Context: I (34F) ended a relationship about a month and a half ago with a man (32M) I'd been dating for around six months. It was a long-distance relationship, although we did meet and spend time together in person.
Going into the relationship, I knew my ex-boyfriend had somewhat severe mental health issues, although his exact diagnosis was unclear. After doing a lot of reading here on and looking into Cluster B personality disorders more broadly, I was surprised by how well BPD seemed to contextualize many of my experiences in the relationship. This has led me to wonder whether he might have undiagnosed or misdiagnosed BPD.
My ex told me he'd been diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder (SzPD), but he wasn't confident that the diagnosis was accurate. Ironically, I was previously in a very healthy, long-term relationship (over 12 years; we broke up because we'd grown apart and are still friends today) with someone who had also been professionally diagnosed with SzPD. Because I was already familiar with how SzPD presented in my former partner, I felt confident that I could mentally and emotionally handle a relationship with someone who had a similar diagnosis. However, I soon realized that my experience with this recent ex was nothing like my experience with my former partner.
Our relationship both began and ended very abruptly. It started with an almost instantaneous emotional connection and ended with what felt like a split/discard.
Based on my experience, I can identify some connection to at least seven of the BPD diagnostic criteria in my ex-boyfriend:
Chronic feelings of emptiness
Yes, strongly. This was a daily struggle throughout our relationship. Because I cared for him, a large portion of the emotional labor I took on in the relationship was trying to help him manage/improve his anhedonia and find meaning in his life.
Emotional instability in reaction to everyday events, such as intense episodic sadness, irritability, or anxiety that typically lasts a few hours and rarely more than a few days
Yes, strongly. We'd frequently be hanging out, having a good time, and seemingly at random he'd experience such intense sadness that he physically had to leave his house to escape it. This actually happened so frequently that I expressed a desire to come up with an action plan I could follow if this happened when we were in person together for his and my own safety.
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
Yes, possibly. There were occasions when we'd have what I considered perfectly normal disagreements, but he'd react with an intensity that seemed completely disproportionate to the situation.
For example, I once expressed discomfort with him getting back in contact with a woman he'd previously had a long-term sexual/situationship-type relationship with. I told him, verbatim: "I think it's kind of inappropriate to pursue this friendship while in a relationship with me, and I wish we could've talked about it first."
His reaction was what I'd describe as that of a frightened child. He begged and pleaded with me not to be mad and seemed unable to earnestly engage with my feelings, even though I wasn't even angry. I was calm and trying to explain my perspective. It was actually heartbreaking to witness because it made me feel as though I was abusing him, even though I could intellectually recognize that I wasn't asking for anything unreasonable in an adult relationship.
There were other, less contentious examples of this pattern. From my perspective, it boiled down to this: if I expressed anything other than complete happiness and contentment with him, he turned it into a catastrophe. I often felt that I had to suppress my own normal emotions to keep his mood stable.
Significant or persistent instability in self-image or sense of self
Yes, strongly. At one point I outright asked him "Do you feel like you have a good understanding of yourself?" to which he replied "no, I don't think I ever have" and ruminated on it quite a bit. I got the impression that having him introspect on this question was very significant to him.
Impulsive behavior in at least two areas that can be self-damaging, such as spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, or binge eating
Not in the traditional sense of the examples listed, although he explicitly told me that he struggled with impulsivity.
From my perspective, his impulsivity manifested more as simple irresponsibility. For example, he skipped work at his new job to play video games on a day when he was expected to be present, because he apparently hadn't clarified with his boss whether he was supposed to be present and just assumed he had the day off. He had told me it was rare for him to hold a job for more than three months at a time because of behaviors like this.
Intense anger or difficulty controlling anger, including frequent temper displays, constant anger, or recurrent physical fights
I didn't witness this personally. He wasn't an angry person in my experience.
A pattern of intense and unstable relationships marked by extremes between idealization and devaluation, also known as “splitting“
Yes. In my own experience, I felt strongly idealized for 90-95% of the relationship, which flipped to strongly devalued in the last 5-10% just before the relationship ended. At first I was a perfect, amazing girlfriend who could do no wrong and had the ability to solve all of his problems. By then end, I was apparently the source of any and all problems with the relationship and his emotional state. No in-between.
He'd also told me that he had bad blood with most, if not all, of his former friends. He didn't seem to have friendships that simply faded out over time, like most people tend to have. The endings apparently inevitably tended to involve conflict.
I also noticed that his current friendships seemed relatively shallow, despite how he'd initially describe them. He'd talk about having close, emotionally deep connections with people, only for me to later discover that he'd known them for just a couple of months and that their interactions mostly consisted of casual conversations and playing video games together. By contrast, my closest friendships are with people I've known for decades and have built trust and emotional intimacy through sharing experiences, supporting each other through difficult periods, and developing a deeper understanding of one another over time.
I don't think it's impossible to form strong connections with people you just met, but it was striking to me that these types of friendships were the only friendships he could maintain. I wondered if he had ever experienced how emotional intimacy develops through repeated, positive experiences with another person.
Repeated suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-harming actions
Yes, very strongly. He'd been hospitalized at least once for a suicide attempt. He also made remarks about suicidal ideation on a weekly basis, sometimes daily when he was doing particularly badly. A significant portion of the emotional labor I took on in the relationship involved trying to calm him during these episodes. The situation felt incredibly urgent because he frequently treated me like I was his only meaningful source for emotional support, despite him seeing a therapist and living close to family.
Temporary, stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms
Possibly, although I didn't witness this first-hand. He told me he dealt with dissociation or hallucinations during periods of stress previously. These episodes didn't appear to happen during our relationship.
Some of the following don't map directly onto the diagnostic criteria above, but they reminded me of patterns I've encountered while reading people's experiences here:
Preoccupation with how he was viewed by others:
He seemed extremely preoccupied with how he was perceived by others, particularly whether other people were paying attention to him at all. We met on a community forum related to a game we both played. I eventually learned that he would search for his character's name almost daily to see whether other players were talking about him; if he couldn't find any recent posts, he'd use random aliases to post flattering comments about himself. He was deeply invested in maintaining a positive image within that community and others related to his hobbies.
I wondered whether this was connected to his reported feelings of emptiness or difficulties with his sense of self. My read was that he relied heavily on other people's perceptions to establish a sense of identity due to his own unstable self-perception. If nobody was talking about him, he felt as though he didn't exist.
Unstable feelings about the relationship:
His emotional instability seemed to extend beyond his sense of self to the relationship itself. He'd frequently flip-flop between very different accounts of his feelings. One week, he'd tell me he loved and missed me and that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him and that he didn't deserve me. The next week, he'd say he didn't know how he felt about me or the relationship, he didn't think he loved me, or that we shouldn't be together. Then, the week after that, he'd be back to telling me he'd dreamed about holding me close, running his fingers through my hair, and kissing my forehead.
It was difficult to reconcile these statements with one another. It felt as though he had no continuity in his recollection of his own emotional experiences: whatever he felt in the present instantaneously became the lens through which he interpreted how he'd supposedly always felt. This was particularly maddening to me as someone who has a pretty good, intuitive understanding of her own emotional experience.
During the final split/discard, he made several statement about my character that I found bewildering:
He said that he 'couldn't take making me feel better about every little thing anymore' because 'any time he talks about his feelings he ends up having to reassure me.' I struggle immensely trying to reconcile this with my experience of the relationship. From my perspective, I did the vast majority of the emotional caretaking, largely because he frequently expressed suicidal ideation and I was treated as his main pillar of support. Even outside those episodes, I spent hours talking through his problems with his family, friends, his job, etc. I tried to be supportive, focused on his needs, and researched potential solutions to help him. Hell, after one particular six-hour conversation about his relationship with his mom I walked away from it with the homework assignment to find him listings for a used car so they wouldn't have to share a vehicle anymore.
The only time I expressed my own emotions in response to his emotional disclosures were when they fundamentally threatened the relationship (the "I don't know if I want to be with you" phases described above); I don't know how or why he expected me to react with complete emotional neutrality to him telling me he didn't want to be with me.
After the breakup, I went no-contact with him across all platforms within two or three days. Through a third party, I later learned that he'd apparently been trying to monkey-branch to a minor and may have been in contact with or grooming them before our relationship ended.
I want to be clear that I don't attribute this behavior to potentially having BPD. Whatever his mental health circumstances might be, I attribute grooming a minor to being a reprehensible, disgusting, piece of shit human being.
I submitted an anonymous tip to his local authorities. Since I'm no-contact with him, I don't know whether anything came of it, and I won't be seeking further information.
I understand that we can't diagnose from afar, and I wouldn't claim to know decisively if my ex-boyfriend does or does not have BPD.
Some of his behaviors, like the lack of violent outbursts and the relative ease with which our relationship ended, don't seem to match the profile of BPD at all. Others seem to align extremely closely.
Since all of you have a lot more first-hand experience with BPD than the average person: do these behaviors seem to match the patterns you saw with your own BPD partners? I'd really appreciate to hear your perspectives.
As for me, I've been doing quite well since going NC despite the relationship leaving me with a lot of unanswered questions. I've come to accept that there are aspects of his behavior I may never be able to explain and that I don't need to understand them in order to move on with my life.
One of the most healing realizations for me has been that the relationship was never really about me. I was simply warm body who happened to be available and close enough by to fill the role of "girlfriend." In the end, I don't think he ever really saw me for who I was.
It was never really about me, and understanding that has made it much easier to let go.
