Confused, broken & lost

[TheFox]

I recently joined this group because I'm trying to make sense of a relationship that affected me very deeply. I'm also interested in hearing whether any of this sounds familiar to people who have been through something similar.

I was with my ex for about two and a half years. I loved her deeply. We lived together, planned a future together, and I was even planning to propose. There were periods when our relationship was genuinely wonderful, and I truly believed she was the person I would spend the rest of my life with.

But there was another side to the relationship that I still struggle to understand.

Over roughly a year and a half, she broke up with me around ten times. Things could be going extremely well, and then suddenly she would become cold and end the relationship. Usually, after 1–4 weeks, she would contact me again, we would reconnect, and the relationship would start again.

It became a cycle: love, closeness and plans for the future, followed by a sudden breakup, separation, and then reconciliation.

There was also extreme jealousy. I was repeatedly accused of cheating even though I never cheated on her.

Once, a picture of my ex happened to appear in my social media feed. She saw it, withdrew crying, and later accused me of secretly having a relationship with my ex. I was even willing to let her contact my ex and mutual friends to verify that nothing was happening, but it didn't seem to matter.

I want to be fair about my own history as well. I had a serious alcohol problem for many years. Alcohol certainly affected my behavior, especially during the earlier part of our relationship. I became sober while we were together and have remained sober ever since.

After getting sober, I spent some time in my home country while she remained in hers. One night she went to a party and became unreachable until the following evening. She also didn't call me back as she had promised. When I asked her the next day what had happened, her response was to want to break up. Eventually we talked through it and stayed together.

And then things became good again. We talked every day and planned our future.

During Christmas with her family, several strange conflicts happened within a short period. She became angry when I asked about money she had promised to repay me. The incident involving the picture of my ex also happened during this period.

On a family trip, her child became upset and cried because of the transportation arrangements. I gave her child my pre-booked seat in the taxi. That meant I had to make the return journey by bus instead, which took around 14 hours and was absolutely exhausting.

I didn't expect some huge reward for doing it, but I thought at least a "thank you" from my partner would have been reasonable.

Instead, when I finally got back after that horrible journey, she accused me of being selfish and of ruining everyone's mood.

Situations like this left me completely confused. My understanding of what had just happened and her interpretation of it sometimes seemed like two completely different realities.

One breakup in particular still stands out to me because of how absurd the trigger seemed.

We had been doing well. One night I couldn't sleep, so I got up and made myself some tea. She became furious because I was making tea in the middle of the night. The situation escalated, and she eventually told me she never wanted to see me again.

I spent about a month alone after that.

Then, shortly before I was due to travel to my home country, she contacted me again on her mother's advice. I needed to go back home temporarily because I had a work assignment there that had already been agreed upon.

We spent a very intimate night and the following day together. We talked about me returning to her almost immediately after finishing that work assignment, and we started planning a trip together. I was still completely in love with her and was seriously thinking about proposing.

Near the end of the relationship, we both tested positive for chlamydia. I had not cheated on her. Nevertheless, I was once again accused of infidelity, and this became one of the final major crises before our relationship ended.

What I'm struggling with now is reconciling two completely different versions of the same relationship.

I remember a woman who could be incredibly loving and affectionate. We shared a home, had genuinely happy times together, and planned our future. I loved her enough that I wanted to marry her.

But I also remember constantly losing that same person.

Sometimes everything seemed fine, and then suddenly she became cold, ended the relationship, or accused me of things I hadn't done. Then weeks later she could return full of love again.

Only after the relationship ended did I start discussing BPD with my therapist and reading about it myself. A lot of what I learned felt disturbingly familiar.

I want to be clear that I don't know whether my ex has actually been diagnosed with BPD, and I'm not trying to diagnose her myself. I'm here because I'm trying to understand what I experienced and because I'd like to hear from people who have lived through similar relationship dynamics.

I'm also not presenting myself as a perfect partner. I had a serious alcohol problem, particularly during the earlier part of our relationship, and I take responsibility for the ways alcohol affected my behavior. I eventually got sober while we were still together.

But I never cheated on her, and the repeated accusations that I did were simply not true.

I think the hardest part has been trying to understand how someone could seemingly love me so intensely, talk about our future together, and then sometimes within a very short period of time push me completely out of her life.

And maybe that's why letting go has been so difficult.

I didn't only lose someone I loved.

I lost the future I thought we were going to have together, over and over again.

[TheFox]

Do you guys think this was bpd? I have never experienced anything like this before.

[Rowdy]

Hi TheFox

What you have described is a very similar pattern to what a lot of us on here have experienced. The push pull, the jealousy, the re writing of history or changing the narrative of things that happen or blowing things out of proportion does sound like a personality disorder like bpd.

Now, I can’t say for sure, I recognise and sympathise with a lot that you have said, but my ex hasn’t been diagnosed with bpd.
In many cases there won’t be a diagnoses because the person that likely has a disorder won’t usually see, or admit they have. They see nothing wrong with their behaviour. To be honest, I’m not sure I would completely trust a diagnoses anyway given the disordered persons ability to gaslight and bend the truth, I doubt any therapist actually gets the full undisclosed picture when dealing with a person with a pd.

I know exactly where you are at on your journey. You likely know she has a problem, her behaviour doesn’t make sense to you and her choices don’t make sense either. You are looking for the reason and validation for what you believe is the problem, the root cause of her behaviour. It matters less that she is given a label, it matters more that you can see the behaviour as toxic or unhealthy and take steps to look after yourself accordingly.

My relationship lasted 27 years. We were (still are) married, have two adult sons and a three month old grandchild. I know she’s got problems, and most people around us know it. What I have done is run through her behaviour, listing what she has done in chronological order, on google AI and asked it to check her behaviour against the DSM-5 for any possible personality disorder. While it can’t diagnose anything, it has given me some clarity to the reason why her behaviour is what it is. In my case, it was quite shocking as it listed 9/9 for npd, 7/9 for bpd and high enough in both anti social personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder as well, so high comorbidity in all four personality disorders.

[TheFox]

It was actually quite a shock at first when I found this forum. Suddenly, the pieces of this completely insane _____storm started falling into place.

My ex and I had known each other for seven years before our relationship went from friendship to something romantic. She is a highly educated woman, and I had always considered her rational, kind, and calm.

Right at the beginning of our relationship, I suspected her of being unfaithful and lying to me. A mutual friend assured me that I was imagining things and told me that she simply wasn't that kind of person. I believed my friend and thought that maybe my own alcoholism was making me insecure.

Early in the relationship, I noticed other strange things as well, but perhaps love blinded me into thinking they were normal, or maybe some kind of joke. She seriously told me that she was a witch and that she had something like clairvoyant abilities. For example, she said that if I ever cheated on her, she would know simply by sensing the energies. In general, she was prone to magical thinking and, among other things, believed that I was an extraordinary person who also had certain abilities.

Another thing I still wonder about is money. She has a good profession, but toward the end of our relationship, I discovered how terrible her financial situation actually was. Her mother's partner told me that she was several months behind on her rent and was about to be evicted. At the same time, our final breakup was unfolding, and she was devastated and in shock, even though she was the one who had left me. I paid her overdue rent and asked her mother's partner not to tell my ex where the money had come from, since he knew the landlord.

The worst part was that only a month earlier, I had made her promise me that she wouldn't hide financial problems from me and that she would be honest with me so that I could help her. She never told me anything.

It was horrible to see someone I loved in that condition. She would call me at night and tell me that I had destroyed her. By this point, I was beginning to realize just how ill she actually was, and all I tried to do was comfort her. I told her that I wasn't going to disappear and that I would be there to support her if she needed me, even though I had already moved back to my own continent.

I kept trying to convince her that I had not cheated on her. I don't know whether she believed me. By then, I was so confused myself that I even started wondering whether perhaps I had been carrying chlamydia without symptoms for years and had somehow infected her. Because I hadn't slept with any other women during our relationship.

Later, of course, I realized that when our second-to-last breakup happened—when she left me because I made myself tea—she had most likely gone and cheated on me.

When that breakup happened, I didn't recognize her. The woman sitting in front of me seemed like someone else entirely: completely cold and emotionless, although at moments she also seemed visibly shaken.

[TheFox]

And thank you Rowdy, I really appreciate your response.