The Illusion of Being the Favorite Person

The Illusion of Being the Favorite Person
When your borderline girlfriend says you're her favorite person, she means it in that moment. The apparent honesty and vulnerability in her expression disarm you. This isn't lying; it's a moment of sincere enmeshment. However, this enmeshment is one-sided. She seeks to absorb herself into your identity, not to merge both ways. This leads you to believe that you are being truly seen and understood as an individual, fulfilling the fantasy of being uniquely appreciated and loved.
Enmeshment with a Borderline
Enmeshment with a borderline is disarming because it feels like a deep, mutual connection. You feel completely recognized for who you are. However, this is not a two-way street. The borderline is operating from a regressed, infantile state. If she were a child expressing this neediness and attachment, your natural, evolutionarily programmed parental instincts would kick in. This is similar to how we react to puppies or kittens, whose lifelong enmeshment is endearing.
Adult Connection and Confusion
Your attraction to a borderline stems from your own similar, though less advanced, emotional wound. You inadvertently take on a parental role in the relationship. The confusion arises because the adult connection feels genuine; you believe you're soulmates. In reality, the borderline is molding themselves to match your identity, creating an illusion of commonality. This resonates with your deep-seated need to be seen and validated, a role ideally fulfilled by a mother who acknowledges your uniqueness and specialness from childhood.
Enmeshment and the Illusion of Being Seen
When your borderline girlfriend says you're her favorite person and kisses the back of your neck, she means it. Her eyes convey honesty and vulnerability, completely disarming you. This enmeshment, where she seeks to absorb herself into your identity, is disarming because it feels like total acceptance. You believe she sees the best in you, recognizing your uniqueness. This is the fantasy of all romantic relationships, feeling seen and understood. However, with a borderline, it's a one-way enmeshment, as she is not looking for mutual connection but rather to be absorbed into your identity.
The Attraction to Borderlines and the Parental Role
Your attraction to a borderline stems from a similar, albeit less advanced, emotional wound. You end up taking a parental role, which leads to confusion. The borderline adult molds themselves to match your identity, creating an illusion of commonality and soulmate connection. However, this is not a genuine adult connection. Internally, this dynamic triggers a deep need to be seen and valued, a role that ideally should have been fulfilled by your mother from infancy.
The Mother's Role in Validating Uniqueness
Your mother was supposed to look at you as a child and acknowledge your uniqueness. She should have energetically, psychically, telepathically, verbally, and through her actions made you feel special and unique. In a healthy mother-child relationship, the mother has no personal agenda other than to enmesh with her child, recognizing and affirming their individuality and worth.

The Role of a Mother in Child Development
A mother's role is to look at her child in the crib, recognize their uniqueness, and energetically, psychically, telepathically, verbally, and through her actions, convey that they are special. This creates an enmeshment where the infant, lacking an identity, allows the mother to shape one for them. This is a healthy process. However, when your borderline girlfriend says she loves certain things about you, you regress to a childhood state, trying to heal the part of you that your mother couldn't. Ideally, this can be a healthy dynamic if you're with someone who has an identity and can take on that nurturing role.
The Confusion Caused by Enmeshment with a Borderline
Your confusion arises when an adult, whom you're attracted to, appears to be on the same path as you, suggesting a soulmate connection. However, this is a misconception; the borderline is adapting her identity to match yours. If a little girl expressed the same sentiments, you would feel love and a desire to care for her, but not in a romantic way. When a borderline adult does this, it triggers a desire for maternal enmeshment, leading you to mistakenly believe she is your soulmate.
Projection and Misunderstanding in the Relationship
You're not only falling in love with a regressed version of a person but also projecting your wounded child onto the borderline. This is compounded by the misconception that your borderline is as attached to you as you are to her. However, her attachment is driven by overwhelming infantile needs, not genuine commitment. A borderline's expression of need is often confused with love, stemming from a vulnerable, narcissistic place of self-absorption.
Super Glue Attachment and the Impossibility of Meeting Infantile Needs
This dynamic creates a "super glue" attachment, where you're unaware of the abusive nature of the relationship. The borderline, grown up in an adult body but with unresolved infantile needs, sets up the partner for failure, as no adult can ever meet those intense, traumatic needs. This leads to a cycle where needs are confused with love, creating a complex and unhealthy relationship dynamic.

The End of the Timer
The timer has gone off; it's over. The opportunity for the borderline to receive the care she needed in childhood has passed, but she doesn't realize it. This lack of awareness creates trauma and pain for you because you have super-glued yourself to her, expecting a reciprocal attachment.
The Nature of Adult Attachment
As an adult, you are programmed to bond deeply with another person who mirrors back your essence, transferring your childhood need for enmeshment with your mother to an adult relationship. This is a survival technique, evolved to ensure long-term bonding in relationships. Unlike animals that separate after mating, humans are designed to form lasting bonds. However, for someone with borderline personality disorder, this bonding mechanism is more akin to Velcro, lacking the capacity to maintain a lasting attachment.
The Velcro Analogy and Sociopathy
The borderline desires enmeshment but lacks the "Velcro" to maintain it, leading to fleeting attachments. She can express intense neediness and fear of separation, but because of her inability to maintain attachment, she quickly shifts her attention to someone else. This dynamic demonstrates a lack of empathy, not in the sense of choice or feeling, but in the inability to maintain emotional connection and commitment.
The Need for Emotional Regulation
The borderline's need is not to connect with you but for you to regulate her emotions. Observing borderlines discussing their "favorite person" reveals this dynamic: intense attachment followed by intense resentment when the other person fails to meet their needs. This is not true attachment but a manifestation of the borderline's lack of self and need for emotional stability.
Why You Stay and the Unconscious Wound
The reason you stay in such a relationship is tied to your own unconscious wounds. Borderlines are unlikely to become attached to individuated persons because they seek out those who reflect their own wounds. This mutual recognition of unhealed trauma creates an illusion of attraction. The borderline looks to you to fulfill the role their mother was supposed to play, regulating all their needs. This dynamic is driven by an unconscious longing for the unconditional care and attention they lacked in childhood.

The Unfulfilled Promise of Care
Borderlines often feel furious because, in their minds, their partners have promised to fulfill all their needs, similar to how a child interprets a caregiver's actions. This expectation is unrealistic, especially when dealing with someone emotionally stuck at a very young age due to Borderline Personality Disorder. This condition is typically rooted in experiences from early childhood, and the emotional needs associated with it are often impossible for any adult partner to satisfy.
Shes So Beautiful
The beauty, sweetness, and caring actions of a borderline partner can be incredibly appealing. However, they are also tied to intense emotional needs. The slightest perception of not having every need met can trigger a dramatic shift in how the borderline partner views their significant other, going from seeing them as a favorite person to viewing them as the worst person ever.
The Worst Person Ever
Understanding the dynamics at play is crucial. No matter how hard a partner tries, they will never be able to fully meet the borderline's insatiable needs. This realization is a key step in dealing with the relationship.
Where You Stay
If you choose to stay in the relationship, hoping to fix the borderline's issues or believing you're soulmates, you're essentially setting yourself up for failure. This is because the borderline partner's expectations are impossibly high, often seeking a godlike figure who can meet all their needs and validate their feelings of abandonment when these needs are inevitably unmet.
Projecting Rational Thinking
Staying in the relationship can also be a form of projecting rational thinking onto the borderline partner. You might believe that by proving your trustworthiness and safety, the partner will eventually see you for who you are and return to a state of seeing you as their favorite person. This is a misunderstanding of the borderline's capacity for a stable, rational relationship, and it ignores the deep-rooted psychological issues that drive their behavior.

Roles Will Reverse
Initially, you believe you are the one to regulate your borderline partner, but as the relationship progresses, the roles reverse. You become the infant needing regulation, a dynamic mirrored from your partner's early childhood experiences. This role reversal is a result of your partner's ability to evoke and manipulate your deepest vulnerabilities.
She Was So Needy
Your partner's initial neediness is now transferred onto you. You become addicted to her, relying on her to resolve and regulate your emotions. Initially, you were the regulator, but over time, you have become the one in need of regulation.
Regressing
In this regressed state, you become childlike, unable to function without your partner. When she sees this neediness in you, she becomes disgusted because it reflects her own despised neediness. Her rejection of your needs mirrors her own rejection by her parents.
Needing Attention
Despite your efforts to support and care for your partner, she may express indifference to your needs. This reaction can be jarring, especially after you have invested emotionally and physically in her well-being.
Need to be Regulated
Your partner may grow to hate your dependency on her for emotional regulation, a dependency she helped create. This disgust stems from her own self-loathing regarding her dependency needs.
You are a little different
Unlike your partner, when you see a need, it evokes empathy in you, driving a desire to heal and care. However, your partner's manipulation reduces you to a state of neediness akin to an infant, dependent on her for emotional stability.
Projecting Rational Thinking
You project your rational thinking and empathy onto your partner, believing if you persist, she will see your value and reciprocate. Unfortunately, she often responds by discarding you, labeling you as toxic, abusive, or narcissistic, which are actually projections of her internal struggles.
Being Discarded
After being discarded, you find yourself in a state of constant rumination, unable to function normally without thoughts of her. This is a reversal of roles, leaving you in the position she was in initially, overwhelmed by a sense of abandonment and neediness.

Overwhelmed by a Sense of Abandonment and Neediness
You find yourself overwhelmed by a constant sense of abandonment and neediness, similar to the position your partner was in initially. This feeling is persistent, affecting every aspect of your life, whether working or attempting to sleep. The need for regulation becomes so intense that you seek herbal concoctions to help you sleep, but even then, you are plagued by terror and anxiety.
Love Bombing
In the beginning, the experience of being love-bombed by your partner makes you feel good. However, this is a setup for failure, as she is projecting her needs onto you. During this phase, you are clueless about the abuse. Her affirmations and declarations of love are not genuine recognition of you as an individual, but rather an objectification. You become a tool for her to paint the picture of her idealized caregiver, usually a parent.
Being Objectified
You are objectified in the relationship. Your partner does not see you as a person but as a means to fulfill her psychological needs. This objectification is not a conscious act but stems from her mental illness. You must choose between seeing her as a rational, evil genius or as someone with a mental illness who lacks awareness of her actions.
Cognitive Dissonance and Healing
The cognitive dissonance of trying to reconcile your partner's actions with her mental illness can cause enduring pain. To survive and heal from a relationship with a borderline partner, you must follow specific steps. Those who have adhered to these suggestions report healing, while those who don't continue to struggle.
Outro
Many remain in trauma-bonded modes, unable to face the painful reality of their situation. While borderlines are responsible for their actions, their inability to control impulses and lack of empathy classify them as sociopathic. With extensive work, they might learn to act in ways that don't reflect sociopathic tendencies, but this is about actions, not inherent feelings. DBT works wonders in this area.