Thank you for writing this blog post. My fiancé has borderline personality disorder and they're the kindest, sweetest, most considerate person in my life. All the self-help books, subreddits, and Psychology Today type think-pieces about dating someone with BPD are so universally horrible and stigmatizing. I couldn't imagine them talking about someone with a different disability that way. Even the one book I've read that wasn't stigmatizing ("Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder") was patronizing to people with BPD and offered no useful advice for setting boundaries in romantic relationships (it seemed mostly geared toward parents with borderline children.) Sadly, this post is the best actionable advice I've seen for dating someone with BPD on the receiving end, too.
I strongly agree with your point that having borderline feelings and thoughts don't make relationships toxic, your actions do. I had one relationship with a guy with BPD who was a manipulative dick, refused to go to therapy, and kept blaming me for his own bad behavior. My current fiancé owns up to their own shit, apologizes before I even realize I'm offended, and puts in an effort to work on their own mental health; they don't push everything on me. Having BPD doesn't make you an asshole, your choices do. Just as true for neurotypicals.
Being autistic, I also agree with your point about how it can be nice to date someone with a mental illness and understands what it's like! I don't have to mask so much or worry about oversharing. I feel respected and understood when I ask to do things in a certain unusual way to avoid feeling overwhelmed. The one time I had a very public meltdown on the floor at an airport, they gave me a stuffed animal and explained the situation to everyone and didn't make me feel less for it because they've been through something similar. It's hard to find that level of understanding from a neurotypical person.
The excitement and high levels of emotional commitment are a huge benefit to dating someone with BPD specifically! I'm not emotionally reserved, but I love partners with BIG feelings! I get easily bored otherwise. I love being endlessly complimented and flattered and appreciated and adored, to an extent that would freak other partners out or put them off. I love nurturing and caring for my fiancé when they're really down, and I feel like it makes us closer. I love when they return the favor, even if I have mental breakdowns less often. It doesn't have to be 50/50, because we're both enjoying our time together either way.
Apparently, I've been doing some things right I didn't even know I was doing right! I've always had good boundaries about not giving too much of my time when my partner is down and I have other things in my life I'm excited to do. I don't drop everything when my partner is suicidal and self-harmy, unless it's a certain degree of bad. I remember a moment our first year together when I was excited to go to an artsy workshop and my fiancé was feeling suicidal and asked me to stay on the phone with them, but I said I was leaving in 10 minutes and suggested some other friends they could call. Later they appreciated that I set that boundary. Generally one thing they love about me is I can't be told to do anything and I'm fiercely independent in pursuit of my own happiness.
My experience of having had many other suicidal and mentally ill friends and relatives has definitely been a help. So has being the more emotionally stable one in the relationship. It probably wouldn't work if we were both a mess all the time.
Final note about polyamory: I'd be hesitant to date more than one person with BPD at a time. It can be a high emotional/time commitment. Maybe if it was someone who had a primary partner? Still sorting out my thoughts about that one.
One thing I've been trying to figure out is what exactly borderline personality disorder *is*, conceptually speaking.
I used to think it was simply the extreme end of B5 Neuroticism, because BPD and Neuroticism seem to get described in very similar ways (and become even more similar when looking at some additional data that might not necessarily be described well). However, various things have made me discard this model, most notably this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9001677/
Which finds that borderline personality disorder is genetically nearly independent of neuroticism.
My current model is to view BPD as being close to the criticality threshold for social conflict escalation. Like basically conflict is normally self-limiting. One might naively/anecdotally think that conflict generates more conflict, but that's just selection bias because the conflicts that are self-limiting have gone away and therefore you don't see them, only the self-perpetuating ones. Conflict is not usually self-perpetuating, at least not in a self-sustaining way, because e.g. if there's too much conflict one will just leave, and also one will tend to forgive older stuff that's less relevant, and of course much more important one will have an interest in resolving the conflict.
But people probably vary in how much conflict is self-limiting. Not necessarily because they are disagreeable or abusive (though that is surely a factor too), just all sorts of random reasons. Like there are so many different mechanisms by which conflict can deescalate, so there are also so many different mechanisms by which people can vary in how well they deescalate conflict.
Under my model, BPD is what occurs when the deescalation tendency is close to 1, so that conflicts easily keep going or even grow exponentially. Which, again, can include weird counterintuitive contributors like being overly forgiving, because if one forgives something that's unwise to forgive then one can end up enveloped in an abusive environment that generates more conflict.
I don't necessarily mean that all BPD characteristics are upstream of this. Facing a lot of conflicts that keep appearing for mysterious reasons would presumably create a lot of the negative emotions that BPD people experience, for instance. But basically my model is this BPD seems fuzzy and heterogenous because it basically *is*, as it consists of wildly different unrelated things that just happen to move closer to the criticality threshold, sometimes for incomprehensible reasons.
I'm not sure whether my model is correct. Your posts on it almost seem to present BPD as a form of extreme neuroticism, so maybe I should get closer to that, even if it doesn't literally 100% work out. Idk.
Needing other people really has been pathologized to the extent that anyone with a taxing disability or hardship might get the message that they aren't eligible for romantic partnership. Often two people who need each other in different ways are better together than they would be alone, and isn't that a big part of the point of a relationship? But the idea that a partner could improve a person's character and their quality of life doesn't factor into either partner-as-personal attainment calculus, where everyone is a static individual who becomes disposable the moment they lose status or experience difficulty, or partner-as-threat mindset, where any behavior can be fashioned into a 'red flag' altering you to the presence of a serial murderer.
I’ve come back to this post a few times when I’ve been struggling with relationship-related BPD symptoms. It’s nice to have a reminder that we can have positive relationships and also affirmation of the work I’m doing to make my relationship a good one.
And it’s really sweet to read the part about partner choice, thinking about how lucky I am to have a partner who supports me, understands that I am working to get better, and doesn’t take my emotional responses too seriously. They are kind to me even when I don’t think I deserve kindness, and they motivate me to work on myself — I’ve improved a lot through the course of our relationship and I certainly owe a part of that to a partner who is so supportive of me in good times and bad times. :)
I don't know if I'm codependent or have been exploited in my relationship with my wife, but I do know that I've been a lot happier with her than before I met her, so... ::shrug::
Just a little note to say i've been thinking about this post a lot since i read it. Especially the last bit about the possibility of dynamics that are non-codependent but where one partner provides more care and likes that.
Thank you for writing this blog post. My fiancé has borderline personality disorder and they're the kindest, sweetest, most considerate person in my life. All the self-help books, subreddits, and Psychology Today type think-pieces about dating someone with BPD are so universally horrible and stigmatizing. I couldn't imagine them talking about someone with a different disability that way. Even the one book I've read that wasn't stigmatizing ("Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder") was patronizing to people with BPD and offered no useful advice for setting boundaries in romantic relationships (it seemed mostly geared toward parents with borderline children.) Sadly, this post is the best actionable advice I've seen for dating someone with BPD on the receiving end, too.
I strongly agree with your point that having borderline feelings and thoughts don't make relationships toxic, your actions do. I had one relationship with a guy with BPD who was a manipulative dick, refused to go to therapy, and kept blaming me for his own bad behavior. My current fiancé owns up to their own shit, apologizes before I even realize I'm offended, and puts in an effort to work on their own mental health; they don't push everything on me. Having BPD doesn't make you an asshole, your choices do. Just as true for neurotypicals.
Being autistic, I also agree with your point about how it can be nice to date someone with a mental illness and understands what it's like! I don't have to mask so much or worry about oversharing. I feel respected and understood when I ask to do things in a certain unusual way to avoid feeling overwhelmed. The one time I had a very public meltdown on the floor at an airport, they gave me a stuffed animal and explained the situation to everyone and didn't make me feel less for it because they've been through something similar. It's hard to find that level of understanding from a neurotypical person.
The excitement and high levels of emotional commitment are a huge benefit to dating someone with BPD specifically! I'm not emotionally reserved, but I love partners with BIG feelings! I get easily bored otherwise. I love being endlessly complimented and flattered and appreciated and adored, to an extent that would freak other partners out or put them off. I love nurturing and caring for my fiancé when they're really down, and I feel like it makes us closer. I love when they return the favor, even if I have mental breakdowns less often. It doesn't have to be 50/50, because we're both enjoying our time together either way.
Apparently, I've been doing some things right I didn't even know I was doing right! I've always had good boundaries about not giving too much of my time when my partner is down and I have other things in my life I'm excited to do. I don't drop everything when my partner is suicidal and self-harmy, unless it's a certain degree of bad. I remember a moment our first year together when I was excited to go to an artsy workshop and my fiancé was feeling suicidal and asked me to stay on the phone with them, but I said I was leaving in 10 minutes and suggested some other friends they could call. Later they appreciated that I set that boundary. Generally one thing they love about me is I can't be told to do anything and I'm fiercely independent in pursuit of my own happiness.
My experience of having had many other suicidal and mentally ill friends and relatives has definitely been a help. So has being the more emotionally stable one in the relationship. It probably wouldn't work if we were both a mess all the time.
Final note about polyamory: I'd be hesitant to date more than one person with BPD at a time. It can be a high emotional/time commitment. Maybe if it was someone who had a primary partner? Still sorting out my thoughts about that one.
One thing I've been trying to figure out is what exactly borderline personality disorder *is*, conceptually speaking.
I used to think it was simply the extreme end of B5 Neuroticism, because BPD and Neuroticism seem to get described in very similar ways (and become even more similar when looking at some additional data that might not necessarily be described well). However, various things have made me discard this model, most notably this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9001677/
Which finds that borderline personality disorder is genetically nearly independent of neuroticism.
My current model is to view BPD as being close to the criticality threshold for social conflict escalation. Like basically conflict is normally self-limiting. One might naively/anecdotally think that conflict generates more conflict, but that's just selection bias because the conflicts that are self-limiting have gone away and therefore you don't see them, only the self-perpetuating ones. Conflict is not usually self-perpetuating, at least not in a self-sustaining way, because e.g. if there's too much conflict one will just leave, and also one will tend to forgive older stuff that's less relevant, and of course much more important one will have an interest in resolving the conflict.
But people probably vary in how much conflict is self-limiting. Not necessarily because they are disagreeable or abusive (though that is surely a factor too), just all sorts of random reasons. Like there are so many different mechanisms by which conflict can deescalate, so there are also so many different mechanisms by which people can vary in how well they deescalate conflict.
Under my model, BPD is what occurs when the deescalation tendency is close to 1, so that conflicts easily keep going or even grow exponentially. Which, again, can include weird counterintuitive contributors like being overly forgiving, because if one forgives something that's unwise to forgive then one can end up enveloped in an abusive environment that generates more conflict.
I don't necessarily mean that all BPD characteristics are upstream of this. Facing a lot of conflicts that keep appearing for mysterious reasons would presumably create a lot of the negative emotions that BPD people experience, for instance. But basically my model is this BPD seems fuzzy and heterogenous because it basically *is*, as it consists of wildly different unrelated things that just happen to move closer to the criticality threshold, sometimes for incomprehensible reasons.
I'm not sure whether my model is correct. Your posts on it almost seem to present BPD as a form of extreme neuroticism, so maybe I should get closer to that, even if it doesn't literally 100% work out. Idk.
Needing other people really has been pathologized to the extent that anyone with a taxing disability or hardship might get the message that they aren't eligible for romantic partnership. Often two people who need each other in different ways are better together than they would be alone, and isn't that a big part of the point of a relationship? But the idea that a partner could improve a person's character and their quality of life doesn't factor into either partner-as-personal attainment calculus, where everyone is a static individual who becomes disposable the moment they lose status or experience difficulty, or partner-as-threat mindset, where any behavior can be fashioned into a 'red flag' altering you to the presence of a serial murderer.
I’ve come back to this post a few times when I’ve been struggling with relationship-related BPD symptoms. It’s nice to have a reminder that we can have positive relationships and also affirmation of the work I’m doing to make my relationship a good one.
And it’s really sweet to read the part about partner choice, thinking about how lucky I am to have a partner who supports me, understands that I am working to get better, and doesn’t take my emotional responses too seriously. They are kind to me even when I don’t think I deserve kindness, and they motivate me to work on myself — I’ve improved a lot through the course of our relationship and I certainly owe a part of that to a partner who is so supportive of me in good times and bad times. :)
I don't know if I'm codependent or have been exploited in my relationship with my wife, but I do know that I've been a lot happier with her than before I met her, so... ::shrug::
Just a little note to say i've been thinking about this post a lot since i read it. Especially the last bit about the possibility of dynamics that are non-codependent but where one partner provides more care and likes that.
Thanks!