me ‘controlling’ and lets me know that it's my own fault because I always withdraw from our relationship, even though HE is constantly working on it. (He conveniently forgets that I withdraw because he is constantly highly emotionally abusive towards me.)

[hiiumaa]

I forgot: As a boundary I did, what SuperDaddy suggested: I told him, that I‘m out of contact as long as he does it.

It worked for a while…

[hiiumaa]

And! When I think about it: In the past he also said, that I have cheated on him, because I spent a christmas with my ex, what is not true.

The real story is that I picked up my son from my ex, who was working at a Christmas market and had my son with him. My ex is my son's father and it was Father's Weekend. ) But a really big problem is the distortion of reality. That has often driven me to despair. Using THAT as a counterargument for the Facebook thing left me speechless.

[lisaea1523]

Im glad Im not alone in this and I appreciate all of the advice from everyone

[Pook075]

For me, emotional cheating is cheating.  If you want to connect to someone else just to talk and flirt, then you have no need for me anymore.  Why?  Because I'm worth more than that.  This must be a very clear boundary in any relationship.

What I would personally do probably wouldn't be constructive advice for the "bettering" forum, so I won't share any more.

[DiggidyDog]

Sounds very familiar.  My partner, another male, I suspect has BPD.  He has never come out and told me, but from the roller coaster ride our relationship has been for the last three years, I’m pretty confident I’m correct in my assumption. 

Lisaea1523’s post about the phone really resonates with me.  The Phones in our relationship have always been a very contentious subject from the beginning.  We met on grindr, and after a couple dates we were pretty much inseparable, and eventually he moved in.  I began to notice he was on his phone constantly.   Looking back I feel like he tried to hide some of the phone addiction from me at the beginning, but 3years in, anytime he has a free minute, outcomes his phone, and always scrolling through something, usually doing it where I can’t see his screen.  The whole first year I just stayed quiet about it and let him continue. Just a little bit of backstory, There is a 12 year age difference between us, I’m in my early 40s he is in his early 30s, social media has never been a big part of my life.  But because it was such a big part of his I felt like I was missing out and after the first year, it was beginning to feel like he was more into his phone than me at times.  I used to ask him what’s so interesting on there?  And he would reply, I’m just scrolling through some funny memes or entertaining videos on TikTok, made it seem like what he was doing was totally fine.   
More time had past and I just couldn’t help my curiosity any longer.  I wanted to know what he’s doing on his phone so much usually behind my back so I set up some parental controls on our home Wi-Fi network and added his phone to monitor. With that feature I am able to see every website he visits daily, weekly, and/ormonthly and how many minutes were spent on each.

I was shocked at my findings.  Yes there was enormous amounts of time, like hours, on Facebook, several visits to Instagram, snapchat, and twitter(x), tictok, and some days I would see visits to grindr and fetlife, a bdsm community site. 
I was shocked I didn’t know how to confront him about this without having an explosion in our relationship, because I knew somehow he would just turn it around on me like I was in the wrong for spying on him.  So I figured out his code and logged into his phone one night while he was sleeping.  I found some messages on Snapchat that said delivered, but they had already been deleted so I couldn’t read them. But they were sent to other guys that are only looking to ‘hook up’.  It was the same situation on fetlife, yet he must’ve forgot to delete one message because it was in an archived folder, but it was pictures of him, mostly selfies, and then a picture of me and him as the very last one at the bottom he Sent to some guy that lived within 10 or 15 minutes from us! ?
This  put me on guard.  I needed to know what he was up to. I continued to monitor for weeks, tracking the site visits. 
Now mind you, this is happening all while he is constantly being paranoid that I’m cheating on him and he was actively going through my phone periodically behind my back, trying to find what he calls ‘crumbs’, little hints or things that make him believe that I’m doing something I shouldn’t be.  He told me he had to do it just to ease his conscience and worry, I didn’t have anything to hide so whatever.

 In the next argument we had, was another time he had found something he thought was incriminating on my phone, but turned out to be nothing, blew it all out of proportion, screaming, and yelling at me for being a liar and cheating on him, told me I’m constantly manipulating him and gaslighting him, so I just whipped out my phone and I text him the screenshots I saved of his fetlife messages.  I said you’re so worried about me cheating on you,? Maybe you can help explain these messages and why you’re on Grindr?  There was a brief moment of silence and he screamed. I f’in hate you, and stormed off…. He knew in that moment he was caught red-handed.  He claimed he was just trying to find us an another partner that maybe we could have a threesome with.   Except we had never even discussed having threesomes, maybe it was brought up once early on in our relationship but It wasn’t something we both actively were seeking on a weekly basis.  And it definitely shouldn’t have been something that he was seeking behind my back. 
that’s just one occurrence , several other arguments have happened since stemming around the same issue and situations.  But I continue monitoring the daily Internet traffic behind his back because I feel like I have to now. 

I have since made an Instagram and a twitter(x) for myself, and he was on board with adding me as a friend, and when you’re friends with somebody, you can see the list of people that they follow and the list of people that follow them, this also proved  interesting because the list of followers on his Instagram looked like a bunch of his ex-boyfriend‘s from his past, several of them were local guys, and yeah, I was also able to see who likes his pictures and which pictures he likes, and he likes a lot of other guys photos too, just like hiiumma mentioned in their post about facebook.  I still haven’t joined Facebook only because I’m scared.  This is the one he spends the most time on, and I can only imagine.  But soon enough, I probably will.  What was interesting is the fact that after two years of our relationship, he still didn’t have any pictures of me and him on his Instagram, making it look like he was still single, that was on our second Valentine’s Day that I confronted him about that, then after a day or 2 he ended up putting a couple pictures on it, of us together, and in his words, did it to ‘pacify ‘ me.  It’ll be interesting when I make a Facebook to see what his relationship status is and how many pictures of us together are on that.

Now we are 3years in and I’m always on guard, there’s been times we've gotten into an argument, and I honestly wouldn’t put it past him if he went out and had a fling behind my back to make himself feel better about his emotions, I know he is always hyperaroused and constantly loves the ‘emotional cheating’ looking at other guys profile pictures on fetlife, , insta, and Grindr, it makes me feel like he’s just exploring his options In case our relationship fails so He has a back up plan or someone else ready to take my place.

[lisaea1523]

Sorry guys I'm still getting the hang of how to reply and respond effectively to everyone's questions and feedback. I think this is a common bx that others have experienced with BPD partners- an extreme need for validation and of course attention from these people they talk to. It hurts to read the way he talks to these women- kind and flirtatious just like he used to talk to me in the beginning.

I am not ready to end the relationship so I am trying to find a way to respond effectively to this challenging and strange behavior. I check his phone regularly because it helps calm my anxiety and fears that he could be cheating or meeting up with people. I DO NOT want him to find out that I know his password obviously because then I wouldn't be able to do this checking. I think this is fair and maybe a part of him knows that I do this - he can't be that naive I would hope. It's almost like he wants me to see that he is talking to other people as a threat that he might or could leave. But again of course he never does. I constantly reinforce the fact that he is engaging in this behavior and yet continues to accuse ME of cheating and I have explained projection to him. I think if you suspect something is going on in your relationship it's on you to investigate and collect evidence so they can't deny it. It's a protective thing from lying or manipulation.

[hiiumaa]

Hi there!

I find all of this quite shocking, and I have to agree with pook075 that emotional cheating is also cheating.

Unfortunately, I'm still stuck in this relationship, even though THAT alone should be enough to make me leave.

Lisea and Diggydidog, what makes you both stay?

I would also like to mention that I suspect my partner now has a second Facebook account.

Since I last confronted him about his hurtful activities, his account has become very quiet. Only three new selfies, no other self-expression such as food or home décor.

I don't think he has managed to break his Facebook addiction, but has found other ways to contact his ladies.

By the way: I am never mentioned on his Facebook page either, and of course there is not a single photo of me or us together. He also presents himself as single.