My Borderline Romance
by Anonymous
Warning: This article contains details of abuse.
Have you ever tried to hug a wolf? What about when it's growling and foaming at the mouth? Or when it’s lunging at you, teeth bared, eyes wild?
For me, that's how it felt to love someone with borderline personality disorder.
Except sometimes, that wolf looks like a bunny.
You know those bunnies with those long floppy ears? Like that. And also the bunny has hearts for eyes. But every time it looks like a bunny, you know it can become that terrifying, rabid, foaming, growling, teeth-baring wolf at any moment. With no warning.
But truthfully, it’s kind of on you.
Because the wolf only comes out when you do something really, really mean and really, really extreme. Like asking if he wants a soda in the wrong tone of voice. Or texting “where are you?” when he’s an hour late to dinner. Or asking if he can move his stuff off the kitchen counter when you’re cooking dinner. You know. Really mean things.
Loving someone with BPD felt like a kind of death. My own. I learned how to smash down my own needs so far that after a while, I forget they were there.
And that, reader, was by design.
The borderline I loved spent his life creating scenarios in which he was the victim of an unfair world. Scenarios in which things always happen TO him. Scenarios in which, somehow, I was his only hope.
It feels good to be someone’s only hope.
But it also feels very, very bad.
When things would get too hard, I would consult articles and books and therapists. His therapist. His therapists. His family. More therapists. Specialists. More specialists. They would remind me that while it’s possible to be in a healthy relationship with this affliction, it’s likely that I would be consumed with managing him and his needs. His outbursts. His inability to self-regulate. His emotional violence. His erratic behavior. His temper. His paranoia. His impulsivity. His constant life-or-death fear of abandonment. His self-injurious desires. His dissociation from reality. His sudden need to be reckless.
His screaming.
His screaming.
His screaming.
Ok. Well.
That just means patience, right?
That just means deep and unconditional understanding, right?
That just means that only someone with enough self-sufficiency and confidence would be up for the challenge. Someone, like him, who also suffered child abuse by inept parents, and would therefore be uniquely able to help.
Right?
Well, no. Of course you’re way ahead of me. You’re looking in. From the outside. But I was looking out. From the inside. And in the place where actual self-esteem should live, was a big, gaping hole of my own, ugly narcissistic wounding.
“it feels good to be someone’s only hope. but it also feels very, very bad.”
And narcissists love borderlines. We dance and dance and dance and we’re really a perfect pair. We both form quick (seemingly) strong attachments to people, the borderline deeply needing the narcissist and the narcissist deeply needing to feel needed.
Of course, at the time, I don’t see it. At the time I just think I’m strong for being able to put up with him calling my mother and “confiding” in her about how he was worried I was on drugs (I wasn’t) as a way to punish me for asking if we could go to couples counseling. Who else but a strong girl could handle this! I know his real heart. This is just the disorder talking.
This was also the disorder talking. Listen up, strong girls!
Taking my car in the middle of the night and smashing it into a telephone pole on purpose because I told him yelling wasn’t an option anymore in the relationship.
Flying to Vegas for a fun weekend trip and after the first night, him driving 8 hours back home, alone, after getting angry when I suggested, at 4am, that it might be time for us to finish gambling.
Taking my credit card and buying hundreds of dollars of cocaine with a cash advance and pretending someone stole it, only to admit it later as a response to me saying we should consider living apart, which I should have known “tweaks” him.
I know what you’re thinking. Well that’s just abuse. And this is madness. You have to leave. Just leave. Leave.
And I did leave. So don't worry.
But it took a while.
Because imagine that you knew the heaven that is feeling understood by another person.
I don't mean like the kind of couples that are on House Hunters who want double vanities and open concept great rooms, I mean like meeting the counterpart to the song in your soul. Someone who unzips all of his armor and garbage and asks you to love what's inside and helps you to do the same. Someone who sneaks 20s in your pockets when you're not looking, not because you need the money but because you never have cash on you and it's always smart to have a little cash.
And arranges a surprise trip to Bora Bora to stay in one of those bungalows that sits literally on the ocean because he saw you pin that image on Pinterest 7 months ago. I know you know those bungalows.
And listens to you talk and talk and talk about your horrible boss, and doesn’t try to solve the problem and just listens and gives you validation, and is your audience-of-one for big work presentations the night before to be sure all the kinks are worked out, and when he’s away on a business trip orders you 5 different brands of litter boxes for your new kitten to make sure you can find one that works perfectly because having a pet for the first time is hard.
But.
With tears in my eyes as I write this, I have to force myself to remember that for every litter box he sends to my sweet little kitten who he loves and kisses and cuddles, on some nights he has screamed at me so loudly that it sent that kitten cowering in the corner, shaking for hours afterward.
“and none of it ever gets better. it gets worse. he told me that from the beginning.”
And none of it ever gets better. It gets worse. And he told me that from the beginning. I think it was Oprah or if not Oprah some schlocky self-help book that said:
When people show you who they are, believe them.
But I didn’t believe him. My incredible narcissism said: You. Will. Be. The. One. To Help. Him. I wanted to believe that the “real” him was that bunny with hearts for eyes.
But the truth is, there was no “real” him. There was no self. No identity. The people in his wake supply the big broken mirror he holds up to himself to approximate the shadow of a person shaped like a man, but there was no one there. And my own childhood wounds convinced me that I was uniquely able to help him find himself, understand himself, become himself.
I wasn’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I waited until he was out of town to change the locks. Far, far out of town. And then I packed up his things. It took me 9 hours. I brought 48 boxes to a storage unit on the outskirts of the city. It was a Wednesday. I stacked all the boxes to the ceiling and walked back out into the unseasonably cold night. I pulled down the metal door with such force that it startled me.
And then I drove back to my apartment with the new lock, with a new goal:
The next confused, broken, sad, floundering person I was going to devote an entire lifetime to helping, would be myself.
________________
It’s 9 years later. I’m married with 2 kids. Social media tells me of his whereabouts from time to time. Three different girlfriends of his have contacted me throughout the years about trying to get him help. I think I saw he was in jail for a while.
I don’t ever respond.
And not wanting to save other people is maybe the greatest thing I’ve learned how to do for myself. So far.
