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The second girl I met through Tinder was one of these people who cannot manage her own life. She was definitely the most dysfunctional person I've ever gotten to know well. She kept flunking out of college because she hardly attended any classes and didn't do any work. She would enroll in a new college every other semester and immediately flunk out. She couldn't keep a part-time minimum wage job for more than a few weeks because she wouldn't go half the time. She didn't need the money because she lived with her parents, but she desperately wanted it so she could buy MDMA, to which she was addicted, alcohol, take-out, clothes, make-up, and bus tickets. When she was unemployed, she would borrow money from me and almost never pay me back, denying she ever borrowed it. Any money she earned would immediately be spent. She didn't even have $3 for the bus to go home, which she stole from me at least once.
She lied constantly, even about inconsequential things like the names of her parents. She briefly suffered from paranoid delusions, in my opinion caused by the drugs. She was prescribed an anti-psychotic, which she did not seem to understand the purpose of other than she was "sick" and this was "medicine". She did not understand that her delusion had been all in her head. She told me about it as though it had really happened. She didn't seem to have made any connection between the delusion and the anti-psychotic she was on. I could not convince her to tell her doctor about the drug use.
She had no attention span. When we met, she was very talkative and would ask me questions, but I could rarely get two sentences into an answer before she changed the subject. She could not watch a movie without repeatedly skipping parts she found boring, which was always most of the movie. She often got bored of me and then started texting other guys she knew while still in my apartment.
Before long, we were just friends. She treated me really horribly and it was clear she wasn't right for me, but I stayed friends with her because I just felt so bad for her. It looked like her life was going to turn into a disaster if no one helped her. But it turned out to be a totally wasted effort.
She really wanted a boyfriend but didn't know how to go about it. I explained to her that a guy who invites her over to his apartment late at night for a first date is not interested in anything other than sex. When she finally got a boyfriend, I explained that he wouldn't stay if she kept cheating on him. She never took my advice.
She somehow got a guy from another city who was too good for her to propose to her. He was really nice, smart, and had a decent job. I seriously considered warning him off of her as I wished someone had done for me, but decided against it. They seemed really happy together. He would regularly make the nine hour drive each way to visit her. He once even drove up to pick her up and take him to meet his family and then, because she was afraid of taking the train home on her own, she convinced him after much resistance to drive her back, adding an extra 18 hours of driving. But the second he left she was meeting up guys and sleeping with them, which she told him about. She was sometimes having multiple one-night stands a week, one of which resulted in a pregnancy which she aborted. Obviously, it didn't work out with her fiancé, who she seemed to really love, but she just couldn't stand being alone.
Early on, when we were dating and I was starting to realize how awful she was, I went through her text messages and found one from her ex-boyfriend, who she always talked about so positively. He just said, without elaboration, that meeting her was the worst thing that ever happened to him. I might say the same.
I didn't get into it much, but despite the incompetence in the rest of her life, she was quite charming and manipulative. She somehow had a few good friends who seemed totally normal. But I find it hard to imagine how she could ever support herself or get a man to do so long-term.
I've known a decent number of girls who were disordered in this particular way, but maybe not to that degree.
Like, they can do the basics of holding down a job, maybe even one with actual responsibilities, keep an apartment, MAYBE keep a pet alive. But their personal and social lives are complete shitshows because they can't keep social commitments, they will lie about things with reckless abandon, and view other people as amusements as best or instruments of their own desires at worst. That is, they care about another person only to the precise extent they can get something fun or useful out of them.
Girls whose aging cars are constantly breaking down or running out of gas but have like a half dozen guys who will show up to bail them out on short notice, and MAYBE get rewarded with sexual contact or at least some drugs.
And sometimes the right kind of broken person can play into that and you can get a codependent relationship that persists for 6 months to a year, then usually ends in spectacular fashion, but the girl, she does everything she can to put up the facade that she has no emotional reaction. And maybe she doesn't, who knows.
USUALLY its downstream of absentee (possibly dead) parents, then the spiral of drugs and self-sabotaging behavior that reinforces itself over the years.
The spooky part is that they're capable of dressing well, speaking well, behaving well in contexts where it is needed, and thus the true extent of the antisocial impulses is simply not clear until you've gotten to know them, then maybe you're a teeny bit infatuated with them and learning how bad things are under the hood simply elicits sympathy, which is something she can use to again extract fun or use out of you.
Apparently the part of the brain used to regulate emotional responses and guide 'constructive' behavior is not tied in tightly with the one that produces social cues and the presentation one gives to others.
I didn't talk much about the personal side of it, but we dated for three months before I ended it for a number of reasons. She did not take it well and blew up at me, getting unnecessarily confrontational and throwing things at me and shouting. She reached out six months later and we had a friendship where I kept her more at arm's length.
When we first met, she was extremely nice, although her behaviour was clearly somewhat off from the beginning. That lasted about two weeks and then it was like switch flipped and she treated me like garbage. There was maybe a month where she got really into some weird cult and stopped doing drugs all the time and seemed to be improving, but then she started doing hurtful things to me again and I ended it.
Overall, it was a pretty disturbing experience. I had never met anyone like that and didn't even have any substantial dating experience, and had no idea how to handle it. I didn't meet any of her friends for a while, but wished I had so I could have asked what in the world was going on with her. The part I found the most difficult to understand was how you could go from telling someone he's the love of your life one day and refuse to talk to him the next. There was all kinds of other cruel behaviour she engaged in and in retrospect, it seems obvious I should have completely cut her out of my life early on, but she was good at manipulating people.
Sounds like textbook Borderline Personality Disorder.
I've dated girls like that on VERY short timeframes, but enough to see the switch flip.
And yeah, it is disconcerting. Yeah you can expect emotional outbursts on occasion, but the literal "I love you more than anything" one day to "You mean nothing to me whatsoever" the next 180 turn feels like something humans SHOULDN'T be capable of doing.
Good on you for actually ending it. I kept a friend around with those tendencies at extra long distance for a few years and she had a habit of calling me at random to expound on all the drama that had unfolded in her life for the past few months. What eventually made me cut it off was her tendency to just dredge up and mention every mistake she knew of that I had made, or every way I had allegedly wronged her to hold it over my head for... no apparent reason. I eventually said "look, since I apologized, you either forgive and forget and stop bringing it up, or I stop answering your call every time."
This was a girl I knew from college, who I knew was smart, and had her academic life in order, but otherwise was a disaster.
Oof. The half-assed commitment to improvement that gives you false hope but ultimately everything returns to baseline because of course it does.
Familiar with that too.
I have to thread the needle very carefully on this -- this is obviously very bad and dangerous behavior that endangers other people, sometimes severely. It's very bad, to the point of profound evil.
But I also can't help but feel a real sadness in my heart for people whose internal life is so utterly dichotomous and disintegrated that anything resembling this appears like appropriate behavior for them. I can't imagine the internal anguish this must reflect. That's really what distinguishes BPD from APD: psychopaths will hurt and manipulate you to get what they want from you, and feel nothing, while borderlines will hurt and manipulate you as a part of hurting and manipulating themselves, and feel everything.
It doesn't make their behavior and the damage they do any more justifiable, but I just imagine borderlines as bundles of suffering so radiant in their suffering that the rest of the world gets sucked into their black hole of anguish, a kind of anti-divinity. It's no wonder people are so attracted to what is essentially a dark god! The pervasive feeling of being around a borderline is much like being around a prophet -- everything is extreme, the world is transcendent, and wrong is evil. If you are appreciated by them, you're given a rare gift, a precious pearl of great price. (This is the male equivalent to the "I can fix the abusive husband" meme.) I never dated one, though I certainly wanted to date at least a few before I realized their deep flaws, and for that I am grateful.
Extreme behavior often summons extreme adoration and affiliation, even if temporary, which is almost certainly the evopsych explanation for the existence of all the cluster B personality syndromes (psychopathy, narcissism, histrionic, and borderline). Crucially, the cluster A and C syndromes... are rather less adaptive even at subclinical levels, since they universally include behaviors that actively turn people away even without a "turn" (and avoidant PD sufferers, for instance, believe no one could ever like them, while schizoids don't really like anyone).
I guess what I'm saying is... remember that every extreme behavior has some sort of function, in moderation, and that people with extreme problems like this aren't ontologically different from the rest of us, even if, tragically, the only thing that can often be done for them is to keep them from harming others. My point is to demonstrate the reason why these traits persist and have attraction, while not endorsing the exaggeration as the truth. This is how people are made to feel -- in other words, those around a borderline sufferer are drawn into the cycle of intensity and delusion as much as the individual is. And so both sides are understandable, but in the way that a plane crash is "understandable."
Yeah, I have to agree with the general sentiment that you have the essence of BPD there. My own mental shorthand has been that BPD really epitomizes the proverbial lead role in a cage, but I really like the way you've described it! I'm convinced that my mother is high-functioning BPD and radiant suffering has been my mother's MO for as long as I can remember. And the pearl of great price... also yes. Jeff Foxworthy's old quip, "when mom ain't happy, ain't nobody happy," hit home for my entire family and on the other side, when mom was pleased with us and willing to show it, it was sunshine. The distortions that I've internalized from my childhood are still so prevalent that I still struggle with them frequently. I mean, except for all of these crazy off-the-chain examples mom wasn't that bad! But when I really step back and think about that a little more deeply, I realize that it's really just that mom was usually able to escape or at least mitigate the consequences of her actions.
And FWIW, yeah, I've been drawn to a certain level of intensity in my own relationships as well. While I haven't been attracted to BPD women per se, I'm pretty sure all of my serious partners have had BPD mothers, up to and including my MIL.
The rebrand of BPD as emotional dysregulation syndrome or something similar does a lot of work in capturing the much of the practical matter of the illness.
I think a lot of people also miss that most people with APD aren't true sociopaths and are also rendered miserable by the illness (especially later in life).
...and both seem to be mostly caused by a combination of genetics, trauma, and other shit you aren't in control of.
Man I miss free will.
Yeah, I completely agree, although I think that the "borderline" aspect of BPD conveys important information, namely that the sufferer's emotional distortions can be indistinguishable from psychosis.
And on the genetic front in particular, the evidence from my n=1 family is damn sobering. Maternal grandmother? Check. Maternal aunt that share's my mother's father? Also check. Sister? Check? Her first daughter? Also check. That's 66% of the daughters from mom's immediate family, with the non-BPD aunt having a different father, and 50% of my sister's daughters, with the younger one also having a different father. And none of the men in my immediate family have fathered a daughter.
You aren't wrong but I don't think anybody really knows this these days except for die hard psychodynamicisists and I can't even spell that.
Wish people knew that though, same for "mood swings are not manic episodes." Every fucking doctor needs to know that one.
In any case my understanding of the state of the research is that it is a two hit situation - you mostly need the genetic predisposition AND the environmental stimulus. However as I suspect you know from past convos - cluster-b coping mechanisms from cultural heritage or family dynamics aren't necessarily the true disorder.
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