Love to a Borderline

(Note: When I say “borderline” I mean someone who suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder.)

People who do not understand Borderline Personality Disorder often ask if people who suffer from it, such as myself, are capable of love. As much as I want to take offense to this, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get where they were coming from. Anyone who’s tried to love a borderline will tell you we are hard to handle. We are hypersensitive, possessive, explosive, inconsistent, and desperately insecure. Our relationships are intense and quick to burn out, they’re based on need rather than genuine caring, and they usually end with our non-borderline partners feeling bewildered and wondering if they were ever even loved in the first place. It’s really no wonder people think we don’t possess the ability to love.
   
However, we can love. We do love. It’s just that our self-loathing and sensitivity to abandonment make it difficult (at best) for us to maintain healthy connections with other people. The comedian Groucho Marx once said, “I would not belong to a club that would have me as a member.” Such describes a borderline’s behavior toward relationships. We long for companionship, yet because of deep emotional wounds, we cannot allow ourselves to have it. So we engage in a perpetual push-pull, “get away from me—no, don’t leave me” cycle that reinforces our own self-hate and drives those we love away. Someone gets close to us, we feel engulfed and demand space, but the second they back off, we feel abandoned and cling to them, terrified we’ll lose them. For healthy individuals, trust and intimacy grow over time, but for us borderlines, because we fear intimacy and trust neither ourselves nor anyone around us, there is no hope for a relationship, despite how much we may desire one.

We are hypersensitive and always on the lookout for signs of abandonment. We see these signs everywhere—in a missed call, in a cancelled date, in a criticism (even a polite, constructive one), etc. Our loved ones often feel as though they have to walk on egg shells to accommodate us. Our inconsistency baffles people. One minute we’re proclaiming our undying love to someone and the next, we’re practically spitting venom at them. Our relationships are founded on personal need. When we say “I love you” oftentimes what we mean is “love me.” What we usually love is the idea of love itself rather than the other person.

Why are we like this? Because we didn’t attach to our primary caregivers properly. The people we depended on during infancy and childhood weren’t there for us the way they should have been. A history of abuse and neglect is common for borderlines, and it’s not always clear-cut and in-your-face. Sometimes it’s subtle. For example, I was two years old (still in the early stages of child development) when my sister was born. She was born with a major heart defect that required intensive medical care, which, as one would expect, demanded my parents’ attention. As they spent time with her in the hospital, I was left in the care of my grandmother. My attachment was disrupted. Growing up, my parents were more preoccupied with my sister. I was their “normal” child, the one who didn’t need to be watched so closely. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, so to speak. Meanwhile the good wheel that goes unnoticed slowly rusts. Pre-borderline children tend to be sensitive and easily flustered. Such children require special parenting that they seldom receive.

We borderlines have a habit of chasing after people we can’t have, such as married people or people who live far away. We do this because as children we anguished over longing for our caregivers’ affection and learned to interpret that anguish as love. So to us love must be painful. There can be no fulfillment in it, no joy. Pining for unavailable people keeps the anguish we felt during childhood alive and strengthens our belief that “love hurts.”

Despite our self-centeredness, we are capable of empathizing. When I read stories about parents who have to choose between food and rent, my heart breaks. When I see someone being mistreated, I want to do something. When I hurt a friend or a family member, I feel a crippling sensation of guilt and remorse. If a friend were to tell me they thought we should go our separate ways, I would back off and let them go. I might not do it immediately. I might not do it with a smile on my face, a thumbs up, and a “whatever makes you happy.” If anything I would probably ask them why and then get upset about it in private. But I would do it, because deep down I would want them to do what was best for them. My problem is not a lack of love, it’s a lack of trust. I always assume a person I love will leave, and part of me feels they should leave because I’m not worthy of their love anyway. So I’ll test their love (in various ways, such as saying I’m worthless to get a reaction out of them) and become the abandoner because it’s easier than being abandoned; I’ll set unrealistically high standards for them, and when those standards aren’t met my black-and-white/all-or-nothing thinking (a common BPD defense mechanism) will kick in and I’ll devalue them, because if they’ve let me down that means they’ll abandon me. I’ll keep doing this until, more than likely, my worst fear will be realized: they’ll decide they’ve had enough and leave, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I’ll be back at square one: hating myself.

So in short, borderlines can love. It’s just that our deep-seated insecurities keep us from being able to accept love in return.