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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Who your spouse is hasn’t changed.  They are just now diagnosed and can learn a little more about themselves and receive treatment.

Whether or not your marriage survives kind of depends.  Borderlines typically marry narcissists. It’s likely that as your spouse gets more mentally healthy and their self esteem improves, they won’t put up with your crap anymore.  You will both have to change for the arraign to work.  
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?? what? no, borderlines marry people who will tolerate their sh*t. the opposite of a narcissist. a partner to a borderline is much more likely to be passive and codependent, taken in by the borderline’s strong personality when it’s a positive, and then willing to subsume themselves to avoid triggering the borderline’s bad side. another pairing that works is a very emotionally obtuse man who just doesn’t care about the borderline’s antics (and lets the borderline wreak havoc on kids/stepkids/ILs.)

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Borderlines do often marry narcissists.  I’ve seen it in my own family.  30 year marriage that ended in a grey divorce.   It is a known classic pairing.  [/quote]

I think this might be a generational thing, because while I can see this in my own parents marriage (boomers, now late 70s) I think it's far less likely to happen to people who are marrying now or have gotten married in the last 10-20 years, because of shifts in opportunities for women and expected relationship dynamics. I think in the "classic" pairing, the man is a narcissist and the woman is the borderline enabler who subsumes her identity to her partner (and before that likely to abusive parents).

People get married later now and women have more options, including to get more education, to work at higher levels, and to postpone marriage and kids, so I think it's more rare for a woman to become an enabler in this "classic" sense. I think this is also why you see more people actually raising these issues in the way OP is -- rather than creating these dysfunctional, codependent marriages that last 40 years unhappily, people who might have become codependent in prior generations are instead saying "no, this is not acceptable to me -- we need therapy and to address these dysfunctional behaviors."

The fact that OP and spouse are in therapy, with a diagnosis, and figuring out how to proceed kind of knocks them out of the "classic narc/borderline" pairing you are talking about. OP might have some codependent tendencies, but the very fact that they are in therapy and working on it indicates that some boundaries have been set and there is self-awareness of issues and a desire to improve. All of that goes against the dynamic you are talking about.[/quote]

I agree with this. The class BPD/NPD marriage is a boomer or older gen X couple where the woman has martyred herself for her spouse and children, while the man maintains control over the household and is the only family member likely to get his needs fully met. My parents are definitely like this.

I could absolutely see myself winding up BPD in a situation where I had little if any agency, and I've definitely struggled in my life in getting drawn into relationships with narcissists who I think see in me someone who has been trained to accommodate the whims of a more dominant relationship partner (because of my experience with my parents). However I've been in therapy since my 20s and recognized those relationship dynamics as dysfunctional and wound up marrying someone without those issues. So even though I do think I share some traits with someone with BPD (most significantly the desire for external validation and fear of abandonment, not unreasonable given how I was raised) I don't think I'd meet the clinical definitions and my spouse is definitely not a narcissist.

So I almost wonder if the BPD/NPD pairing is not so much a true clinical diagnosis of how people with these disorders interact, but rather a cultural construct we have since started to dismantle by empowering women and also raising the social expectations of men as husbands and fathers. I think a man who behaved the way husbands/fathers behaved in my dad's generation would get a lot of social criticism, whereas it was considered normal when I was a child.[/quote]

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