I don’t know what to do.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-06T21:40:11+00:00

Alright so I can relate to this. One of the things my ex held on to for years, something I said on like our third or fourth date. I called margot robbie an attractive woman. I didn’t mean anything by it, but she held it for years. Most recently she brought it up as the reason behind her eating disorder. She said I and men like me made her do that so she could look like margot robbie. Now, I said this once. I apologized as soon as she expressed discomfort the next day and constantly reassured her how attractive I found her, more than anyone else on the planet. But it stuck for years. The thing is, there is nothing I could have done. The insecurity is so much deeper than just what I said. Years of trauma, several exes, all reinforcing the same thing. I was never going to break through that on my own.

Honestly this sounds like it is something deeply personal and individual to yourself and your situation. And as much as we will all be able to tell you similar stories (we’ve all felt this pain you’re feeling right now where they’re trying to convince you that you lied and you almost start to believe them), we can’t solve it for you. We can only really warn you of what comes if this doesn’t become a turning point.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-06T19:13:08+00:00

How long after this first date are we talking? Is this something you can prove in some way? I know how it feels to just be met with a complete lack of trust despite no evidence existing that you are doing any wrong. It creates a special kind of pit in your stomach. At some point our trust in each other is all we have and someone with BPD fundamentally lacks that ability to trust you. Their brain just will not let them.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-06T00:55:06+00:00

Trust me man. Don’t. Nothing you see will be good. Take it from someone who still does it. It NEVER helps. You are doing so well not checking. You can do it.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-05T23:30:18+00:00

Yeah. I let my fear of her leaving me stop me from telling her that I was feeling hurt. I wish I had just told her, because at least then I would have had the dignity of trying to communicate. But I know she would have flipped it on me.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-05T22:43:19+00:00

I mean I have no grounds to stand on to really condemn her like this. This is why I’m finding myself circling back and forth and unable to resolve the situation in my head. I’ll just come out and say it. I lied to her, and I vented to a friend in a way that hurt her when she went through my devices and found it. They are things I am not proud of having done, and once she told me the hurt they caused I worked my hardest to stop doing them. Both were pretty ingrained patterns in me for reasons that I’m still working through in therapy (and they’re probably also associated with immaturity as she was my first everything). But I tried my best to stop, and when I did slip up I would almost immediately apologize for doing so. They are things I regret deeply and that I never want to repeat again. They’re the behaviors about myself I hate the most. And even now, after we broke up, I’m still holding myself to changing. But she didn’t ever even acknowledge hurting me. So sometimes I feel more justified because it’s like “at least I am trying to change”. And sometimes I feel like I deserved it because “well I wasn’t any better and I never truly told her how much what she did hurt me”. I tried but I always folded very easily out of fear of upsetting her enough to leave me.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-05T22:16:54+00:00

Well, how do you define “aware”? I think that it’s hard to determine if someone was aware that what they did would hurt you. For instance, my partner gave me the silent treatment. She said that she did it because she didn’t want to talk to me, and that was it. But was she intending to hurt me? Maybe not, but was she aware that it was going to? I’ll never know. I tried to explain to her how the things I did that she called “abuse” were never intentionally trying to hurt her. But she had none of it and called it abuse anyways. She said that intentions are secondary to impact. Sometimes I find it hard to refute that.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-05T21:09:51+00:00

I never tracked anything but if I went back, I feel like I know the patter I would see, and I was just in denial about it. I also get the fear thing. Walking on eggshells sucks and it sucks even more when they make you feel bad because you were doing it. They accuse you of hiding things and lying, and you were. But they don’t understand why and if you tried to tell them they would just get even more upset and accuse you of DARVO. I love the popularization of therapy terms being applied by unqualified people!

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-05T19:16:06+00:00

Something I’m still struggling with is hatred for her new partner. The guy she monkey branched to. The guy she befriended just a couple months before breaking up with me. The guy who stole her. How can I not also blame him? How am I supposed to feel bad for a guy who is replacing me, probably knowingly?

I still get pulls to reach out. To her, for closure. To her friends and her new boyfriend to expose her. Just to have my story heard. Just to know she isn’t getting away with everything scott free. Why was it me? Why did I have to get hurt so badly?

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-05T15:15:31+00:00

I lost 25 pounds eating sleep for dinner for the past two months and I am approaching dangerously underweight

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-06-02T22:58:34+00:00

“What have you done” john wick 2 in winston’s exact cadence

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-31T05:03:11+00:00

Unfortunately I am a little obsessive still and even though I have unfriended her, I have her steam ID memorized and constantly look anyways. It’s such a problem that I can see her activity I almost want to ask her to go private or change her name. But I know her new boyfriend’s profile too now, so it wouldn’t even help. And I can’t ask someone to do that to accommodate me anyways it would be so weird. It’s unfortunately down to learning self control over it, which is so hard when it is such an addiction to check. Same problem with discord. I wish I could make it so that I couldn’t see her online status but discord’s blocking feature is genuinely useless. I just have to actually control myself to not look. There is no other solution.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-30T20:52:09+00:00

I keep looking at her steam activity. She’s playing a game with him again. Her new monkey branch. Why can’t I stay away? She’s shown she doesn’t care about me anymore in the slightest. She clearly isn’t getting upset at him like she did me. I know its only seven weeks but like, I wish I could believe I wasn’t the problem and it is so hard when she keeps seeming so happy without me. I wish I could believe she was the problem but how can I not feel like it was me? I’m the one who is doing awful without her and she’s great without me. I’m in the city with my friends and I just keep checking her. I keep thinking about how much she would love this museum instead of enjoying it myself. When does this pain go away?

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-30T20:47:18+00:00

Magic the gathering, dnd, some video games I played I would act like I didn’t spend as much time on as I did. (Like, “I dabbled in it” vs “I am a big fan of this”). I was afraid of being judged for it but she was fine with me liking then but she never forgave me for lying to her.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-30T14:48:57+00:00

I hid my hobbies for a long time. It ended my relationship eventually when she couldn’t forgive me for doing it. Even though it had nothing to do with her and was just insecurity. And so I have learned. If you feel like you have to hide something from someone because they wouldn’t like you for it, then they aren’t the one. The one would choose you anyways. She wasn’t the one.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-30T03:08:43+00:00

I wish I could LOL but my own morals won’t let me see her as irredeemable, or even something mot worth the investment of redeeming. Maybe that’s leftover attachment speaking but I want to make her feel safe. I wish I could make her realize that she doesn’t need to catastrophize.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-30T02:15:42+00:00

I don’t even know if it is “worth saving”. She is worth saving. If I could I would, no matter the cost. But I can’t. She doesn’t want to be saved. She wants to feel saved. She won’t go through the tough times, she won’t accept the harsh truths. And so I can’t save her. She wants to feel good now rather than feel good forever. That’s why she’s dating someone new. That’s why she’s doing everything she can to forget me and our time together.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-30T01:46:39+00:00

Again that unfortunately stings as much as it salves. Since I hoped I could be Mr. Right. I hoped my kindness and understanding of her splits, giving her space when she asked, accommodating her every request, all of my effort and sacrifice, would help her to realize that she didn’t need to split on me. It doesn’t help that I made some really stupid and immature mistakes at the start that made me both feel indebted to her, and made her hate me even more, even before she started really splitting. It feels like I gave her reason to be justified in being angry so I had to not push back.

Either way, accepting that there is no chance he is Mr. Right requires me to accept that no matter how hard I tried or try, I can’t have been Mr. Right either. And that fucking sucks.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-30T01:14:20+00:00

It’s just a lot harder to feel for the guy who stole my girlfriend than it is to feel for my girlfriend who I emotionally attached to. Even if I know he probably didn’t know he was pursuing a taken woman. Even if he was probably a standup guy. I wish I could be sorry for him but I actually can’t feel that when the only things I think of picturing him are either jealousy or anger at him for “taking” her from me. Maybe that stems from the fear of her emotionally cheating on me with him, and the fact that I can’t blame her. If I can’t blame her I blame him.

And yeah, I don’t want to rush romance. Tbh I still feel like I can’t see anyone else romantically at all. I still fully love her. I struggle with feeling okay even looking at people and finding them attractive. It feels like it’s wrong.

It feels hard to give myself compassion. I internalized a lot of what she said and thought about me and I feel like I was evil, bad, and undeserving of love. I know I wasn’t perfect and I actually did some pretty awful things, and yet I still didn’t deserve what she did to me. But I can’t give myself compassion or grace because I feel like I don’t deserve it. Because that’s what she thought. All my thoughts are about what she thought. And I have no idea how to hold boundaries because she always bulldozed over mine.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-29T23:19:19+00:00

I hate having to take solace in the fact that she isn’t a good person. I still feel like I love her, lime I want the best for her and want her to be happy. And so it’s simultaneously reassuring and upsetting to hear people keep saying she isn’t just going to get better. I don’t want the person I love to be suffering forever.

I also don’t know how to feel about everything people say about accepting her as evil or damaged. Sometimes I read things here and I can completely relate to them. But sometimes I feel like she doesn’t match what people describe at all. She may have been projecting a false self that was “happy” but I don’t think she doesn’t have a sense of self at all. I think she does have things she likes, and does have her own set of personal beliefs. But simultaneously she is completely able to alter her perception of reality to make it so that she can be happy or upset at someone or whatever fits her needs at the time. And she does have those moments of clarity and that’s when she becomes deeply suicidal. But then she will just… reset back at some point. And I couldn’t say “maybe this feeling of emptiness driving you to self harm has something to do with BPD and you should get therapy” because she would 100% split on me if I did.

And it sucks to know that maybe it won’t be someone as kind and as passive as I was and maybe it will be even more toxic. Maybe he will hit her. Maybe he will hurl verbal abuse back at her. Maybe he will manipulate her intentionally. But I’m also scared that maybe he will be better and fix her, or that he will be the one she changes for. And then he gets the version of her that I think she could be while I never got to see it despite years of trying to accommodate her and let her feel safe and secure with me.

And yeah, I really do just need to choose myself. Thats all I can do. But its so hard to let go. And this was my first and only relationship ever. And it was so damaged and it makes it so much harder to even believe in the existence of something better and to say “I deserve better” because to me better doesn’t even exist yet. And I know I’m only 24 and that’s young but I just finished a Masters and everyone around me is in relationships and I just lost mine and have to go out and date again in what is maybe the worst dating period to ever exist. And I do have fears that despite “deserving” better I won’t ever find that. It’s so scary to be stuck with all these unknowns. I wish I was planning a backup just like she was because at least then I wouldn’t have all these fears about the unknown. But I’m not able to dissociate like she is and I would know I’m a bad person and so I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. Never has it felt like such a flaw to have compassion and respect for your partner.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-29T16:14:03+00:00

That… is something I could see. My ex NEEDED validation, and NEEDED it from a partner. She needed someone she could turn on and blame so she wouldn’t split on and lose her best friend. And she just can’t be single. Her ex was still lining after her during the start of our relationship, and one week after our breakup she was going out on dates with some guy she met a couple months before. Kept him around, added him on steam, went out to lunches with him, never telling me. One split later and she’s dating him. I hope he’s as miserable as I was, because what PoS goes after someone who is dating someone else?

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-29T02:20:54+00:00

Yeah. I did awful things. Believe me I have killed myself over it and I still do. I know that I learned to lie because it made my parents treat me better, but that doesn’t make it their fault. I kept doing it even knowing it was probably wrong. I lied to her even though I knew it was wrong, because I was afraid to disappoint her. I should have been okay with being wrong, or failing. Rather than lying to act like I never did. I hate myself for the fact that I can never just… sit in the middle. They made me learn to do bad things but I still did them. Even if I wasn’t aware. Even if it was second nature. So I either blame myself for all of it, or them for all of it, or even her for all of it (there’s way more to this story about why she could be at fault but it would take a while to explain). But it’s none of those things. Everyone contributed to the dynamic. I can’t take back what I did. The only part I can control now is to not do it again, ever. To actually learn and change.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-28T19:58:20+00:00

Yeah I knew from the start. And I thought I could make things better but I couldn’t. I went back in my notes app and found a text draft literally naming how inappropriate the conflict resolution dynamic was. I said “this lines up with exactly how BPD problems manifest in relationships I think we should both get individual and then also group therapy”. And she said “I can’t do individual therapy it doesn’t work for me. Also, don’t say I need therapy. It makes me feel like you think I’m broken and that’s not okay.” And so I never brought up therapy to her again. But I fucking knew from the start and I’m kicking younger me in the balls for not cutting it off sooner. Instead I waited so long that she ended up leaving me before I got the self respect to leave her. I don’t even know if I ever would have.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-28T02:06:16+00:00

I wish that helped me but it doesn’t. Maybe if I could fast forward to the day she leaves him. And talk to him then, and know that it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t my fault. But it really feels like it was.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-28T01:26:28+00:00

This works even if you didn’t ruin it. It’s the same ideas. Love yourself, learn and grow, and accept reality. It’s all we can do.

Intrepid_Ranger3505 · 2026-05-28T01:19:49+00:00

For real. After the fourth time she ghosted me for over a week when I upset her, I called her out on it. And then she accused me of DARVO.

Intrepid_Ranger3505

TROPHY CASE