[quote]LoRez wrote:
[quote]Smashingweights wrote:
Seriously though, she’s a twentysomething who’s already divorced and has obvious relationship/trust/self esteem issues.
You’ve bent over backwards and she still doesn’t see it.
What do you expect to happen?
Blinded by love.[/quote]
I… expect things to continue pretty much as they are. 99% of the time everything is actually really good; 1% of the time she starts a stupid argument about something stupid.[/quote]
I rarely ever post anything on this or any forum, but I felt a social responsibility here, because I know what her problem is, and the 99/1 numbers that you posted made it click.
I have a friend who married a girl he had only known briefly. This is normal and expected in his culture, so please no questions on the story itself. A few days after the wedding, his new bride was sitting on the corner of their bed frowning. She told him that she “feels so alone” and was in no way comforted by the fact that she was in the presence of her husband. In the coming weeks, she periodically went into fits of blaming him for not caring about her, disrespecting her, and not giving her what she needs. He always reassured her, but the only real way to appease her was to sort of grovel and do whatever she wanted in the moment. He asked her father what the deal was and he said “99% of the time she is an angel, and the other 1% you just have to give her what she wants, whatever it is.”
So a very long story made short, it turns out that these are all signs of Borderline Personality Disorder. She also had bulimia and possibly bipolar. Look up BPD on wikipedia for more information, I see many parallels to the story you are telling us now. This girl’s now ex-husband, my friend, told me that he read a book about BPD and i described giving a person with the disorder what they needed emotionally as akin to “attempting to fill the grand canyon with a squirt gun.” Seem familiar?
The disorder also masks itself well. People with it can fake normality effectively, and are often not diagnosed because they behave differently around mental health professionals. It usually is only impossible to hide when their inability to be emotionally intimate or tendency to “plot” is revealed, but this can take years and even people close to them may not connect the dots.
Devaluing your role and sacrifices to please her are typical borderline. Self-harm, risky behavior, lying and promiscuity are also pretty common. I am not qualified to diagnose, but nearly everything you have told us about her lines up with BPD.
[quote]At this point it’s not even really about what I’m getting from the relationship. I’m getting what I want. She’s just fundamentally unhappy, and I’m hoping there’s something I can do.
Also, maybe it wasn’t clear, but I did stop bending over backward for her a long long time ago. I will say that was one of the best decisions I ever made. In response, she now does the same for me. She started putting a lot more work into the relationship.[/quote]
LoRez clearly cares a lot about this girl, and I think that the other posters in this thread need to decide whether or not they care about LoRez, because anyone trying to give advice on how to fix an obviously broken girl is not doing him any favors, and probably just acting as an enabler, helping him to get in deeper with this girl (grown woman?). Anyone who gives him hope of accomplishing what he is attempting is only participating in a delusion, because Borderline or not, this girl needs more help* than a boyfriend can give her.
- I know that things must be pretty bad, because if you had a girlfriend who just got annoyed and whined sometimes, you would not be an a forum asking for advice. You, like most men, would just know it was normal and ignore it. The fact that you are on here tells us all that things are very, very wrong.