VERY LONG POST BECAUSE THIS HAPPENED YESTERDAY AND I'M IN A MUDDLE] My (f/30) partner (f/31) just spitefully ghosted me and I'm searching for clarity. Was it my fault? How do I make sense of her actions at the end? Does she have Borderline Personality Disorder or am I just looking for outside reasons why things failed?
We were together 5.5 years. We met in grad school and fell in love when I was still in a failing relationship (I was a real
PLEASE READhead in that first relationship). It took over a year for me to be able to leave the logistics of the first relationship (moving out, cutting ties, separating stuff, getting a job, there were deaths in my family, etc.) and really be able to pursue my feelings with the person I had fallen in love with. I know that my new partner resented me for how long it took me to get out because she directly told me that. On my end, it felt like I was moving mountains in a way I had never done and I was proud of myself for growing the hell up, getting out, and trying to be the best person for this person I had fallen in love with. During this whole time, we were communicating.
From the beginning, my partner expressed lots of concern about abandonment in the form of complex questions. We're both writers, so I took them as just deep conversational pieces. At core, her worries seemed to stem from her relationship with her mother, who she has to take care of and who often abandoned her/ridiculed her when she was growing up and in the present. I'm almost certain her mother has Borderline Personality Disorder, depression, and more. Her mother rarely leaves the house, utilizes extreme silent treatment, breaks stuff, threatens with self-harm, etc.
Fast forward 1.5 years (5 months since we became official) and I've moved nearby to my new partner. We're seeing each other almost every day. I'm doing my best to keep up with her in terms of communication and presence, but I'm an introvert and was trying to juggle my new job, my first time living alone, and more. I stepped outside myself and opened myself up to her exponentially more than I would have with anybody else, but I got the sense that it still wasn't enough. I changed my hobbies and habits to try to meet what she liked because I wanted to.
During these beginning months, my partner a few times went out with an ex-lover/an ex-girlfriend (we'll get to her later)/and people who she had told me "loved her" and wanted to "date her" and would either not tell me about the meetings, or if they came up somehow, brush them off because she said she told herself "it was fine because I wasn't sleeping or being romantic with them." She told me she was primarily doing it because she was hurt about my slow fade from my ex. But my vindictive solution to my own distrust and hurt from her lack of communication before the events and after, was to tell her I wanted a friendship with my ex (I really didn't) and I eventually met my ex for a final moment of closure. It coincided on the day that my partner's mother attempted self harm. This was the worst thing I did in the relationship.
My partner and I worked through this and stayed together, but in the next months, the breakup/blocking cycles started to happen. I had moved again nearby and she was part of the lease at my new place, with a lot of her stuff there. I can't remember what provoked it, but she brought a long-time friend (we'll get to him later) to come through and help her end the relationship and move her stuff out. I was stunned because despite the negative events I listed above, we seemed generally genuinely happy almost all the time. I did not foresee a breakup. I of course asked her to stay and talk and we eventually made up.
We continued for awhile, enthralled with each other in person, but when we were apart, more and more my partner would seem to get overwhelmed by the past hurts. She began to tell me she was "sad and hurt and empty." I would do everything possible to make her feel better and gave her my love, support, attention, and commitment to changing and growing but it didn't seem to be enough.
As I grew more attached, she grew more distant. I felt that she had a grudge against me. Actually, she told me directly she could never forgive me for the beginning of the relationship.
We began to enter a cycle where when we had to have a difficult conversation, she would say she wanted to break up instead. I was in love with her and wanted to work through everything, but we would either move on from the problem without solving it, or she would say she didn't want to be with me and I'd more and more emotionally ask her to stay even as I less and less addressed the problems. Each time she stayed and we made up.
Then we entered the ignoring, blocking, breaking up, getting together cycle. My family lives about 4 hours away and I would sometimes go visit them. I invited her and she went a few times. But when I went by myself, she would suddenly cut off communication, tell me she didn't want to be with me, block me, ignore my increasingly frantic attempts to get a hold of her, and finally give in to my request to work things out as soon as she knew I was back in town. She once much later explained to me that she did it because "she didn't have the courage to break up in person" and when I wasn't there "it felt like the relationship had ended and I no longer existed, so she just ended it for sure."
All of this felt very wrong to me because I felt like I was finally doing everything right: listening, communicating, being available, had cut toxic people from my life, was always available to help her with her anxieties, took us out, etc. She frequently had to attend to her family, which I always offered to help with, but never intruded upon, and I couldn't understand why everything became so poisonous when I spent a brief time away with my family. She had problems with not being able to be alone in my room without me, getting angry at me for falling asleep first because "I left her alone," such that I trained myself to fall asleep after her, and hating me for sleeping in because she felt so alone in the morning. She seemed to think I was abandoning her in these moments and said it made her anxious.
The blocking began to happen more frequently, for things that I couldn't even put my finger on. For example, walking too fast when we were out with my mom or for inviting her out to dinner. She would stew over trivial things she hated me for without telling me what they were instead of talking them through together. She'd tell me she didn't want to be with me and I would either send long messages or try silence to give her space. Then, a few hours or days later, it was like she suddenly missed me horribly and wanted to be back with me, and we'd be back in the habits of a working relationship.
At some point, she began telling me she didn't love me anymore and didn't want to be in a relationship anymore because she was so depressed, she needed to work on herself. She said she couldn't love anybody if she couldn't love herself. She told me the certainty of my love scared her. I was so attached and confused by the make-up/break-up cycles, I couldn't tell what was true, and reacted overly emotionally/logically, and each time she ended up staying/coming back. During all these silences/breakups, I'm fairly certain that there was no other significant other/fling in her life. There was just the absence of me and a turning to a few friends.
Present time: The blocking cycles escalated this year, though in between we'd have amazing days and an undeniable intimacy and poetic feeling with each other. She would flip flop between saying she loved me and acting like I was her worst enemy. She refused communication about how to solve the cycles or any sensitive issue.
Three weeks ago, I went to my family's house. I talked about her maybe coming and it seemed she might want to go, but we both decided it would be better if she didn't because it would be crowded, hot (she hates heat) and I had other family there that can be homophobic. Mind you, I haven't met almost all her family because they're homophobic, but that's fine. She seemed to agree and understand. Beforehand, we went out together, had fun, slept together, and agreed to see each other the night before I left. When I called her that day to check our plans, she snapped. She said she didn't want to have to see me when I wanted, that she was doing her own thing, and that she hated me.
I responded emotionally/logically like I usually did: lots of messages explaining the facts of the situation and asking if we could just talk for 15 minutes to avoid 5 days of toxic silence. She briefly answered my call, told me something about hating me and not being able to do this, and said she had to go. I didn't reach out to her for three days and just tried to be calm with my family. Then, I just couldn't help it, I started sending emotional/logical messages again: why are you doing this, let's talk, why do you do this every time I leave, etc. She ignored until the morning she knew I was coming back and responded by breaking up with me over phone and text, saying she had to solve herself. I was pissed to be discarded digitally after being ignored for 5 days, and succumbing to my persistent questions, she agreed to meet in person.
Then it was like we were back together. Over the next week, we had dinner, slept together, walked together, went out with her grandma, and she told me she loved me.
Then the thing happened: she was at my house on Friday, and I opened my Instagram feed. Her long-time male friend had posted photos of them going to theme parks, dinner, night walks, and more the whole time she was ignoring me when I was at my family's. I felt horrible. I asked her how she could be doing those things that take such energy, but couldn't send me a text to tell me she was out with so-and-so, was busy, and wasn't intentionally ignoring me. Over the next four hours, all of my frustration at the zero communication came out as word vomit and I'm sure I overwhelmed her. Still, before she left the next morning (to a funeral for a distant family member), she asked if she could leave stuff at my house, she kissed me, hugged me, and said she would work on communication.
That was the last direct contact I had from her. I sent a message two days later asking how the funeral had been, and when I didn't get a response, I felt something was different this time. I sent a few more calm messages over the next couple days, and then went into freak out mode and left her pathetic sobbing messages. I was so
PLEASE READing confused by the way things had been left on Friday, and so tired from all the conflicting cycles, I ended up calling the friend (who had been a mutual friend) and trying to figure out what was happening. He stonewalled me and gave me cryptic messages, and not two minutes after we hung up, he and my partner blocked me on everything -- except, EXCEPT, my partner left our mutual Instagram account unblocked so I could see her personal account we followed. I felt hopeful there was still this window even though I sensed something was very wrong.
That's when she started posting Instagram stories of her friend and her with hearts, he started posting (his profile is public) posts about their new dates together, they reacted to comments to people asking if they were dating with confirmation, she wrote sappy messages on his pictures, and they were physically spending every night together walking and talking. She's hardcore gay, so I was flabbergasted. I knew they weren't actually together, and I knew she wanted me to see these things, because she had left the window open and she knew I would look. At the same time, it seemed so far beyond comprehension, that I began to suspect that she had painted him white and me black. She even called our years together a "black hole" on his post. Even worse, when I couldn't handle not messaging her anymore through that small window, she posted the spiteful stories in sync with my questioning messages.
These final messages from me were positive and I don't think pushy. I was mainly confused and hurt and wanted a clear word that this was the end. I turned to writing poetically, as that's how we had first learned to communicate. Yesterday, as I was writing, she was finally reading along in real time. Stupid me felt we were having a conversation, finally, though I was the only one talking.
Then the final retaliation came last night. She posted a story showing her male friend, her ex-girlfriend, and her toasting at a restaurant, with "Reunited with my heart" (referring to her girlfriend) and their nicknames from long ago, etc. The video is clearly intentional, because after a pause, she turns the camera to her friend who remembers, as if on a script, to loudly state who the person is (for my benefit, as if I wouldn't know).
That did it for me. I sent a final message saying goodbye and she blocked her accounts finally, closing the last window.
Does this sound like BPD or just a fallout of me not wanting to breakup? Do you think that she did this because she knew I would never leave the relationship? How do I even begin to comprehend the final events? Was it all an act or is she generally now emotionally dating her male friend and delighted to be reunited with her "heart" ex-girlfriend? Her ex was not in the picture at all after that first hiccup at the start of our relationship, so this feels all so out of the blue for her to suddenly be emotionally attached to her again.
