Posaune
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What is your sexual orientation: Straight
Who in your life has "personality" issues: Romantic partner
Relationship status: Seperated
Posts: 3
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« on: July 05, 2021, 05:18:38 PM » |
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Hi, I'm brand new. I've read this site off and on for about six months, but I didn't want to believe it all because she has insight about her mental health challenges. This will be a long first post, but it's been an even longer ten years.
My ten year anniversary to my wife (let's call her Adra) was this past Wednesday. Our first meeting eleven years ago turned into an immediate whirlwind romance that triggered my first onset of mania at age 35. I had been in an abusive first marriage for twelve years (she hit me when she didn't want to deal with intractable issues) and Adra "saved me". I packed up everything and left home, only to end up in a hospital three weeks later, after which I went back home with my first wife. The stress and sleep disruption set the stage, but I remember the night I went off the deep end. I was exposed for the first time to Adra's own bipolar and frequent self harm & suicidal impulses. I couldn't stand the thought of losing her after just finding her...the thought sent me mad. Three weeks later I'd end up in a hospital and after three weeks there I was sent home with my current wife. Adra and I fell out of contact for about six months. Then we became friends again as I left my first marriage in a non-crazy way. We reconnected during my divorce period and married one month after my divorce was final.
The next few years were bliss. My music career took off, we were totally in love, did everything together. I nontraditionally took her last name (I'm male). But Adra's personality was unstable. She'd have intense mood swings, often veering into self harm and suicidal scares. I had to leave work multiple times to take care of her. At this point, about two years in, I turned to pot for the stress. I had used pot for years before her, but had stopped because she didn't like it and it was frankly good to be clear headed.
By 2016 and five years into the marriage, several stress points were threatening to crack the marriage wide open. Several incidents stand out to me. One night I came home and she tearfully confessed to spending about $15,000 on credit cards. We lived paycheck to paycheck with no savings. But right after telling me, she told me I could hit her if I wanted. That she felt so bad she deserved it. She didn't seem to consider my having been at the receiving end of that kind of behavior in my first marriage and would NEVER do the same to anyone, especially her. The effect was that I then had to soothe HER, and my opportunity to express justified anger was hijacked. Another night, I had spent the day caretaking her suicidal scare and as we lay in bed in the dark, she began to casually talk out loud about the most mundane logistics to take care of before dying, like cancelling the utilities. At no point was I mentioned at all. I was lying there invisible to her and completely unconsidered. It was like grieving the death of your spouse combined with being broken up with at the same time. Not long after this, she was feeling so bad about herself and guilty about things that she went into the bathroom and carved a heart on her forearm with a scalpel. She wanted me to know how badly she felt.
We never fought. How could we when stress caused her to be like that?. So the hidden resentments built up, and she began searching out new relationships. I had been suspicious and jealous the entire marriage, both because I knew from how we met that when she took a shine on someone, she went all in and without guilt. I found evidence of at least emotional affairs and confronted her about them. Told her that I considered it to be cheating. She got angry and defensive.
Over the next few years, we lived. There were lots of good, but our romantic life was dying. I intensified my pot habit and let myself go, as I had finally given up on recapturing the intense fire we had the first few years. I started being passive aggressive. I didn't trust her, especially seeing her texting. A LOT. Then my mom died and a few months later the pandemic hit. With it went my whole music career (luckily I have a pretty solid day job as well) and a deep depression settled on me.
On New Year's Day this year, I was heading out to a routine bowl smoking when I had the thought to stop and ask her if she felt trapped. The next three days would be the hardest in my life. "Yes", she said. She felt trapped. "Are you still in love with me?" I asked? "No", she answered. Everything went black and I felt like I was imploding. Then I immediately began changing all my bad habits all at once starting that day. Showed her my throwing out all the pot. Committed to a diet and exercise plan. Then Jan. 2 came. I asked her that evening if I had lost her to someone else. "Yes, I have feelings for someone", she said. Another knife in the chest. "Who? Do I know them?", I asked. It was her old high school boyfriend who her parents had pressured her to break up with over two decades prior because he "wouldn't make something of himself". Then Jan. 3 and what was bad became worse. I asked how far along their relationship was. "He's leaving his wife and kids and moving her in February to take care of me. He's bringing his bed, so you can have our old one". I lost it. I knew I was in danger of slipping into mania again just like the last time ten years before (I hadn't had an episode since then) because I couldn't sleep from the grief. I left town to see family the night after experiencing her seem to want to make up but then breaking down herself and slipping in a "I think I should get the house for my mental health" manipulation. I called her on it as it happened and she got angry and stormed away to the bedroom for the next 14 hours. I was afraid of her unpredictability and I knew I needed a quiet place to let some meds calm me (which did help).
While out of town, she was adamant about divorce but was almost completely ignorant and childlike (she admits she has the mind of a child, emotionally) about the details. I had to explain that no, he couldn't just "take over" my name on the mortgage and have my equity just "bought out" from some magical place. She didn't know that she or he would have to fork over a lot of money to buy me out and avoid a sale. She also just assumed that I'd be okay with the new arrangement and could transition cleanly to being "her best friend". She assumed she could have her cake and eat it, too. That she could have our mental connection but live with her new (old) boyfriend and eventually marry him. She thought we could still do music together.
As I came home to our new reality and the certainty of divorce, I took my ring off. We then worked through longstanding communication issues and misunderstandings, both feeling frustrated that a lot of what drove us apart was unnecessary. Things then started getting really confusing. We restored our intimacy "as friends" at first, but then in a way that started tearing her in half. She told her boyfriend that she needed to consider me again. I had changed and had kept it up and was working overtime to fix our relationship.
A few weeks of this went by, with me pushing every couple days to address one of the many elephants in the room. At some point during this time, I was shocked to discover that her memory of January was incomplete. She protested when I called him "her lover" and said they were just friends. When I reminded her of what happened, she seemed horrified and couldn't believe it. I had started screenshotting texts starting from back then and showed her a couple. She had forgotten her relationship with him. She just wanted to be friends with him, even though he clearly remembered their plans and love and was about to move here. When he moved in March, she went to help him unpack. First one day, then the next. It was killing me inside. She kept insisting she was freaked out by the thought of anything happened and would be lucky to manage a handshake. I knew that it would just happen again; they were "serious" in January and he made drastic plans even though they hadn't seen each other yet in person after twenty years (maybe...I doubt that now). It had been online only until it all came out Jan. 2.
Then she wanted to spend all day Sunday with him hanging out. And that while nothing had happened, she had hugged him and did feel like kissing him but didn't. That she wanted to just see if she could redirect it into friendship. Early that morning, I woke her up before she went over and gave her an ultimatum. That if she was serious about seeing if our long marriage was salvageable, she would not see him that day and in fact would cut off contact for a while while we worked on us. My ultimatum also mentioned the logistics of divorce and that our lives would be ripped apart and we'd need to figure out the house then and where to live. That this was all a package deal and that it SHOULD be given more weight and consideration. So she did it. She canceled her day with him and told me she wouldn't talk to him. That was early March.
The next few months, we started feeling "normal" again, but with better communication. Her work had gotten really intense and an incurable rare disorder of hers flared up the worst she's had, so I spent a lot of time being her caretaker, both emotionally and physically. She was working multiple 12 hour days and I barely saw her. This ramped up into May and the first part of June.
Then one evening the beginning of June, I asked her to come to jazz club show. She said yes. I said "it's a date!". She just smiled (this was on text). I asked "is...it a date?". She said that she needed more time. Over the next hour or so after getting her on the phone, it all came out. She had started seeing him again weeks before. It had progressed to kissing. She had decided she could no longer feel that way about me again and that this was it.
I had spent WEEKS doing all the work to support her in her "12 hour work days" and she was stopping to see him on the way home. It was like January all over again. I was wrecked. But over the next couple weeks I recovered. More quickly this time; I had practice from the first of the year. It was getting settled; we'd go our separate ways but would remain friends. I forgave her for the SECOND betrayal this year. I went out of town to see family, firm in my letting go of her. By the morning I was heading back, I felt good and free about the situation. I'd get a decent payout from the divorce and could let go my codependency and reinvent myself. Then Adra told me not to be mad, but that her friends and "him" had convinced her to move out that day. I was sad and disappointed we couldn't sort through our past ourselves for closure, but I understood. The rest of the day flying with layovers, we put our marriage to rest and I began to embrace moving on.
Since this is a BPD site, you all know what is coming next. When I got back to my house, it was empty. My core stuff was there, but everything else...EVERYTHING... was gone. Pictures on the wall. Furniture (except a couch, my workstation, bed, etc.). Curtains. I text her with "wow, you weren't kidding". She had left me one of our three cats but had taken the other two without my having a chance to say goodbye. Then as I was texting and then talking to her on the phone, she tells me this is all wrong and she was panicking more and more during the day and no, she didn't realize how much was gone and she kept thinking "god, what have I done?".
So I tell her to put her shoes on, grab her keys, and run back to me. That it's still not too late. So she does. She runs out of his apartment yelling "I have to see him!" and out the door. Her car was locked in his apartment garage, so I raced over (he had moved ten minutes from us), picked her up (it was 11pm at this point), kissed her, then raced back home to the empty house and reconciled. An hour or so later while spooning each other, a car roared up honking and flashing its lights. He was afraid I had absconded with her. She texted him that she was okay and was staying the night; it was late.
The next morning, the carriage hadn't turned back into a pumpkin. We kissed like we used to and both felt like a team again. And we had a plan. I'd take her to work, then we'd go together and get the kitties and a load of stuff and start moving back in. She was on board. By the afternoon, though, she said she was exhausted and so stressed (now she'd have to explain to her friends and to him) and needed a couple nights in a hotel to sleep and be by herself. That she had taken a leap of faith running back to me so I should have faith with her.
Two days later right as she was about to check out and I was expecting her to come home, she went radio silent. For three days. Her friends and him decided I was brainwashing her (it was becoming clear they had a certain narrative about how "bad" I was for her that she constructed over the years) and had told her to block me, she'd tell me when I finally heard from her again four days later. During that time in feeling betrayed and cheated on for a THIRD time the same year for the same person, I told her it was sad because we had settled on being close friends but then she ran back to me and I had opened my heart and trust again. That now it would be hard to be friends, let alone have trust and love back. We began to be close again, now that I saw she was just torn and couldn't face her friends and him because they'll judge her for returning to what they thought was a bad marriage.
So this past Tuesday the 29th, we reconnected again. Spent all day on the phone while we each worked, and it seemed like our plan from the week before was intact. Neither of us wanted to get divorced. At all. She had been stalling it and hadn't done anything, and I had told my lawyer to pause indefinitely; I hadn't filed yet. We were going to get back together after all. She would see me the next day and she didn't care who knew. It was our 10th anniversary and we would celebrate.
The next day, Wednesday, was our anniversary. Her stress built up to dangerous levels right away while texting her at work, culminating in her cutting a heart into her forearm, much like she had four years before. She felt trapped and surrounded by walls of black water threatening to crash in on her. Her boyfriend (she had sent me and him pictures of it while texting us) came by to bandage her and go buy a plant with her; plants always make her feel better. And then later that afternoon, she came back home and we spent the evening being close and comforting and in love. She insisted at the end that she didn't want to divorce and please don't divorce her.
The next day (this past Thursday), she was even worse at work. The walls were closing in. She couldn't go home and face either of us. Not me, not him. She needed to disappear. He could take care of her kitties (they had always been a "can't kill myself because cats" safeguard), I'd have the other. She insisted unprompted multiple times that she "wasn't going to kill herself" but just needed to drown a little. Then it was even more heartbreaking. She told me for pages that I needed to leave her. That she couldn't do this to me again. That she couldn't hurt me again the way she had our whole marriage. That if I knew things I'd know how bad of a partner she was. She was begging me to save myself from her. That's when she sent two pictures. One, a bloody hand holding a scalpel. The other, words carved in her arm that said "god, what have I done". So I did what I had avoided for ten years and called 911. I kept her looking at her plants back at her desk while police found her. They questioned her and then let her go with a friend (he was there). Her last text to me was "the cops came to check on me". I'm now blocked on everything and she's gone. In my last email to her, I hoped she was safe and mad at me. That I was filing for both our sakes but I love her and she can visit any time.
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