Bpd is a disorder that exists on a spectrum of severity, from mild (bpd traits) to severe.
Severity has nothing to do with how difficult a person they are for us (or anyone) personally, and everything to do with the suffering and dysfunction
they experience.
There are 6 billion people in the world. It is estimated that 2-5 percent of them have bpd. Countless more have bpd traits (think of bpd traits as bpd light in terms of severity. Bpd light describes most exes on this board. Bpd light may mean less severe, but it does not necessarily mean easier to get along with. The opposite may even be true.)
You're talking about a great deal of people. You are by definition going to have a great deal of diversity. The only thing that people with bpd really have in common is some mixture of 9 personality traits.
This is all to say, that if the internet is telling you that people with bpd, as a whole, do these "things", the correlation is probably a lot more complicated.
If you take ocd, or any mental health disorder, sure, there will be some commonality, but no one assumes any uniformity of experience.
So the answers to your questions probably have less to do with bpd, and a lot more to do with the individuals involved.
But after 3 months BPD came in full force
The first three months to a year of a relationship is considered the "honeymoon phase" (I am talking relationships in general; this phase is not limited to bps relationships).
In that period we are full of hormones, tend to idealize our partners (everyone. People with bpd traits just do it to an extreme), and on our end, we tend to put our best foot forward, put forth that most attractive version of ourselves, and then all of these things settle down.
The vast majority of all relationships end around 3 months, for this reason.
Where bpd comes in, is that bpd may become a lot more obvious around the same time, because of their inherent relationship struggles with exactly those things. Someone with bpd is more likely to resent and blame
you for
themselves trying to become the person you find most attractive. Or where you or I might relax after a while, stop seeing our partner through rose tinted glasses, and maybe some of those habits are now more annoying than endearing, it's actually kind of a crisis for someone with bpd to go through that because they can't hold a stable image of themselves or their loved ones.
. So how was she able to be in all those long term relationships, albeit unhealthy ones?
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that precludes someone with bpd traits from being in a long term relationship.
Bpd obviously presents major challenges in any relationship, but that doesn't necessarily have a great deal to do with length.
There are people on the bettering board whom have been married for 30, 40, 50 years. There are people that have been married to someone with bpd all their lives, never broken up, never had any infidelity.
Length has more to do with "clicking", and clicking really has little to do with the health or the quality of the relationship. My relationship was just shy of three years. I first tried to end it around three months in. Our first three months were full of fights, I told her for the entirety of the relationship that it was unhealthy, I even told her it was more bad than it was good! And yet, I stayed, and she stayed, until we both found a cowards way out. I stayed because however unhappy was, I was getting something out of it. I was getting some dysfunctional need met. And that alone can make for a long term relationship.
So, you can really only get so far in comparing your relationship to theirs. Relationships are a series of interactions between two unique individuals. There are any number of reasons why one lasts longer than another, none of them necessarily "good" or "bad".
Did her BPD got worse over time?
I don't know her, but its possible.
Some bpd traits can improve with age, generally speaking, but if you take a person, anyone, with a dysfunction, keep piling more dysfunction on it, and things are usually going to get worse before they get better.
Was I the reason BPD was triggered so early?
No. This is not really the way bpd works. It isn't triggered. It's a world view. A mentality. A lifestyle. For whatever reason, that has to do with
both of you and the way you connected it sounds like the two of you just had an explosive beginning.
Was I not good enough for her? Was I too good for her?
What I eventually came to see, once I had detached, and moved through the pain, is that we loved each other very much, we just couldn't make it work. There were things about each other that we just couldn't live with. We weren't right for each other.
It isn't a contest. The two of you weren't right for each other (i cant tell you how hard it was and how long it took for me to see that). There are better fits for both of you out there, and that has nothing to do with you or her as a person.
