I have a soft spot in my heart for borderlines because my first relationship was with a girl who has BPD. In fact, I’ve dated several borderline women over the years.
These relationships can be extremely difficult when you don’t have the knowledge and the skills needed to be with these people.
And, depending on the level of her personality disorder, it could very well be impossible to have a healthy relationship with her.
But, that shouldn’t prevent you from at least trying to make it work. Which is why I’m here with this website and why I’m passionate about helping men and women succeed in borderline relationships.
After having the first few of these relationships crash and burn, I spent a lot of time educating myself and learning skills that would make these relationships work.
I hope these tips will help you find success in your BPD relationships. They have been a big part of my life over the past 10 years. Let’s dive in!
1. Free Yourself From A Negative Mindset
The problem with a lot of people that seem to have BPD behavior is that they are generally very insecure. With insecurity comes thoughts and actions of negativity.
A person suffering from insecurity will constantly find ways to fail, they’ll constantly think ‘I can’t’ instead of ‘I can or I will’. Negative people find the bad in things instead of the good and positive. This goes beyond just people with BPD. This is about negative people in general.
A lot of people are negative and it’s very important that you extremely limit yourself around negative people. If you happen to be dating someone that’s constantly throwing you their negative feelings and making you feel like an emotional tampon, then it’s very important that you shut this down as much as you can.
Don’t allow yourself to be this person that your partner can dump negativity onto you. Stand up for yourself, tell your partner that you want to talk about something positive and not focus on the negative. Your behavior should also show this by suggesting positive things.
2. Accept Your BPD Partner, Flaws and All
You’ve probably felt confused by the unpredictable behavior and the inconsistency that’s all too common when dating someone that has BPD. It’s up and down, hot and cold at times.
Your journey to discovering BPD could have taken some time and it eventually led you here to my website. Through out a lot of this research, you’ve probably heard nothing but negative things. It’s extremely rare to read about any success stories on the BPD forums that are out there.
The reason for this is that the men and women succeeding in these relationships just don’t go around posting about it. A lot of these people don’t even know their partner has BPD. They naturally have the attitude, the behavior and the skills needed to succeed.
My point here is that you need to accept the way your partner is. Don’t be trying to change them. They simply are who they are. They are going to be unpredictable and they’re going to do things that can make you scratch your head. It’s simply the way they are.
Your time is much better spent learning how to have the attitude and the skills that a borderline loves in a man or a woman. This is what I teach here.
3. Imperfect Is Perfect – Limit Your Criticism
While I do believe that you need to set boundaries and be critical from time to time, you must also be careful that you don’t become too critical to the point where you’re being insanely logical, bitter and a butthurt to be honest.
One of the most important core values you need to ingrain in you is that people are imperfect. We all have our own problems and issues and egos that bring us down. I will be critical at times to the women I date, but this is only when they cross the line and do something that I simply don’t want in a relationship.
One of my strong points is that I set my standards high. Women tend to work hard on themselves to be better because I bring that out. It’s a leadership quality of mine that I’ve worked hard on building in myself. This is something you need to build up in you.
You should be stating what you like and don’t like, what you’ll put up with and what you won’t. Don’t be afraid to get into fights over things like this. You need to have the attitude that you’re not afraid to walk away from the relationship.
4. Forgive Your Loved Ones and Move Forward
This is more life advice that applies in relationships. It’s important that you forgive your loved ones and yourself in order to let go of bitter grudges, pain and heartache. Maybe you have an ex that caused you a lot of pain and grief. It can be extremely hard to forgive, believe me I know.
But in order to be that positive, forward moving individual, you can’t have these festering feelings from the past, this bitterness that creeps into your mind from time to time. You need to do what you can to heal yourself and forgiveness is the best therapy for this (in my opinion).
This is a big struggle for BPD’s. They usually have a lot of pain and negative thoughts constantly running through their minds. From my experience, the BPD’s I dated found it extremely hard to forgive these painful events from the past. I remember one of my girlfriends telling me that she simply cannot forgive her ex boyfriend for what he did.
It sucks that she felt this way, but it is what it is. It’s not my job to help her learn to forgive. All you can really do is state your beliefs and opinions and hope that your partner will consider changing their beliefs.
5. Be Spontaneous and Unpredictable
People with BPD are often spontaneous and unpredictable. Dating someone like this can be really tough when you’re not unpredictable and not spontaneous like they are. You might often times find yourself fully committed and dedicated to making the relationship work.
This behavior actually has a negative effect on the relationship. Your partner will find you predictable. And when it comes to dating and relationships, predictable behavior means boring behavior. This is just how it is for a lot of people, especially BPD’s.
This is one of the important skills to master and a big focus of what I teach. If you’re the constant, predictable force in a BPD relationship, you’re going to constantly find yourself at wits end trying to ‘settle down’ your partner and make them predictable.
It should actually be the other way around. You want your partner trying to settle you down. This means your partner is chasing you and putting in the effort and commitment to get you to settle. This is some advanced advice that I rarely give away for free so remember this. I’ve given you a little taste.
6. Look Past Criticism and Negative Commentary
Earlier I wrote about how you need to not always be critical and to accept your partner how they are since you can’t change them directly. But this doesn’t mean that your partner won’t be critical of you. Because as you know, they usually will be.
People that tend to be negative will throw their negativity your way. They’ve got insecurity issues and it’s simply easier for them to toss the way they’re feelings at you in order to release their emotions.
Negative commentary can be anything from rude remarks directed towards you as well as your partner talking about how stupid his or her coworkers are. They’re both negative and they’re both going to toxicity if you become his or her emotional tampon.
What you instead need to do is to not let negative commentary get to you. When you partner is being negative, give a sarcastic look and reply, something like ‘cool story bro’ or a thumbs up. This is what I personally say but the important part here is the attitude.
If your partner constantly talks about how crappy her job is, avoid saying things like ‘get a new job then’ as this is logical and won’t help. Instead, say something like ‘well it’s too bad your job is crappy on you. Let’s just not focus on that when you’re home, let’s do something to take your mind off that. Like ice cream and a back massage. For me :)’
7. Don’t Forget About Yourself and Your Own Needs
Last but most important, remember to take care of yourself. A lot of people get so caught up in the flow of their partner that they lose focus of their own needs and what makes you happy.
Having your own alone time and being able to read, educate yourself and build your confidence up on your own time is extremely beneficial. You never want to lose focus of yourself because this is how you keep someone such as a BPD in love with you.
BPD’s want to be with someone that’s forward-moving and doing things that are bigger and more important of the relationship. They want to go with your flow and do things that you want to do – even though they may act the opposite.
If you enjoyed this article and liked my writing, then you might be interested in my Better BPD Relationships audio and ebook course. It’s quite lengthy, but has helped thousands of men and women over the years.
It might work for you so check it out if you want.
Thanks for reading this far. Feel free to ask me any questions in the comment section below if you’re trying to strengthen and improve your BPD relationship.
– Rick
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