Thankfully, my SO hung in there with me for over a decade. I finally realized I needed professional help last year and things have gotten a lot better. Lamotrigine was a miracle drug for me.
I just ended a 6 month relationship with a woman with borderline personality disorder or bipolar (I think).
I wrote that “I think” because she was incredibly private about her past and told me “I’m hiding a lot of my “crazy” from you right now but you’ll find out soon enough”. Ominous and exact words from her. She told me of several less several diagnoses that are all part and parcel of BPD. So, my thinking is she was not diagnosed with something larger or just hid it from me.
When I broke it off, of course she and her friends accused me of lying when previously I said I understood and cared and accused me of selfishness and cowardice.
I actually had to explain to a grown women that understanding someone and caring for them doesn’t mean you are willing to be with them no matter what. If it were, then literally nearly everyone that ever broke things off with anyone would be in the wrong for doing so. So, she was also excessively focused on who was at fault for the failed relationship and wanted to make me the scapegoat to make herself feel better.
To answer the OP: I was getting sick of things at the 3 month mark when she could no longer uphold pretenses and by 6 months I was worn down to a stub, and had to end it for my own health.
She had a string of such relationships that lasted about this long.
If I had a personality disorder, then I would not try to have long term, romantic relationships at all.
Friends can deal with a lot more than SOs because they can better limit their interactions and how they are affected and what they expect.
I tried to explain this to her when she noted how a few of her female friends had stuck with her for longer. It’s a different kettle of fish. Unless she finds another person with afflictions that leave them with limited relationship options or she finds a mental super man or someone that just doesn’t care or can take anything/very low standards, I don’t see her able to stay in a relationship for long.
BPD and bipolar are nothing alike. There are a lot of people in this thread with baffling conceptions of bipolar disorder.
Alright, but she might have had both.
She was very upbeat and loving at the beginning of our relationship and then after a single, relatively mild, stressful event, she withdrew totally and made no effort to rise above her melancholy. She was then sullen for months on end.
She was also highly manipulative and told small lies constantly.
It is possible she had mild versions of both or one with some characteristics of the other.
I find your certainty around this amusing.
Gosh, I know just how the OP feels; there are times when I can’t stand myself for more than a couple of minutes.
A lot of the rest of you have a very strange sense of what bipolar is. I’m seeing a lot of descriptions of manic depressive and borderline personality disorder, but I don’t see a lot of myself in here. Of course, lately I’ve been so down I’ve been unipolar for the most part (or maybe down, and then lower down as the poles).
But anyway, thanks for helping to perpetuate the stereotypes that stop so many of us from seeking help. I know I can’t say anything about my condition at work without getting fired because of things like this.
Bipolar is difficult to explain. Certainly there are high periods and low periods, but they aren’t always cyclical. There’s at least three types of Bipolar disorder, and most cases are misdiagnosed. It can take years of trial and error to properly treat the disease. That’s potentially a huge burden to bipolar sufferers and their loved ones.
So, to those of you who don’t think the participants of this thread understand what you’re going through, it’s because it’s a hard condition to pin down. There is no easy solution.