A little back story:

I've been in a relationship with a BPD woman for 2 years now. She wasn't diagnosed until March of this year. She has since started DBT and is coming along great!

My question to people with BPD is what kind of SO would have been or would be helpful to you? I frequent /r/bpdsoffa a lot and it seems like in general, the SO of a BPD person is one who is easily walked over. They crave your attention and when you're upset, do everything in their power to try to make you feel better, even when you may be acting irrational.

This is not how I interact with my BPD SO at all. An example: We are in the car and she's driving. There's traffic -- she gets stressed in traffic really easily. I know this but it's not always on my mind. The car starts acting a little funny and I make a joke: "What did you do the car?". She doesn't think it's funny or a joke at all.

She reacts by getting upset with me since she thought I was criticizing her driving. Makes sense, however I respond with "I'm sorry, but it was just a joke". In hindsight I know that's an invalidating statement. As you can imagine, it fed her high emotion and she continued to be upset.

At this point I basically match her high emotion because I feel like I tried to validate her even though I did it wrong. Eventually we did what we usually do when we both feel invalidated and go silent. After we got home, she said something like "So are you going to talk to me?". We start talking and after a bit of harsh exchange we eventually validate each other and all is well.

Notice that I didn't keep apologizing or plead with her to forgive me. I thought her response to my joke was somewhat irrational in the moment and in the end it turned out she was trying to guilt me for something she did earlier (cheat on her diet) but that's irrelevant. I'm talking about the behavior. I didn't try and validate her behavior, I tried to validate her emotion, though poorly.

I feel like other SO's out there are validating poor behavior in their BPD SO. In that example for instance, if I apologized like I did and she remained upset, I feel like it would be a poor choice to promise her a present or a treat or something to make up for how I made her feel. If I profusely kept apologizing, it seems like that would be a bad thing to me. I feel like that would resolve the conflict immediately but it would validate her poor behavior.

So I wonder, to the BPD people out there, would a SO who doesn't cave to your poor behavior (but still try to validate your emotion) be more beneficial than one who does? I feel like it would be, but I would love to hear your input.