Dating someone with borderline personality disorder (BPD) can be challenging. BPD is a complex mental health condition characterized by difficulty regulating emotions, impulsive behavior, and unstable relationships. While people with BPD deserve love and compassion like everyone else, entering a romantic relationship with someone with untreated BPD can be painful and traumatic for both people involved.
What is BPD?
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a condition marked by ongoing instability in moods, behavior, self-image, and functioning. These experiences often disrupt family and work life, long-term planning, and a person’s sense of self-identity.
People with BPD tend to experience intense and unstable emotions and moods that can shift fairly quickly. This is often tied to their difficulty with maintaining a stable sense of identity. Additional BPD symptoms and signs include:
- Intense fear of abandonment, even going to extreme measures to avoid real or imagined separation or rejection
- Severely distorted self-image or sense of self
- Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors like spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating
- Self-harming behavior like cutting
- Repeated suicidal behaviors or suicide threats or attempts
- Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days
- Chronic feelings of emptiness
- Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger
- Difficulty trusting, which is often accompanied by irrational fear of other people’s intentions
- Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality, known as dissociation
People with BPD tend to have trouble seeing a clear picture of their identity. Their self-image often shifts and changes depending on their mood. This makes their goals and values often unclear. Complicating matters further is the unstable relationships that often surround BPD. A person with the condition may fluctuate between idealizing other people and undervaluing them, seeing them alternately as completely flawless and then as worthless.
Common challenges when dating someone with untreated BPD
While the symptoms of BPD can heavily impact the person diagnosed with the condition, they also can take a toll on romantic partners. Some of the common challenges people report when dating someone with untreated BPD include:
- Extreme highs and lows: The shifting moods and changeable sense of self people with BPD frequently experience can be exhausting and stressful for romantic partners. You may feel like you are constantly walking on eggshells and don’t know what kind of emotional reaction to expect from one moment to the next.
- Hypersensitivity to rejection: People with BPD often have an intense fear of abandonment. They may perceive rejection or criticism where there is none. Small misunderstandings can prompt dramatic overreactions like excessive anger or withdrawing affection as a means of punishment.
- Difficulty with intimacy: Many people with BPD struggle to resolve fears of getting engulfed by others and losing their own identity. This can make physical and emotional intimacy challenging.
- Unclear sense of self and goals: The often rapidly shifting self-image and difficulty focusing on long-term goals that characterize BPD can make it hard for partners to grasp what the person with BPD needs and wants from the relationship.
- Impulsive behavior: Impulsive behaviors like spending sprees, binge eating, risky sexual behavior, and substance abuse are common in untreated BPD. Partners may feel angry, scared or uncertain how to respond when their loved one acts recklessly.
- Controlling or abusive behaviors: Problems with anger along with fears of abandonment can lead some with BPD to try to control their partner’s activities or act in verbally, emotionally or even physically abusive ways.
- Chaotic relationship patterns: Black-and-white thinking can lead people with BPD to put romantic partners on a pedestal before abruptly reversing course and seeing partners as lacking value. Their fear of abandonment can drive behaviors like constantly calling or texting partners or showing up unannounced.
- Self-harming behaviors: Suicidal statements or self-harming behaviors like cutting are common in people with untreated BPD. Witnessing a partner physically harm themselves can be extremely traumatic.
Why relationships are often unhealthy
A number of factors contribute to relationships involving someone with untreated BPD often turning unhealthy or toxic, including:
- The shifting sense of self people with BPD experience often impairs their ability to see things clearly from a partner’s perspective.
- Partners may get drawn into trying to fix or rescue the person with BPD and neglect their own needs.
- The unpredictability of BPD moods and behaviors can put enormous strain on partners.
- Fears of abandonment combined with black-and-white thinking can fuel extreme emotions and behaviors that are out of proportion to the situation.
- Some people with untreated BPD use anger or other problematic behaviors as a way to control their partner and prevent them from leaving.
- Without proper treatment, the core relationship instability caused by BPD is likely to remain.
You may experience abuse
While not everyone with BPD is abusive, some do turn to emotionally or physically abusive behaviors, particularly as a result of difficulties with anger, impulsivity, and fears of abandonment. When a romantic partner experiences repeated verbal abuse, possessiveness, controlling behaviors, anger outbursts, physical aggression, or threats, it is extremely damaging.
You do not deserve to be in a relationship that feels unsafe. Everyone deserves a relationship that is grounded in mutual care, trust, and respect.
It can be emotionally exhausting
The constant ups and downs that frequently come with dating someone with untreated BPD can leave partners feeling like they are on an emotional rollercoaster ride. You may constantly feel anxious about what kind of emotional reaction your next interaction with the person will bring. The chaos and uncertainty can leave you feeling off balance, insecure and drained.
Your own mental health may suffer
Trying to cope with the shifting reality experienced by your partner and adapt to their unpredictable emotions is extremely challenging. The chronic stress often causes partners of people with BPD to develop their own mental health symptoms, like anxiety, depression or PTSD.
It may keep you from flourishing
When your partner’s needs and emotions dominate the relationship, your own hopes, dreams and goals can get neglected. The demands of the relationship can prevent you from ever feeling fully relaxed and carefree. You may lose touch with the parts of yourself and your life that previously brought you joy. In a sense, you put your life on hold for the relationship.
Treatment matters
Without effective treatment like dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), people with BPD often struggle to establish stability in their relationships. However, research shows that many people with BPD who engage in appropriate treatment see great improvement over time. With therapy, self-awareness tends to increase along with the ability to self-soothe, avoid self-harm, control impulsive behaviors, establish realistic goals, and engage in healthy relationships.
You can’t sacrifice your well-being
While you care about your partner and want to support them, you also deserve a relationship that does not come at the expense of your own mental health and self-esteem. You deserve a partner who is able to offer you emotional stability, intimacy, understanding, and mutual care.
Seeking support
If you decide to end a romantic relationship with someone who has untreated BPD, be gentle yet firm and seek support. Recruit trusted friends and family members to help look out for your safety. Consider consulting a therapist who has experience with BPD and can provide expert guidance on setting boundaries, managing misplaced guilt, and processing the experience in a healthy way.
Breaking up tips
If you decide to move on from a romantic relationship with someone who has untreated BPD, here are some tips that may help make the process safer:
- Have an exit plan and place to stay lined up before the breakup conversation.
- Conduct the breakup conversation in a public place or semi-public location like your yard or right outside your home.
- Have someone else present or nearby for the initial breakup talk.
- Communicate clearly, calmly and compassionately without blaming.
- Keep the breakup talk brief and avoid getting drawn into circular arguments.
- Resist ultimatums or attempts to pull you back into the relationship.
- Remove avenues for unwanted contact like your partner’s access to your apartment, accounts, and phone plan.
- Consider blocking your ex on social media and your phone to limit their ability to track you.
- Tell close friends and family about the breakup so they can provide support.
- Avoid risky behaviors that could make you more vulnerable.
- Pay attention to any warning signs that you are being stalked or monitored and seek help immediately.
While breakups are rarely easy, you should not stay in an unhealthy or abusive relationship. With time and support, you can heal and eventually move forward to find a relationship where you feel safe, secure and valued.
Conclusion
Dating someone with untreated BPD can be incredibly challenging and painful for both people involved. While compassion for your partner is admirable, you deserve a healthy relationship that does not come at the cost of your own mental health and self-esteem. If your partner with BPD is unwilling to get appropriate treatment, it is often best to move on. With the right help and perspective, you can recover and look forward to relationships built on stability, trust and real intimacy.