Why Did You Marry A HPD?

This is obviously directed to only those who have married a HPD and have divorced since.

My question is a simple one.

Why did you marry your HPD in the first place? Were their traits not evident to you before you married them?

She was on her "best behavior" until about two daus after the wedding! She had cafefully selected me as her primary fool. She had chased me, seduced me, and the marrigae was her idea, and I had fallen for her act............

Immediately after the wedding, she flipped............

more later............

I dated mine for a while before marriage. In hindsight, the traits were apparent early on - although not as strong as they would develop later. This may be partly because I married fairly young and I've read that personality disorders often don't fully manifest themselves until early to mid 20s. In fact, I'm not sure anyone would have recognized the HPD at the time of our marriage, but he was definitely a general purpose controller/manipulator even back then.

Anyway, the below article explains my situation pretty well. (Thanks to whoever posted the link to the "are you dating a loser" article earlier - which is how I found this one).

Love and Stockholm Syndrome: The mystery of loving an abuser
http://counsellingresource.com/quizzes/ ... index.html

IN PARTICULAR from this article applies to my situation:
"In teens and young adults, victims may be attracted to a controlling individual when they feel inexperienced, insecure, and overwhelmed by a change in their life situation. When parents are going through a divorce, a teen may attach to a controlling individual, feeling the controller may stabilize their life."

In my bad moments, I have worried I'm just a "bum magnet". But I am hopeful that by understanding what happened, I can grow from this and not make the same mistake again.

nicholas wrote:Why did you marry your HPD in the first place? Were their traits not evident to you before you married them?

Yes and no. We had a couple of incidences of her starting up a 'fan club', although she only seems to need one 'special friend' on the side at a time and she gets her emotional satisfaction from trying to make him and I fight over her. The first major incidence ended with us almost breaking up, and her choosing to ditch him in order to keep me. We found we were pregnant shortly afterwards, and during the pregnancy she showed no tendency whatsoever to flirt with other guys or string along a 'special friend'. I wrote it off to a learning experience and hoped we were past that. Then we found out our baby was very sick, and we lost him at five weeks after a roller coaster of misdiagnoses that started 3 months into the pregnancy, so we didn't have any time for anything but dealing with that.

We had already set the wedding date before we found out she was pregnant, and we decided to go ahead with the wedding as planned, a month after we lost our son. It was only about 5 months after we got married (heh, her first 'special friend' was about 5 months after we moved in together, I only just noticed) that she dug up an old work acquaintance who'd had a crush on her when they worked together, and dragged him full tilt into our lives as her new special friend. This time I recognised the pattern, which was step by step almost identical to the guy just before we got pregnant, but while I was better equipped to deal with it this time, her behaviour hasn't changed and she strongly resists any suggestions that it do so. She still denies any responsibility 99% of the time, the other 1% of the time she say our problems are due to her but then she snaps back to denial.

If we don't manage to save our marriage, my next partner will have to wait at least a couple of years before we even consider things going further. I wish I'd known before about things like HPD that have a long incubation period - the first few months we were together were absolutely perfect, and we've had awesome times in between the bad bits. It just seems like my love isn't enough for her.