Healthy relating after BPD r/s

[Tupla Sport]

It's been about 6 weeks of NC with my exwBPD, though I did see her in passing the other day.

I'm getting slowly back into the dating scene and I have to say that getting to know new people is proving to be a real boon for me.

My advice would be to approach dating in a radically grounded way. The echoes of the BPD relation might make you want to distract yourself by looking for infatuation and those dopamine hits. Or not, it's not the same for everyone.

I did not feel I was looking for that thrill ride kind of dating life but when I started seeing people I felt this tension in the air. I felt I had to be on my absolute best behavior and I wanted to interpret every slightly prolonged moment of silence as a sign that I was being too much, for example.

On the third time seeing this one person I was still feeling the jitters but we spent a good 3 hours or so talking and by the third hour at the latest I was feeling elated. I had not felt so validated in ages.

You might also want to re-examine your existing friendships. I for one realized that I have quite a few relationships with my friends that have gone stale over the years and that have defaulted into this "very good pal" type of relationship where you see each other once a season, say and think you want to see each other more often and then you just don't. In the future I'm looking to build friendships that evolve and deepen in a manner quite similar to romantic relationships. Nothing wrong with having solid pals too, but those r/s's aren't really going anywhere.

[Sappho11]

Dorothy Parker had a point with "The best cure for a man is another man". Surely goes vice versa.

I initially thought so, too. For about three months or so after the final breakup I couldn't meet up with anyone without feeling a profound sense of despair afterwards. It felt as if nobody was ever going to live up to my BPDex, especially physically. In hindsight this was just the chemical addiction wearing off; I remember looking at our old photographs months later and wondering how my mind managed to turn this Average Joe into a perfect Adonis.

Then I met someone who was like the 2.0 version of my ex: similar but better in every way (apparently). It was elating in the short term but that turned out to be a chimera too.

Finally I became infatuated with someone who was the opposite and who seemed solid, but it turned out to be a fantasy as well.

Now I have no interest in dating anymore. The emotional costs of falling for someone are just too great. People only show their true colours after a couple of months (or even years); and it's biologically impossible for a woman not to get attached to a man she finds attractive (there aren't that many out there from our point of view) and spends lots of time with.

tl;dr The emotional cost of dating for women is much higher than for men, and too high for my personal risk assessment at the moment, so I'm not doing it for now.

[Tupla Sport]

I initially thought so, too. For about three months or so after the final breakup I couldn't meet up with anyone without feeling a profound sense of despair afterwards. It felt as if nobody was ever going to live up to my BPDex, especially physically. In hindsight this was just the chemical addiction wearing off; I remember looking at our old photographs months later and wondering how my mind managed to turn this Average Joe into a perfect Adonis.


I'm having a hard time not checking her social media out regularly. While some of the selfies she posts seem to be deliberately giving a vibe of being... out of it some of them have her in stunning make-up accenting her best features. Well, mostly her eyes. I some times pull up those pictures just to feel bad about "missing those eyes". I guess she finds her eyes a safe and innocent way to get the attention. Not to be crude but with her ample bosom you would think she would accentuate that part of her look but I guess that would be too obvious. Seems to go hand in hand with the quiet BPD want to seem normal and not too attention-hungry. But then she only posts those highly made-up selfies of her face . Interesting strategy to say the least.