It can get turbulent (Picture: Getty)

One of the main criteria of diagnosing Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is difficulty maintaining relationships.

If you’re not familiar with BPD, it can be explained, briefly, as a disorder that causes a person to experience intense and unstable emotions, which doesn’t sound like a particularly appealing dating prospect.

12 things you should know before dating someone with borderline personality disorder

Googling the subject, I suddenly find the internet is awash with people who have an incredibly negative and distorted view about what it’s like to date a person with BPD.

Some of the comments hit home because, from an early age, I have had an extremely tempestuous love life, but I also know it can work if both partners learn to understand each other.




As such, I’ll try and share my two cents on dating someone with BPD.

One of the main symptoms of BPD, which I think is almost universal, is a ‘chronic feeling of emptiness’.

This is a hard concept to explain to a healthy person, who may have only ever felt something close to this when someone they love passes away, or they lose something they hold dear in their life.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

People with BPD, even in their happiest periods, experience this pervasive feeling of emptiness almost every day, and often they try and fill this with things that stimulate them.

It’s well documented that we love to turn to a quick fix; drugs, alcohol, binge eating, any risk taking behaviour that fills us up for a second.

Personally, the only thing that gives me true happiness is other people, which is why BPD is a cruel illness – because most people who suffer from it are gregarious, true people lovers, but they struggle to maintain close relationships because of their illness.

When you finally meet the person who sets your world on fire, it feels incredible. You want to spend every minute of the day with them because you find them so interesting, so much fun, and so enjoyable to be around.

Having such strong emotions make people with BPD incredibly empathetic, and because of this we find it easy to connect with people on an emotional level quickly.

The feeling is so wonderful that when they’re gone (albeit maybe only to work for the day), you hit the floor like a rock and back comes that creeping emptiness.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

You’ll do anything to keep it away, and because of this, it can become quite an addictive feeling to be around the person you love.

Now, obviously living in each others’ pockets is neither healthy nor feasible, and sometimes the intensity of someone with BPD’s love can be too much at first.

Some people pull away for space, which is possibly the hardest thing for us to take.

This may be because it’s thought that BPD could stem from early attachment issues in childhood, so another of the main symptoms is a ‘chronic fear of abandonment (real or perceived)’.



When people pull away for any reason, that part of our illness goes into overdrive and this is where the disorder may get its bad name.

The fear of being abandoned is almost always, even if only subconsciously, the driving force of our ‘crazy’ behaviour in relationships.

To understand why our reactions can be so adverse, our partner needs to understand that because of our illness, we think differently in some ways to others.

(Picture: Erin Aniker for Metro.co.uk)

Paranoia is a common symptom among people with BPD, and this can blow not replying to a text, because your phone was on silent, into your partner thinking you have been hit by a bus/run away with the circus/are having an affair with your boss, in under 30 minutes.

This is not helpful and certainly not an easy quality to deal with in someone you share your life with, but the key to it working is understanding why the person does the things they do so you can work together to help them.

You wouldn’t ask a person with a freshly broken leg to climb three flights of stairs, and in the same way, you shouldn’t assume a person with BPD would just be able to handle certain aspects of a relationship.

Relationships are our Achilles’ heel, and feel like 500 flights of stairs, but we will always embark on them with full force and disregard for our wellbeing because – to answer the person who Googled ‘Can a person with BPD really love?’ – yes, we can and do truly love and care for the person we’re with.


In my somewhat limited but quite eventful 26 years of experience, as a person with BPD, the way to make it work with that person is always communication.

If you communicate clearly and honestly then you get rid of that fear of the unknown, the fear that you’ll disappear, and the fear they have of not being good enough.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Dropping a message before you start working for the day to say you have a busy one ahead, but you’re thinking of them and will call later, will stop the midday freak out, because they know you care about them and they know you’re OK.

If you’re unhappy with them, don’t act cold and distant – be up front and speak to them so you both understand each other and this can help them stay in control of their emotions.

Of course, I can’t speak for every person in the world and, yes, there are some people who can be down right horrible.

But if I could get people to understand only one thing about being in a relationship with a person with BPD, it’s that we do not enjoy or take pleasure from our behaviour.

It’s only ever done in a misguided attempt to stop the terrible feelings that occur when our illness is triggered by certain factors.

It breaks our heart when we feel our behaviour has pushed you away, and sometimes we don’t have the emotional intelligence to fix it, which is where you need to help us.


If you fall for someone with BPD then I won’t lie, you will be in for an experience you may not have had before.

But if you learn about the illness, its symptoms and discuss with your partner, you will be able to find healthy ways of dealing with them and I promise you it will be worth it.

Think of it as installing an emotional stair lift for that broken leg til it heals.

MORE: What to do if you’ve just been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder

MORE: What not to say to someone with Borderline Personality Disorder

MORE: Things you only know if you have Borderline Personality Disorder

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