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"How can you say you love me when it takes you 10 minutes to reply to my 3:00 a.m. texts!?!"

Well, imagine that, only worse. And you never grow out of it.

So people who have BPD tend to go through relationships like the tissues they go through over the course of those relationships, and I'm no exception. I fall in love whenever I look at someone for too long, but I've always been on the lookout for the next person since (according to my stupid brain), he will inevitably leave me. It becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, I had only been dating one guy for six weeks when I informed him that I was in love with him and we were meant for each other. After that understandably freaked him out a bit, I went into panic mode and found another guy within 36 hours. I had about four "serious" relationships that summer. You see, staying single is not an option.

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That's the name of the go-to book about borderline personality disorder, because that's more or less our constant emotional state. The clinical terms are "idealization and devaluation," but what that means in normal person language is that someone is the best person in the world, until they're the worst person in the world -- but even then, you still intensely desire his or her attention.

Do you remember the relationships you had in your early teens, when the hormones first started pumping and absolutely everything was HUGE and DRAMATIC? One day, you're madly in love with a person or she's your best friend, but as soon as she does anything to make you feel even slightly insecure, she's suddenly the subject of pages of bleak poetry in your diary? Do you remember the constant anxiety and self-doubt, the fear that if you went even one day without talking to him, it meant he didn't like you anymore?