Photo by Abo Ngalonkulu

Slight warning for mentions of self harm

My love life has been a series of great beginnings, intense peaks, and then nothingness. This trend began when I first started to date at age 14, right around when I figured out that I was a lesbian (but no that’s not why my relationships fail).

I plunged into the world of dating women, which was easy at an all-girls high school. I had a crush on practically every girl I talked to. Soon, I had a kind of girlfriend. And again. Sometimes it would even be official. But it never would last.

I didn’t know why women didn’t want to stay with me, or vice versa. It was almost an even split of who broke up with whom.

Now, I’m in my third year of college. I’ve had a few relationships, but all of them have failed. I either lose interest in the person, cycle between periods of hatred and love, or push them away through various unintentional means.

It wasn’t until this year when my therapist brought up that I most likely have BPD: borderline personality disorder. Throughout the years, I’ve had friends close to me and maybe one therapist mention this possibility to me, but I never really thought much of it.

BPD meant that I would become irrationally angry at things, hurt myself, lash out at people I loved, dissociate when it all became too much. I was frightened at the thought that this person I loved so much could just stand up and leave me.

But then everything made sense. In the beginning and during the peak of my relationships, I was head-over-heels. I absolutely loved my girlfriend and I wanted to spend most moments with her. Sex was great. Then, after a while, I began to notice things. Flaws in her. She would talk too much about one subject, or she would want to be around me too much. She started bothering me all the time, and I began to not want to see her. I went from being the most loving girlfriend to a cold shadow of what I had been.

Sometimes the loving part of me would come back, and we would spend nice moments together again. But then my girlfriend had to move because of a job, and everything got worse. I would turn her on Do Not Disturb because every text I received from her annoyed me. “Why did I ever like her?” I would ask myself. She would come to visit and cry when I didn’t want to have sex, asking me if I even found her attractive anymore. Even though I didn’t, most likely due to subconscious feelings of her abandoning me, I told her yes, I did still find her attractive and love her.

I began dissociating all the time, wondering if my body was even my body. Soon I wasn’t just hurting my girlfriend and myself, I was also hurting someone else. I couldn’t deal with the feeling of being alone, so I had been hanging out with a girl. One who was gay and began to like me. I didn’t feel the same, but it was better than being alone. So I led her on a bit, lied to my girlfriend when she would ask how my night was or what I did. The girl and I never had sex or anything, that was way out of bounds. But the way we spent time with each other wasn’t something I wanted to tell my girlfriend.

“You have to make a decision”, the girl would tell me, as if this wasn’t on my mind every minute of the day. I would stare into nothingness at night, feeling nothing, but knowing that something was deeply wrong. I had awful nightmares. I hurt myself almost every day. But I still couldn’t make a decision. How could I break up with the one woman who has ever loved me as much as she does? Who has stuck by me through awful times? I wasn’t ready for the numbness to break. Even more, I wasn’t ready for the pain.