Escaping a Borderline Personality

I originally wrote this as a reply to a post in a support group on here for partners of people with Borderline Personality Disorder. So that's what BPD means in the following. I decided it was relevant to the broader group of men going through divorce because, whether stated explicitly or not, I think getting involved with a woman with BPD will ultimately end in divorce. And there's lots of them out there online, and the sex is amazing at first...

Anyway, my journey. Thanks for reading.

I finally broke up with my pwBPD for good, as I'll explain below, but I know I need to really get to the bottom of why I got played so hard. I've got therapy lined up, starting in a couple of weeks as well as an awesome support group of friends and family who would literally have an intervention if I made the slightest move toward reconciliation.

I've been with my pwBPD for over 10 years, married 9. I was widowed at a fairly young age and began online dating totally naive.

In retrospect typical BPD signs: great, intense sex and adulation, my assuming the role of rescuing her from a past, supposedly abusive relationship, tons of unresolved circular fights where something I said was completely misconstrued, major trust issues, never taking accountability, not working, leaving all the financial responsibility to me, but saying I was being financially controlling if I said no to anything, which picked up once we'd burned through my small inheritance... the list goes on.

The only reason we lasted as long as we did was because I had a second house (our planned retirement place) which she started basically living at, filling it with stuff she'd hoard.... We were living the majority of time as 'separated.' After one particularly bad fight I saw an attorney about divorce, but 'did the right thing' and discussed it with my pwBPD.

She always had an amazing ability to make her problems mine, and I dropped that divorce before she was ever served.

Jump forward six months and we have another big fight while she was here at 'my' house. She leaves, and the next thing I know, the cops are at my door. She'd totally mischaracterized and exaggerated our fight, but, as I learned, it's the police's policy to separate the couple, so somebody has to 'go downtown.' Now I've got a criminal charge to fight, but I got the divorce going again, full speed ahead, and the best thing of all is that she got a protective order against me, which means we can't talk, and her powers of manipulation as they relate to me are out of the equation. My point here is that, the BPD was so strong and controlling of me that it took a night in jail and a 90 day forced separation to finally set me free.

I definitely know that my dysfunction, whether it be codependency or whatever, needs to be addressed. Just to be a healthier, better functioning person for however long I have. Ten years down the drain, much of it bad, but even with all the legal shit in front of me and the money that goes poof, I've not felt this optimistic and more like my old self in a very long time.