Perspective on Relationship with Ex?

Hello everyone, now I understand that every person is unique with their own goals, but I am very confused about my relationship with my recent ex and I was hoping if anyone could offer perspective. She was diagnosed bipolar but she also may be borderline.

[Back Story]
I had met a girl while on a trip to the desert to watch a meteor shower with friends. She seemed cool enough but I knew she had a boyfriend, I'll call her Harrah. I went with one of my best friends and her sister, I'll call her Julie, who's best friend was Harrah. Didn't hear from Harrah for about a year when one day I received a Facebook message from her asking to hang out. Judging from the message it was obvious she was interested, excited, anxious, and wanted to date me. We went on a date and had a good time and she told me that night she liked me and we began dating.

The night of the date she told me she was diagnosed bipolar, that she had gotten out of a bad 2 year relationship a few months prior, and was deciding on two schools to move to. There were no initial plans for something long term but we hit it off so well that we became boyfriend and girlfriend within a couple weeks. I hadn't fallen in love with her by the point but a month in she fell in love with me and I fell in love with her a couple weeks later. I was on top of the world, it was my first relationship and I was handling everything really well. She was the child of divorced parents who had her when they were 20 or so, the dad being severely bipolar and DID but extremely high functioning and the mother nice enough but a bit of an attention freak. She terrorized Harrah when she was younger and Harrah spent a lot of her young adult life moving between the two, running away from whatever problems would arise.

I respected the bi-polar DID father more than the mother, as he was a really good parent, loved her, had a really nice job (he is extremely intelligent) and set reasonable boundaries. The mother was more of the -I'm the cool mom- that talked about doing drugs and let her do what she wanted, while earlier on in Harrahs life she was a control freak and still is.

Harrah herself seemed to have herself very put together and after six months of dating when it was time for her to move up away to school we decided to stick it through for the year before I would move up.

First semester went well enough with no hiccups in the relationship, we would see each other every couple of weeks and she did good in school, which I respected since I had recently graduated and moved out of my parents house.

Around after when we had been together for x-mas break and I drove up to school with her to hang out for a week, I sorta knew there was something awry. Cut to around March she becomes less and less willing to talk on the phone, she up and surprises me by driving down with one of her guy friends for 10 hours to see me on my birthday. The birthday weekend I was oblivious to what was going on with her. I always told her to be completely honest with me and I would never judge and to be good with communication. The night of my birthday the guy she drove down with is there with the girl he is hooking up with, a real idiot guy that smokes an ounce of weed every week. She is cold and distant. Next night we are drunk watching a movie together, it is the night before she leaves and she tells me coldly that she feels disconnected, I tell her that I don't and she tells me that I must love her more than she loves me. She also tells me she slept in the same bed with the guy she drove down with but nothing happened. She tells me this same night that she cheated on the guy she was with previously, Troy, with this other guy John and that she had only been a couple weeks out of the relationship before messaging me. The next morning I go to work and think about it more and become very distraught, a lot of it having to do with the poor timing of her explaining this to me.

She is so depressed that semester at school she is ignoring me nearly completely and screws up the semester. We meet up in the middle where we live for our anniversary weekend and it is miserable. We are drunk together one night and she tells me she doesn't love me, but wakes up the next day and says she does. I am distraught and she does not give a $#%^...no empathy. I realize by this point that she is very mentally ill and I beg her to get help, to which she replies she cannot promise anything. Before when she met she was fine (or so I though it very well could have been just the excitement of a new relationship keeping her grounded, and she has no support system up at school while she had therapy and family while she was down here, she also stopped taking her Trileptal while up at school though she has always been inconsistent about it). It is this fickleness, and off and on love that colors the rest of the semester before she comes down for summer.

She comes down for summer to stay at her moms and and is very stressed out and depressed. All I want to do is help and work on the relationship. Anyway I become increasingly frustrated at her because she is putting off hanging out with me, blaming it on her controlling mother. One weekend when I feel things are going better she tells me she has to rush up north to where her dad lives for the weekend, some four or five hours away, because he is having a terrible episode due to his mental illness (it happens) and is the only one that can calm him down. She has three best friends, me, Julie, and this other girl who was visiting from Hawaii and who's birthday it was that night. So I obviously believed her because she would never miss her birthday.

Monday she is back and I come home, I use chrome and she uses firefox on my computer, I without thinking open up firefox and see that her gmail was logged in, I checked it (not cool but sorry I was curious) and there are a bunch of pictures of her hanging out with John, the guy she cheated on Troy with. I tell her I'm coming over, she knows what happened, she pops five xanax and have a three hour long break up.

$#%^ really sucks for me, I am a very emotional guy, always feeling a lot of empathy for her condition even then when we broke up, and I can hardly get out of bed and am going home from work early and calling in sick a lot of the week. What hurt most is that she didn't seem like she cared at all about the break up, and was going out with friends the same week. A week later she starts texting me telling me how horrible she feels and that she can't stop crying (she has delayed emotional reactions to things she says). Her mom is gone for the month and I go over to her house and have sex with her (yeah yeah I know). She said during that week she hung out with and kissed John but realized that he was an idiot. Anyway we get back together and I tell her she needs to be consistent with therapy and meds and not talking to exes because it hurts me to see her hurt herself and she agrees. She tells John to never talk to her again and blocks his number. She is being super happy and I ask her why and she switches to crying, unable to find a middle ground. I tell her trust is low and she tells me I'll just need to learn to trust her again (I was very put off by this). Anyway I am probably knowing this won't work out long term but needed something to make me feel better because I felt so horrible.

[Recently]

Things go great and I help her move up to school into a new apartment with her dad. I plead with her to tell her dad that she screwed up in school the last semester but she won't and thinks she can pull it off. It becomes apparent to me around this time that she is pretty much willing to lie to anyone to cover up and has been easily able to do so between her two parents for most of her life. After helping her move I leave and she is calling me every chance she gets to tell me how much she loves me and misses me.

She comes down for a weekend to see me and her psychiatrist but goes down with strep throat immediately, making it a pretty #######5 weekend because she is in bed and can't go to the psychiatrist and get help, and furthermore her telling me how she feels depressed and wants to cut herself and thinks she should take the semester off to come down and go to therarpy/get her meds adjusted, despite things being seemingly good with us, apparently. She gets cold when she leaves again and realize I had left her gmail logged in from the last time (I know how this seems and no I seriously do not snoop it I just remembered and didn't log out, I wasn't doing much but laying around in bed the weekend we broke up) and she is emailing the ex-boyfriend Troy telling him she has been thinking about him the past two months and wants to meet up for a drink because she got the week off work and is going to roam around the state and come home for a little (she lost her job because she couldn't get out of bed and is coming down because she screwed up school). I can only laugh that she is ruminating on cheating on me with her other ex-boyfriend, the one she cheated on with John before, the one that she hated for being a total asshole to her. I forgot to mention after he found out she cheated on him he blocked her out of his life for the year but just after we got back together emailed her telling her to watch some movie on Netflix because it reminded him of their relationship and that he forgave her. She told me he did this and I told her not to say $#%^ back, she watched the movie and emailed him back anyway because she felt so shameful for what she did previously.

So now after I find that she was talking to him I confront her straight up, she says she is an idiot for thinking that. She ignores me again and when she comes down on Monday she turns her phone off and leaves. I swing by her house early morning and see her car is gone and I break up with her. Her mother is worried sick texting me because her phone has been off for two days and the last she heard from her is that she was going out to dinner. I tell Julie this and she is blown away by her behavior. I tell her after I break up with her that she is messed up and needs therapy. Harrah eventually texts me telling me that she "went to a party she shouldn't have and did some stupid $#%^ that left me sick throwing up and crying at an old homies house for 24 hours" and that we would talk eventually. She gets dinner with Julie last night and tells her she went to a party with Troy and nothing else (Julie couldn't probe her for information because Harrah doesn't know we were talking). I tell Harrah's mom about the comments about hurting herself because it would be completely irresponsible for me not to.

She stops talking to me and I hear she is hanging out with Troy, texting me only that she can't be with anyone and she is too toxic for me. FInally she texts me, telling me she is going out to the bars as a warning in case I see her and that she needs her stuff. Next day she says she is in a better mood and comes over to get her stuff and talk. She says the same thing that she is too sick and needs to be alone because she gives too much into relationships and becomes absorbed in the other and needs to take care of herself. She admits she had sex with Troy but is steadfast that she is not dating him because he is depressed and tried to kill himself last week and she is probably using him. She says when she has sex with a man however she cannot rid herself of her feelings for him many times and she needs to learn to do that and to be alone. She says that she loves me and has never met anyone so compatible with her and understood her and that the breakup sucks but it is what she needs. She doesn't seem to really be sad about us breaking up but admits that it will suck when she feels better and it hits her that we broke up.

She says she couldn't get her bike because she didn't have her moms car and she forgot other things to bring over (even though before she said she didn't have them). I really do not know what to think about my relationship with her at all. It seems like she is leaving things open with me to bounce back but who knows. I do not know what is real with any of this. She was open about the bipolar at first which was nice but said her relationship with Troy ended a few weeks before and that she told him that they were just taking a break (she fell out of love with him and gave him the silent treatment too before breaking up because he was abusive), to which she tried to get back with John but ended things with him.

I want to know what type of perspective if any you guys can give me, I have always been very supportive of her and understood her disorder makes her do things out of control but is this a symptom of her bipolar or a symptom of her being a bad person or having a rough childhood? Thank you guys and I don't mean to offend with any wording this is just a lot and I am distraught, it's hard when someone is elated in love with you one moment and off with her ex the next.

I had a long post written and the website logged me out! arrrrgh

Anyways, to make it short and sweet.

She has recognised that her behaviour is imbalanced and could hurt you. She recognises that she needs to learn how not to be co-dependent. Let her learn this lesson. She will try to come back to you and you'll want to give in, but its going to take TIME for her to sort and manage her issues.

Move on, showing her that you care by doing this. Make sure you have stronger boundaries next time in a relationship.