It’s complicated, as I’m sure you’re all aware. My partner of 5 years has BPD and I’ve done my best to research and understand the disorder so I can better understand her. That understanding has allowed our relationship to last through some bad times, but the worst of those has been the flirtation with other men.

Anyone on the outside would immediately say “end it bro, she’s a cheater”, and lemme tell you, it’s been hard not to. But it’s the intense remorse she feels afterwards that’s made it hard. She will sob intensely for days, saying that she wishes she wasn’t like this and even threatening suicide at times. And it’s not because I found out, or because I threaten to leave her. She came to me and told me, I had no idea. The hate she feels for herself at that time is way more intense than any resentment I felt.

That was last year. Since then, it’s happened again, and this time I knew it was happening but didn’t say anything. Her not wanting to be around me at all, but being glued to her phone, smiling and talking to some new and exciting. Any attempt to try to love her was immediately shot down, and she pushed me away and kept talking to some dude from high school or something.

And then she came to me, again. And she wept and apologized and said she took it too far, again. And she beat herself up and felt that remorse, again. While I am sympathetic to some degree, it’s hard to continue to be a doormat to this behavior over and over. If it was once, okay fine we can work through it. But it’s sending me into trust issues and making me depressed now.

I try really hard to be supportive to it all, but at what point is it too much?

EDIT: Thank you everyone for the honest, thoughtful and insightful replies. I’ll be honest, my experience with BPD is with my partner exclusively, I assume anyway. I didn’t expect the replies, coming from people who suffer from BPD and know how hard these things are to deal with. It sounds like I’m just being abused at this point, which I kinda assumed but didn’t want to believe. And it’s still a hard pill to swallow, and I’ll need time to mull all of this over. But honestly, out of all the input I’ve gotten about this relationship, the BPD community siding with me and not my BPD partner has hit the hardest. Thank you.