Can Someone With Borderline Personality Disorder Fall in Love? | STR Behavioral Health (2024)

FAQs

Can people with borderline personality disorder truly love? ›

Although the path to a healthy relationship for a person with BPD can be challenging, it's far from impossible. Individuals with BPD can form meaningful and loving relationships with the right treatment and effort.

Emotional trauma can manifest in various ways, including anxiety, depression, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, difficulties with trust and intimacy, and changes in self-esteem. If you find yourself experiencing these symptoms, it is essential to seek support and acknowledge the trauma you have endured.

At the start of the relationship, your partner with BPD might tend to idealize you and everything you do. They may focus all their attention on you, singing your praises, and demanding your attention. They might see only the positives and feel you correspond to their interest and feelings.

They're easily seduced by the borderline's extreme openness, charm, and vulnerability. In addition, the borderline's passion and intense emotions are enlivening to non-BPDs, who find being alone depressing or “healthy” people boring.

Many individuals with BPD never commit any aggressive acts during their lives. If you are feeling threatened, even if no violence has occurred in your relationship, you should take that seriously. If you already feel unsafe, it is possible the situation could escalate to the point of violence.

Dissociation and Emotional Dysregulation in BPD

This might manifest as a "glazed-over" or "empty" look in their eyes, hence the term "empty eyes." This phenomenon is also associated with depersonalization or derealization, where individuals feel detached from themselves or their surroundings.

Borderline splitting can burn bridges in relationships when they act in ways to make their partner pay for it or punish them, being spiteful when they perceive they are being hurt or mistreated.

Maintaining a relationship with a friend or family member with BPD can be difficult. However, it's important to understand that people with BPD often engage in destructive behaviors not because they intend to hurt you but because their suffering is so intense that they feel they have no other way to survive.

The individual with BPD tends to blame themselves for the breakup and may experience an increase in depression, anxiety, anger and self-harming behaviors.

Manning encourages, “In my experience, people with BPD do not do well in relationships with those who are emotionally insensitive, but can thrive in relationships with people who are willing to experience and talk about their emotions.

How fast does someone with BPD fall in love? ›

It's very common for someone with this disorder to have intense, unstable relationships filled with drastic and quick-changing feelings. A person with BPD may fall in love quickly and assume that the other person will make them happy.

People with BPD are attracted to people with narcissistic qualities because they have similar relationship skills. Both types tend to get into relationships quickly. They may feel romantic emotions more intensely than others.

BPD affects the sexual functioning of many of those who suffer. Sex is sometimes weaponized in order to cause partners emotional pain. Individuals in sexual relationships with sufferers of BPD need to set healthy boundaries to protect themselves.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a complex psychiatric condition marked by intense emotional reactivity, unstable relationships, and impulsivity. One manifestation of this impulsivity can be hypersexuality, a behavior characterized by a significantly increased interest in or engagement with sexual activity.

However, because of the nature of this condition, the favorite person connection may sometimes swing between extreme love and attachment to a strong dislike. This switch may occur when the person with BPD perceives that their emotional needs aren't being adequately met.

If one or both partners in a relationship have BPD, that doesn't mean the relationship is doomed to fail or become a source of stress. Taking the right steps can help minimize the negative impact on your relationship and help you maintain a healthy, satisfying connection with your partner.

Some people have relationships that just last a few weeks or months, while other people living with BPD have relationships that last years or even decades, though, the relationship may have cycled through periods of breaking up and getting back together.