BPD and True Love

This week I bought the new Pink album The Truth About Love. I'd usually liked her singles, but had never owned anything by her. Then, last week, I saw her perform her new single "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)" on the Daily Show and I read an interview with her in Entertainment Weekly so when the full album came up for cheap, I thought "What the hell?" Though I really like it, I must confess that it's been a trip down BPD-colored romantic relationship memory lane. 

One of the toughest parts of therapy is finding out that all the ways you've felt and interacted with the world is not just wrong, but is also completely foreign to most of the population. In no area is this more glaring than in love relationships. Now that I'm more aware of those things, it's interesting when I do see it in others, when I recognize that kinship. In the interview with Pink, when talking about keeping good relationships with the people she writes her painfully honest songs about, she seemed to laugh it off, saying that it's the people we love the most and who know us the best who can piss us off the most, that we only feel that intensely when we care that much, but that those people in her life feel just as strongly back. I have always felt that how much a person could push one's buttons was a reflection of how one felt about that person. If that person can't make you see red, whether in anger or in bed, you don't really love them. Even though therapy has given me the skills to not act on it (as much), I think I'll always feel that way, deep down inside. It doesn't matter how much my reasonable mind knows that it's a fucked up way to be and a fucked up way to carry out a relationship, it's still how my emotional mind and my heart feel and react to the world.

That makes me question my dating future. What if my sexual self can never be attracted to men or women who are good for me, who don't set off my crazy meter? I want a teammate and a partner, but I'm scared about trying to find that, even if I felt like I had enough time and energy right now to pursue it. 

Without even pursuing any other relationships, in my present, things are fucked up enough. For as much as I love this song:

it does nothing but remind me of my relationship to/with Moneypenny, past and present, as well as a little bit of my relationship with TyRoy. ...There's no one quite like you. You push all my buttons down. I know life would suck without you. At the same time I want to hug you, I want to wrap my hands around your neck. You're an asshole but I love you and you make me so mad I ask myself why I'm still here, but where could I go? You're the only love I've ever known. But I hate you. I really hate you, so I think it much be true love...Nothing else could break my heart like true love...No one else could break my heart like you...Sometimes I wonder how we ever came to be but without you I'm incomplete. My two closest friends are not just exes, but exes I still love, will always love, and who I don't exactly have the most functional relationships with, more one than the other. Thinking about my life without them is like thinking about my life without my parents, doable but not complete. But how can I have a primary romantic relationship with somebody else like this? And though I'm trying not to be that person anymore, BPD is like alcoholism- I might be sober, but I'll still always be an alcoholic. And I can't imagine that my next relationship with my next ol' man or ol' lady won't be as volatile as these have been. Or, sadly, I probably won't be with them for long.

I don't know how to be in love without it looking like this, feeling like this, being like this. I don't know how to feel close to people if they can't push my buttons. I can make as many spreadsheets as I want with the qualities I want to look for in people that I date, but, at the end of the day, I still grew up in a culture that presents crazy volatile romances as the only true love and in a family where we laughingly told stories of my grandparents' love, which usually involved her throwing cans at him during arguments or throwing his keys into a field while she drove off into the night. But it's not just the only way I've ever known. I've tried it without and it just doesn't do it for me, even if the end result usually looks something like this:
White knuckles and sweaty palms from hanging on too tight. Clenched shut jaw, I've got another headache again tonight. Eyes on fire, eyes on fire, and they burn from all the tears. I've been crying, I've been crying, I've been dying over you. Tie a knot in the rope, tryin' to hold, tryin' to hold, but there's nothing to grasp so I let go. I think I've finally had enough. I think I maybe think too much. I think this might be it for us. Blow me one last kiss. You think I'm just too serious. I think you're full of shit. My head is spinning so blow me one last kiss. Just when it can't get worse, I've had a shit day. Have you had a shit day? We've had a shit day. I think that life's too short for this. I want back my ignorance and bliss. I think I've had enough of this. Blow me one last kiss.

So I don't have any answers. I love the Pink album. It's got me dancing in my driver's seat. And it is the funny, energetic soundtrack to all the dysfunctional impulses in sexual and romantic relationships I'm trying not to mindlessly enact anymore, but don't exactly know how to have those relationships without. I guess I'm just sharing it with ya'll.