After 6 Years I Wasn't Even Happy, Why Do I Want Her Back?

[Sentinel5]

First, I just want to say thanks for reading and any feedback as I don't want to continue burdening my friends with discussing this situation, I'll try to summarize everything as best as possible without turning this into an epic.

My ex-pwBPDgf and I have been NC for 16 days now after me breaking up with her, her getting into a relationship the next day with a woman that was her "best friend" and lying to both of us about each other while saying she would do anything to make it work with me for the next month and a half.

My issue is I am thoroughly confused as to why I miss her so much and it hurts so bad.

The relationship was a recycle, we were first together in high school (2015) I was 17 and she was 15 for about 6 months when she decided to out of the blue tell me she was Bi, had a girlfriend, and we were done.

After that, all types of hell broke loose, she would tell me she still loved me, send me sexual pictures of herself and "hints" behind her girlfriends back, talk about how much she wanted to harm herself and about the things that happened before we met (which looking back may or may not have even been the truth). It got to the point during all the push and pull I was thinking she wanted to get back together, but when I brought it up, our guidance counselor called me into the office and told me if I went to see her at any point in the day the police would be called.

At that point I tried cutting contact but she started texting me using other phone numbers and blamed the guidance counselor incident on her aunt (that she was living with at the time). We kept in low contact the rest of the school year and she even sent me a weird message the day I graduated (2016) that read "Did you die yet?"

Somehow, that sparked us getting back "together" briefly before I broke it off because she wasn't allowed to leave the house. We both dated other people but stayed in contact the following year and a half until she turned 18, she was finally able to leave the house on her birthday which is when we started dating officially again (2018).

The first year and a half back together was a bunch of fights, I didn't trust her at all after everything and would try to break it off but she would cry and call me 50 times and message me on 4 different platforms saying a bunch of sweet nothings until I would eventually break and get back with her.

 The second half of the relationship my resentment towards her started to build as I felt like I carried the load of the entire relationship, paying for almost everything, planning everything and making just about every adult decision that had to be made between us while it felt like she was putting zero effort into anything (even her effort into how she presented herself) and all I seemingly got in return was sex (literally) whenever and however I wanted.

(2021) Things started to really break down around the beginning of the year, my dad was in and out of the hospital, my mom has always been in and out of the hospital due to mental issues and sickle-cell and I had to pay for their living expenses along with me working a restaurant job, being a personal trainer AND working on starting an E-commerce business.

Around this time I finally got to the point where I needed more from her as a partner emotionally, she knew everything that was going on and did nothing to even show she cared all that much and it really began to bother me.

During this time she also became close friends again with a gay girl she had painted me black to years ago who she is now dating, when they started becoming friends I had a weird gut feeling about it but because (and not trying to sound extremely superficial) her now girlfriend is so damn ugly and has absolutely nothing going on for herself I kinda just ignored it, and I was glad she found friends to hang out with because over the 3 years we were together it was just me and her family (or so I thought).

Over the last few months I got a message from someone we both knew in HS that she used to be really close to saying she was dating a guy behind my back, I almost left her then until my ex's sister called me saying it was a lie (why would this girl lie about who someone else is dating, though?). And my ex told me it made no sense because why would she have brought me on vacation with her family and posted pictures of us if she was doing that behind my back.

A few weeks later while working on an ad for my business using her phone I tripped over naked pictures of herself she had on her camera roll that she never sent to me, she never sent naked pictures unless I asked for them and they were always sent through snapchat so I couldnt save them without her knowing, when I asked she said she was going to send them to me but didn't like them. This didn't feel right so while acting like I was editing videos for the business on her phone I went through her messages and found the guy in question, looking back I'm pretty sure she deleted messages between them as there wasn't much there but I did find out from her that they hung out "every now and then", he thought they were together and she "didn't know why". Again, was going to break up with her but later that night her mom comes and tells me that my ex loves me, that guy is just a friend and she doesn't know why my ex was doing what she was doing and that "maybe her issues are acting up". At this point I just made her call him, tell him never contact him again and block him on everything, which she did.

At the time I never knew what BPD was (didn't until last week) and I thought her issues were limited to memory and certain learning disabilities like dyslexia so I was thinking "what does that have to do with this", my exes sister said something similar when we talked but both times I was so pissed I never followed up and whenever I asked my ex any questions like that she would give me the bare minimum.

In March, all this became too much when me and her hung out, I had to leave and I got a message from the guy saying "Hey, (Ex's name) must be with you" as soon as I got in my car, I tried calling her but I found out her phone was on silent (Why?) So I asked why they were in contact she said it was just to return something she had of his that she didn't know she still had (which according to him when we talked a few weeks ago was an engagement ring he gave her). Seemed odd because this was months after everything else happened. I then told her if I had any other problems with her in any way we were done because I was already under a lot of stress, she had a blank look on her face, just said ok and I left.

The following few days she was really distant, we talked on the phone but I hadn't had time to see her because I was so busy and she never brought it up either except to say she wanted to do something the following week.

With the lack of support on her end I broke up with her in a call saying my needs weren't met (again) and she (again) said she would fix it and do better. The next day she got in a relationship with her "best friend" but didn't tell me when I asked if something was going on between them. The week following she started avoiding me, while spending almost all of her time with her and blaming it on her thinking I'm going to leave her or that I'm cheating on her so she just wanted to be around her friends.

The only time I was able to spend with her that week was a couple hours where I picked her up from her grandparents house (who she lives with now) to talk about everything, she told me her "friend" was spending the night with her but we could hang out for a couple hours and talk, I told her I felt like she was cheating, she told me again she wasn't but felt I was going to leave her and that she wanted to be with me, we kissed a little, grabbed food and I took her back to her house.

To summarize the last few weeks, one day a few days later I picked her up from work, saw hickeys on her neck, she confessed she had sex with a girl, but lied saying she met the girl through her now girlfriend which I realized she later did to throw me off her trail. She again said it was because she was mad and upset because she thought I was cheating and going to leave her for good.

The following few weeks she preceded to still date/sleep with me, tell me she loves me and only wants me, and invite me to all her families big weekly dinners they have as her boyfriend, then slowly started to avoid me again, at that point I took all the stuff she ever gave me back to her as I was completely done, begged for hours asking what she could do to change my mind, spent hours on the phone after and she continued to say she wanted to only be with me.

I agreed, but two days later I glanced over at her phone while she was texting my replacement and saw the words "I love you baby" with corny emojis after it and next to her name in her phone, at that point she was caught and when I asked who she wanted to be with she said "I don't know" and that they weren't together the were just "talking", she preceded to put the blame on me saying she was tired of feeling like I was going to leave and had started to mentally let me go for weeks.

After this began a game of push-pull where whenever I said I was ready to move on she would threaten self harm but whenever I said let's get back together she would say no, and that she didn't want to be in a relationship with anyone because she was so hurt by me (while in reality she had been in a full relationship for a month and a half to this point).

We continued to talk every day over the phone even with my replacement in the room with her (this happened the entire time which in part was why I believed nothing was going on between them). It got to the point where she would tell me she wanted to work on things between us and then change her mind the same day saying she had "a really dark feeling" whenever it came time to be around me.

Finally I found out she had been lying to both of us when one day I called her and her replacement picked up, said my ex had been done with me for weeks when I broke up with her the "first" time and they had been together ever since, neither of them knew I had been collecting screenshots and pictures once I started feeling like something was going on, and when I sent them to my replacement she told me she had no clue that we were still doing all those things, my ex had told her we were just friends and that I was having a hard time getting over everything so she was just being nice.

My replacement then told her to block my number in her phone and be done with each other, which she did, but then called and texted me every day after, saying she "needed me" or saying she might as well kill herself when I didn't respond, constantly bunching things and actually harming herself physically. She would text/call me, then block my number back immediately after doing so. This went on for days until I asked her why she was doing all this if I'm such a bad person, I again asked if she wanted to move on from me, she said she didn't know, we preceded to argue and afterwards she hung up on me and told my replacement I was blowing up her phone and she didn't mean to call me, she didn't know that for days I had been recording my screen and taking screenshots, so when my replacement threatened me over it I sent them all to her, my replacement then apologized but... stayed with her.

We talked one time after which she again blamed me for everything but also said she knows I'm a good person (?) NC since.

I know it seems crazy that I put up with so much to begin with but it was in part because I felt so guilty. I wasn't the perfect partner, mainly because I never understood that she has BPD, as I said earlier her family never told me what was really going on with her, so I treated her the entire relationship as a "non", there were often times where I made her jealous because I felt I didn't have her respect, along with the fact she is extremely low functioning, didn't have a job until the end of 2020 (which she works 3 days per week for like 5 hours per day), no car and barely left the house/had friends, she always said seeing me do the things I did (start a business, being a go kart racer, being in the physical shape I'm in, the amount of money I make, the amount of friends I have, the girls I know and dated while we weren't together, etc.)  made her insecure and like she wasn't enough for me, along with the fact we never spent more than 3-4 days together per week because I honestly liked having my own life outside of the relationship.

I pretty much ignored all the early love bombing when we got back together in 2018, she immediately jumped into marriage and living together talk before she had even graduated high school, talk of wanting kids and things that I had kind of ignored because I wasn't (and still aren't) ready for and insisted on getting promise rings for each other while over the course of like 12 months I kept telling her no to. So when all this went down over the past few months I felt super guilty because she was making it seem to me like she was doing everything because she didn't feel I was committed to her which led me down the rabbit hole of trying to prove all this while she was dating someone behind my back.

This still doesn't explain my feelings and why I'm on here today, I wasn't happy with her when we were together, but I still feel so connected to her now, I recently hooked up with another girl after the break up and when I left her house I felt so empty and all I could think of was my ex, all these feelings towards her came back, when I wake up I think about her and feel pain, before I go to sleep she's the only thing on my mind, that's how I stumbled upon this forum I've been doing so much research trying to figure it out I just don't get it.

The way she acted I feel in the back of my mind she will be back in contact whenever (if) her current relationship falls apart, I just don't know what to do or say or what I want when/if it happens.

[once removed]

i didnt understand it either.

i was consciously unhappy for much of my relationship. i tried many, many times to end my relationship (sometimes more seriously than others) and then when my ex finally left me, i was devastated for months.

there are reasons both general and particular to you, and to your relationship. you will know when you find them.

the start of exploring it for me was understanding that i had a very "loaded" relationship with my ex, and that what i was feeling now was bigger and more complex than just being about her. what that meant for me may differ from you, but its a good place to start to dig.

part of it, and while this may be stating the obvious, may be more subtle than you think, is that you werent, and arent, emotionally done with the relationship. when thats the case, it almost doesnt matter if youre dumped or you do the dumping; you arent really sure what your feelings are or what to do with them, and they dont seem to make sense to you.

that will work itself out, eventually, when you grieve the relationship. right now, i suspect, your mind is more focused on trying to make sense of what youve experienced.