Would it have worked if I'd know about BDP sooner?

[Brevity]

I've been posting all over the net about this break-up. It's been six weeks now, and two weeks of absolute no contact.

He was diagnosed with "mild personality disorder." I never paid much attention, as I thought it was just some catch-all term, like "anxiety and depression". But since the split I have researched a lot and everything fits.

Started out lovely - sort of. Day after we decided to at least date he changed his mind. Then a few weeks later we slept together. Day after that, he changed his mind. This "don't know when I'll see you" suddenly morphed into his moving in. He lives with his parents though he's 48 and he used to go back and see them every day.

We had some massive rows - I'm autistic and I can get angry too. But it all seemed to be working up until last October. I had some problems myself - mood swings due to HRT, partly - and he would get angry when I was upset. He said he wasn't spending the night, and I came home to find all his stuff gone. I coaxed him back. Then he was so cool, I got angry again. We agreed to spend some time apart. Then he texted to me to say I could keep what he'd left. So I coaxed him back.

I think you can guess what happened next. The third walk-out came because I disagreed over one of his many, many conspiracy theories. I just shook my head over this one. He leapt up and said we were different people and it was hard when it shouldn't be and he left. This hurt so badly I knew, and I still know, I could never face another walk-out.

I think he was having a sort of psychotic breakdown. He was convinced people were plotting against him and talked a lot about "defending himself" if anyone said certain things to him. He had recently burned his bridges over getting a part-time job. He had turned against a lot of people - I can't think of any friend he hasn't been suspicious about, in some way. I put my face close to his, jokingly, in bed, and later he said he'd wanted to hit me when I did that. I asked him about this after the third break-up, and he basically said it was my fault.

I did at that stage get worried about him being violent, to me or others, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Last time I spoke to him, three weeks ago, he told me there'd been some stuff stolen from his parents' garden, and he'd put a blank rifle cartridge in the shed door some way, so it'd go off if someone broke in. He is a good handyman, so I can imagine him being able to do that. This is in the UK, by the way, where guns are very hard to get hold of.

I also came to the conclusion that he has hallucinations, because he'd "hear" people say threatening things so often, and they were so close to precisely what he was scared of, that it just seemed too convenient. Sometimes I think he'd hallucinate praise, too (and he praised himself endlessly).

And he often asked me if I was seeing anyone else, which was the unlikeliest thing in the world - I adored him, I loved him, I wanted to grow old with him. He said he'd been cheated on a lot by women in the past but I no longer know if that was true. I no longer know if anything he said was true.

I broke down a couple of weeks ago and phoned him, in loneliness and despair. All he did was talk about the problems he's having with his parents. It was weird - like I was a phone counsellor.

I think (I mean, this is a guess, but it seems obvious) that he had this breakdown because his parents are elderly and his dad is very ill, and they were talking at the time of moving into sheltered housing, where my ex could not go. I think since then they've changed their minds. All sorts of reasons, but really they're a very enmeshed family. I used to hate going there - there was an awful atmosphere, though his parents were nice enough to me. I think now they're scared of him and his rages - probably as he was once scared of them - and they're also scared of losing him.

Bitterly funny moment when you try to call your 48 year old ex to discuss things, and his mother answers, and you hear him telling her he doesn't want to speak to you.

Never once has he expressed any sadness over losing me or hurting me by breaking up, not even in a sort of conversational, cliched way.

It's so odd to me - how we can be so close, and then, over a matter of weeks, he seems able to write me out of his life completely.

I knew I had to stop contacting him, so I sent him a text so insulting he won't want to talk to me again. In it, I told him that, right at the start of the relationship, someone we both know had said he was very like his ex girlfriend - you should hear the tales he tells about her. That's the deadly insult. Mind you, a few weeks into our relationship, he told me quite happily that when he's mentioned me to his brother, his brother had said, "Oh no, not another one" - ie, that I was like that ex. But it was never OK for me to insult him as he insulted me.

I don't know how it went from closeness to absolute distance.

And I can see I am co-dependent. I put up with a lot of insults, I put up with him not paying his way, with not listening to me when I was speaking (though he insisted on my full attention when he was speaking). I really begged him to come back after he'd broken up in a nasty, cowardly way. All this because I was scared of losing him. Well he went anyway.

If I'd known about BPD from the first - would it have worked? Only if he had known too, and had been self-aware and working on it. But we were just two people with problems that meshed together, grinding away at each other till the pain (on my side anyway) drove us apart.

I fantasise about reconciliation. But even when I have the phone in my hand, crying with loneliness, I say, out loud: "If he came back he'd only leave again."

Reading this back, I can see that he has very severe mental health problems, very few of which he will acknowledge. But really - and probably this is common here - he wasn't like that when I met him. He seemed kind, generous, empathetic - a really lovely man. It was a big shock when I first heard the conspiracy theories. There were lots of big shocks. But I can't, at present, get over the gap between who he was and who he became. It does seem like two different people. How did the man who nearly cried when he first said he loved me, because he was scared of getting hurt - how did he change into the man who threatened me and then said I deserved it?

I don't want to demonize him. I don't see him rubbing his hands with glee over my sufferings. I believe he doesn't really understand that I am suffering. And if I told him, he'd say, as so often, "You shouldn't feel like that," or else, as he once said when I was ill, "you don't know what pain is." I see him as locked up inside himself, bricked up, unable to understand anything but his own pain. Which does not mean that I do not hate him for hurting me. Of course I do. Who likes getting dumped? It's horrible and it hurts me.

So, I came up with a simple solution today. He won't want me while I'm weeping and begging him to stay. So I need to recover, to become strong, regain my self-respect, and find happiness. And when I've done that - I won't want him.

Thank you. I need to write this out again and again, till I recover so much it bores me.