The Art of Not Caring

[DetachedAndEngaged]

So many tales of woe on this board, and I certainly have mine, but I thought I'd share a story about how I successfully handled a dxBPD woman I dated a few years back.

We met online and, although I wasn't super-attracted to her, we had a good intellectual connection and a shared sense of humor. We dated for a couple of months and had quite a lot of fun sex, but it was not something that promised a serious, long-term relationship for me. We used condoms and she told me she was on the pill, but what I didn't tell her was that I am unable to conceive children.

A few weeks into it her dramatic behavior kicked in and I started to suspect she was BPD. It kept escalating until one evening she had a meltdown, told me about how traumatic her upbringing was, that a close sibling had committed suicide, her mother suffered from psychiatric problems, she had been held prisoner and raped for a week by a man, plus other pretty wild tales, and that she had herself been diagnosed with BPD a few years previously. She also told me about a man she had previously dated who had gotten her pregnant and then abandoned her whereupon she had a miscarriage. I was sympathetic that evening, but I also decided that would be the last we dated. While some of what she said rang true (I verified the death of her sibling from an obituary and the wording was consistent with suicide), some of it (like the prisoner story) sounded exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated.

I didn't announce to her that I was done with dating, but she quickly figured it out from my lackadaisical responses to her texts.

A couple of weeks later she left me an "urgent" voice mail in a very distressed tone that sounded fake to me. I thought to myself, "This sounds like a set up for some BS, but let's see what she has to say." I was not disappointed. She proceeded to tell me that she hadn't had her period in over a month, that she had tested positive on a home pregnancy kit, I was certainly the father and that I should join her for a gynecologist appointment she had scheduled the next morning. I knew she was lying about me being the sire and I suspected she was lying about being pregnant at all, but I didn't let her know why. I asked her 1) how she got pregnant if she was on the pill (though, yes, I know that isn't 100% effective) and 2) how she knew it was mine when she had told me about another guy she was sleeping with. Her response was to say that she had been taking the pill when we first met, but then she stopped, and denied sleeping with anyone else. I laughed at her and told her she was a liar. She got all weepy and dramatic and put on quite a show.

I frankly found the interchange pretty amusing, but I realized that if getting her pregnant wasn't a medical impossibility for me, her deception would have sucked me in.

She kept texting and leaving voice mails, claiming her gynecologist had confirmed her pregnancy. I texted her "Congratulations to you and the father!" once, but otherwise ignored her. About a week later she texted asking if I had read her social media post. I ignored her. Then she texted me a link to a social media page. "Hoo boy, here we go," I thought. I clicked on it and saw that she had posted an angsty mini-novela about how some man she had been seeing had gotten her pregnant, abandoned her when she told him, she had just had a miscarriage and this dastardly fellow was refusing to give her any emotional support at all. Much of what she wrote was word for word the same as the story she had told me about the previous guy who had supposedly done the same thing to her. At that point I knew the first story she had told (which I initially bought) was BS. There were over two hundred replies from people expressing sympathy and damning this horrible man to hell. She didn't name me, but she gave enough information for some of our mutual social media "friends" (none of them were real life friends of mine) to figure it was me and proceed to immediately un-friend me on the platform.

At that point I blocked her on all communication channels and had a good laugh about it with some friends and colleagues.

She ended up sending the post link to an ex-girlfriend of mine who then emailed me trying to interrogate me about it. I just ignored the flying monkey.

This dxBPD din't let up, though. She would call me from a blocked number at all hours of the day and night and, after I set up a system to stop calls from blocked numbers, she started calling from other numbers (seemed like a combination of burner cells and friends' lines). It took almost 5 years for those calls to completely stop. You gotta admire her persistence! BTW Google Voice is a great resource in situations like this—highly recommend it.

This could have turned out much more dramatically if I had believed her, so I was lucky her BS took the form it did. Regardless, it speaks to the power of no contact, refusing to feed the troll and not caring about the opinions of other people to whom I had no deep connection—ignoring her, rather than trying to establish my righteousness, was insurmountable.

Stay true to yourself, folks, and don't let the PDs get the best of you. Don't feed the trolls.

[notrightinthehead]

What a story! 5 years being stalked. You must have very good real life support and be well grounded to be able to handle it so well. I hope she has found some other person by now.

[Spygirl]

Remarkable, familiar, and educational. Thank you for telling the tale.

[DetachedAndEngaged]

What a story! 5 years being stalked. You must have very good real life support and be well grounded to be able to handle it so well. I hope she has found some other person by now.

Thanks for the kind words.

Unfortunately, I've experienced far worse from PDs with whom I was far more engaged, so it was easy to brush off. Also, she never posed any physical threat, nor did she have any credibility within my circle of friends or work colleagues.

She has a blog which enabled me to keep up with what she wants people to think about her life. She's been through what she claims are multiple boyfriends with the same pattern: 1) they are everything she's ever hoped for, 2) they are emotionally weak but violent men who abandon her, 3) she's moved on and here are semi-nude pix showing her ex what he's missing out on, 4) how she misses her ex and wants to get back with him even though he was an abusive jerk (perhaps hoovering them). Lather, rinse, repeat. It was funny to see over the years how she would recycle the same exact, overwrought posts. Literally cut and paste. For about two years after I went NC with her, about every six months she would repost the same thing about her grief over "the unborn child she lost."

Part of what cracked me up was that there was no correlation between her stalking calls and the phases of her supposed relationships. She'd be posting about how much she loved her new man and calling me the same night. Of course, who knows how much of what she posted is real.

My wife and I get a laugh out of reading the blog--quite a drama fest train wreck. I'm sure some think that's cruel of us. Oh well...

[DetachedAndEngaged]

Remarkable, familiar, and educational. Thank you for telling the tale.

Thanks for enjoying it!