Love when you have BPD

Face the Facts posted the following, written by someone working to stay in recovery from BPD:

Some partners of people with BPD worry the relationship was just a game, that their SO was using them and felt nothing for them. That’s not true.

I am a recovering BP.

Before, when I was in a relationship, my feelings felt genuine. I didn’t have a conscious ulterior motive. There was an authentic connection; and while it may have been unhealthy and for the wrong reasons, it was, in my mind, real.

I acted as if I was in love because I thought I was.

The bond that occurred in the beginning of a relationship was incredible: there was a deep (false) sense of knowing the other person intimately, intuitively. He became my whole world and it was wonderful, rapturous. When my boyfriends left – and they invariably left – that world was annihilated; everything fell to ashes.

The breakup that led to my hard-won recovery from BPD left me literally slumped on the floor, crushed in spirit, feeling as if there was no meaning in my life.

I was close to killing myself - too defeated and broken to even move. The saddest thing about the situation was that I was the cause of my pain, yet had little idea then that it was due to my own behavior.

So yes, the love is “real”, but only in the sense of how it feels to the person with BPD: the feelings seem real, they feel like love.

But it’s not love because it’s based on need rather than on true caring and intimacy, which is the real love we all deserve.

~People suffer to different degrees with BPD, the fears vary which also make their responses vary. As we come to understand this illness and the specific cycles our loved ones follow, looking back the behaviors will seem predictable in some small way.