I need help to analyze my three-year relationship

[Remy457]

First of all, I'd like to point out that I'm French and that I'm going to write in English, so there might be some mistakes here and there.

It's been two months since I left my ex-girlfriend and I'm still lost in the memories of everything that happened during the three years of our relationship.

Our meeting was explosive. I think I fell in love in a matter of days. Her look, her words, her attention, her tenderness, everything seemed totally unreal. It was as if I had met someone who was finally going to give me that absolute love that I was unconsciously looking for (I think I have some emotional dependency traits). I also felt, very quickly in our exchanges, that she was a person in pain. One of the first words she said to me was "I was left by my ex three weeks ago". A red flag in my head went up but I didn't pay attention to it. I often play the role of savior in love, I think it gives me esteem, and I perceived in her a need for security, stability, a need to be pulled out of her anxieties.

The intensity of her attention to me literally made me feel like a kind of chosen one of her heart, as if this had never happened to her before. She wrote me a letter very quickly, left me tender messages all over the apartment. I'm the kind of person who takes my time before falling in love, but I felt like I was totally bewitched by her charms, her great beauty, her wild intensity.

Our relationship made me feel very lucky to have stumbled upon her. Because she seemed to be coveted. She was working in a bar at the time, and because she's so pretty, boys would often hit on her. She seemed to enjoy it, and she was very proud of the fact that she was beautiful, that she had a beautiful deep voice, etc. She had a history with her boss some time before we met, and then cheated on me once in the beginning of our history. A red flag went up again in my head, but she explained that it allowed her to move on and get on with me for good.

On several occasions when she was being hit on, especially in some clubs, she seemed to want to tell me about it to test my reaction. "I let this boy kiss my neck" or "I made him believe that I would put my tongue in his mouth if he offered me a cigarette”. I was trying not to show any signs of jealousy. Why? Because I wanted to look strong, confident, I wanted to be that base showing her that she didn't need to flirt to get me to chase her, that it didn't affect me, that I was just there for her, to help to make her happy. Although I thought she was immature in her handling of seduction (she was 26 at this time), everything else made me madly in love with her.

Two years went by like that. She was a seductress, I often met boys with whom she had made love once, or who, in her words, "were a little in love with her". She told me that she couldn't imagine her life without having a lover one day, for a while, that it was nothing, that she loved me anyway and wanted to make her life with me. That I drove her crazy, beacause I was mature, reassuring, that I was her best shot in bed in her whole life. In short, a shower of praises, tender moments, poetry and discussions until the end of the night.

We moved in together, and at that point, the first mood swings came. She could become aggressive or sullen over a poorly closed fridge door, a poorly selected vegetable at the grocery store, a remark about her cigarette consumption or a mismatched garment. One day, she dyed her hair blue and I explained to her that I preferred her natural color, which she took as an attack on her freedom (this is often a topic for her, her liberty). She had two depressions during that time and blamed me for being affected by it, for not understanding her, for not getting her out of it enough. The problem is that when someone is sad, I feel sad in turn, like a kind of hypersensitivity. But I always tried to communicate with her, to be tender, to take charge of the meals, to reassure her... Nothing seemed to be enough. In short, these kinds of little tensions built up to the point where I felt like I was walking on eggshells. In public or in front of my parents, she often put me down while being, in the next second, very tactile and cajoling.

She had also started training as a ceramist and we decided to go abroad so that she could find a studio to work in. It was kind of our big project, we spent a few months preparing it, I left my job, my friends and I followed her.
Once in this other country, we quickly found a nice apartment, met people, she found a studio to work in and she told me that for the first time in her life, she felt like she had an identity, like she didn't exist before. That sentence stuck with me. She has always had a hard time nurturing friendships, gets angry with people pretty quickly, I felt like she could go from white judgment to black judgment pretty quickly. With a bit of nuance sometimes, though.

That's when everything started to seriously go downhill, that's the period of my life that I'm struggling to recover from, because the confusion was total.

One of the boys we met liked her because they both had a sick sister. She told me "I felt it in him, in his silences". In the weeks that followed, she always seemed to want to see him. When I made comments, when I started to feel jealous, when I wanted her to explain to me if she could have feelings, she told me that "I was going to ruin everything". So I apologized, thinking I was some kind of dumb straight guy, like a boy and a girl can't just be friends. But at the same time, she talked about him a lot. Asking me if I thought he was handsome, telling me that she had shown a picture of him to her mother, complaining when I got a call from him first and not her… Until the day when, in a club, while she is literally glued to him in front of my eyes, she announces to me as if it was nothing that she has a crush on him, that I was right to be jealous from the beginning, but that she loves me anyway. It was like a blow to me. Because, among other things, few days ago she was writing to me a little love letter. Seeing me sad, she asked me to leave the club. I ended up doing it, completely lost in my feelings. I go back home at 10 am, she comes back at 4 pm. She tells me that nothing happened, then tells me that they kissed, then tells me that it was just a passing crush, then tells me that I pushed her into the arms of this boy because of my jealousy. She also tells me that she had seen him on the sly a few days before but that they just caressed each other's arms, and once again, that she still loves me.

The next three weeks, while I explain to her that I intend to leave her, she maintains a strange vagueness, asks me to wait, and at the same time she seems to actively check with this boy if a story with her is possible.

She continues to torture me by telling me that she fell asleep thinking about him, but that she loves me, that she won't be able to get better than me, that she envies my next girlfriends... That this boy is her "victim" and that it's all my fault, because I should have let her have this crush without saying anything and it wouldn't have lasted. I am literally lost in a fog of opposing feelings.

I finally decide to leave the country, to go back to France to take my things and to run away from the relationship after these weeks where I almost didn't sleep anymore. That's when the mask fell off. She explained to me that during the first three months of our relationship, she had a double life with her bar owner, that she had cheated on me after the confinement, that she had kissed so and so.

That she was telling me all this "so that I would detach myself from her faster, so that I would hate her". I was convinced that I had met someone with whom I was deeply connected, madly in love, and I now reread our whole story differently.

After two months of silence (I'm good for no contact), she calls me back to tell me that she is heartbroken because the boy in question left her after a few weeks of relationship, because he finds her dangerous. She compares me sexually to him, telling me that we were finally wrong about a lot of things and that also, since the confinement, she knew very well deep down that it wouldn't work between us. But also that she doesn't regret me and that she feels relieved that I left, because I was controlling her too much. I felt like the sole keeper of the memory of our relationship, as if everything she felt and said to me at the time was, after the fact, no longer valid.

I've been struggling with this for the past two months. I finally thought that she might be suffering from BPD. Her fear that I would leave her, which she often talked about, her childhood traumas (her parents took care of her sick sister and not much of her), the fact that she always went from one relationship to another in a few days, the mood swings and her feeling of existential emptiness... Until the triangulation with her bar owner who turned her on, in her own words, but also with that boy at the end of our story.

I'd like to have your take on all this, as I feel a bit lonely with my analysis. And that the mourning of the love story but also of the brutal return to France is very very heavy to bear. I have the feeling that in the space of a few weeks, I am not much more for her. Thanks a lot in advance.

[alterK]

First of all, Remy, welcome, and don't worry about your English. It's fine. You would have to forgive an awful lot if I tried to write in French.

We don't diagnose here, so I won't try to speculate on whether or not your ex really qualifies for the label of BPD, but she does indeed sound like a volatile person, and many of the things you talk about are very familiar.

People like this (including my own soon to be ex-wife) often start a relationship making you feel wonderful. You go to bed on your first date. They tell you you are the person they have been looking for all their life. You feel so good with them, you ignore the red flags. When things start to go bad you remember that wonderful feeling and long for that person to return. We are all fools for love.

Sadly, these folks are untrustworthy because they project all the blame for failures, including their own, onto you. You did something bad, have some bad characteristic, are wrong about something, are too naive, aren't understanding, argue too much--whatever. Once they have knocked you off your white horse, in their mind, they consider they are justified in deceiving you. It's not their fault. It's yours.

You can fall into their trap. They are so certain, they can start to convince you that you do in fact have those failings they accuse you of. All this is very distressing.

If you read English as well as you write it, I'd suggest you look in the Tools heading in this website, under Books. You can find a lot there that can give you understanding about the problems you're dealing with.

[Skip]

Mes sincères condoléances...

Looking back at story like yours after reading here for years, there are many  and with much respect, I think you made a made a very difficult and emotionally intelligent decision to leave.

Good mental health is hard. Your story is a very good example of that.

A person with severe fears of abandonment will always hedge their relationships and often maintain parallel tracks for their own protection. They know (consciously or subconsciously) that they will be destroyed if rejected by someone they love. This is a hard concept to understand if we don't have the same fears, but it is self survival for some people.  When you read about murder/suicides or broken hear suicides, this is what is has happened.

My reading of your story is that you were special and she tried to make a go of things with you, but her dysfunctional coping ultimately did the relationship in. Probably not the first time. And you were special, but not so special as she made you feel. As you say, she jumped from her last relationship to you (to avoid grieving) and to the her next while keeping you on, to avoid grieving it if it failed.

As you say, there was a lot testing. Testing of your both loyalty and your gullibility to be manipulated. The part of the story where she says you pushed her to the other guy by being jealous is probably how she felt - and it would be reasonable if she was 16 - but she was an adult and can handle life better than that.

You love her. You support her. This is hard to hear, but I think you already have a sense of it.  I encourage you to stick around and work with members on this.

Bienvenue.

[Remy457]

I thank you both for your answers. Reading you brings me some comfort. I have sometimes felt like I was crazy lately, and I had to write down the different things she was doing to me to be sure that these were not normal things that one does in a couple where listening, respect and sincerity are structuring values. I ended up wondering if I was too sensitive, too reactive, too emotional... Crazy loops in mind.

Indeed, there were many red flags. She told me the first days in a rather transparent way all her endings of stories and everything always ended with infidelity, hasty departures, abrupt changes of boyfriend. But she told me that she had changed, that the problem before came from the fact that her guys had no libido, that she was obliged to go see elsewhere... This kind of bullsh*t necessarily made me feel better from the start.

The issue of jealousy has been going around in my head since it happened. If I hadn't shown anything, would she have gotten tired of this flirtation game? But the problem would also have arisen later, in another context no doubt. She kept telling me very paradoxical things: "I wanted you to see me flirting with him" but also "I didn't think it was obvious, I wanted to live my crush secretly" and "I'm angry with you, it's all your fault about this" to finally said "You're right about everything". What a mess.

I apologized for my jealousy, I didn't say anything the times they were having drinks together, because I was happy that she finally had a friend and above all I couldn't consider him a rival. He is a very very depressed boy, and he comes from a rather conservative family where fidelity in a couple, transparency and resilience were presented as important values for him. He talked to me a lot about these things. We almost had an intimacy about these topics in our conversations. I find it hard to understand how I could have pushed her into his arms because they were both feeding into this situation behind my back.

This boy was quite a friend to me. That's what hurts deep down today. When they kissed in the club after that horrible night when I came home alone in the morning, he called me at the evening to tell me "it was a platonic kiss". That "he had no feelings for her". That "she was too complicated for him".

A few days after my return to France, they saw each other and went out together. She told me on the phone that he lived in the apartment I shared with her. That he was a fabulous lover. It still hurts my heart to think that this guy could put his morals aside to move into my place, in the middle of half the stuff I left behind. In the middle of my posters, in my sheets. So, recently, he briefly left her after a big red flag in a nightclub (she let herself be hit on in front of him), but I think they're back together today. And since he's a very depressed person, I'm afraid he's going to get completely eaten up. This is the news I received on our last phone call. It was the last one, I made that promise to myself.

In any case, I have trouble understanding this psychological dynamic where I would have pushed her into his arms, even with her teenage maturity?

And I don't know if I was special to her in the end. She now tells me that she doesn't regret me, that we were wrong about many things. And I know she believes it, as if the past doesn't make sense anymore. That the official narrative of our history had sadly become "it wasn't that good, actually."