Hello /r/BPD,

I am a woman in a long-standing relationship with a husband who has BPD. I love my husband very much, and would never want to leave him. However, recently things are becoming more challenging for me and I don't know how to properly cope or help him.

For the longest time, my husband did not have many friends, and as a result he also had no FP. I have since realized that I may have been his FP during that time, but I had never known what an FP was until only recently. Due to personal circumstances, we were temporarily separated. During that time, he began to make friends... and began the FP cycle.

Now, my husband bounces from FP to FP, losing each one as he tries to hold onto them far too tightly. He often wonders if he has fallen in love with these FPs and it can cause him to doubt his feelings for me. I do not doubt his feelings for me, however, watching the cycle has become increasingly frustrating for me.

Every time he meets a new FP, I feel my heart clouded by fear and dread. As much as it may make his heart lighter than air at first, it always leads to a very long period of very painful downswings that destroy both him and myself. It also leads him to become suspicious of me, thinking that I take his FPs away or that I do not want him to have them. It is true that I don't, but that is because I watch him suffer.

During this, he has also begun to lie to me. I would ask him things about things he had not told me, knowing what the truth was, and he would give the answer that was safest, rather than the answer that was truthful. This has caused stronger doubt to manifest, as before the FP cycle, he would never lie to me like this. However, he also values his privacy to a fault, and were I to expose the lies, he could leave me for knowing something that I was not supposed to know.

He refuses to believe in the idea of an FP because he feels that it devalues his relationships with these people to attribute them to a cycle. Sadly, he also will not get any sort of therapy, suffering from a severe anxiety dysfunction that prevents him from even leaving our house except on rare extenuating circumstances. He used to have a regular therapist, but ditched her after a minor disagreement, and the anxieties seem to prevent him from even considering the idea of finding a new one.

I try to believe in him and myself as much as I can, and I do my best to take care of him. I love him. I always have loved him. I always will. But this is getting very difficult for me, and I do not know how to make things easier on myself or on him.

The tears are flowing hard right now, as I watch him push me away, day after day, holding on tighter and tighter to his FPs. He no longer even gives honesty toward me about his condition. He is always okay. He is always fine. It is always nothing. Even when I see him suffering, or hear about terrible things that happened that involved him from our mutual friends. It is tearing at my heart to watch this, but I seem to be powerless to do anything but make it worse.

Please, help me. I do not know what to do, but I want to stay with my husband and help him recover and find happiness. I want that more than anything.

-A BPD Husband's Wife