The next morning I rush to work, hoping to have dozens of messages from intrigued and handsome men. My inbox is empty, but I’ve been “winked” at twice by overweight divorced men my father’s age. Winking, a noncommittal gesture of interest, alarms me a bit. Is it okay to just ignore winks? What’s the protocol? I write a carefully worded message to each winker, explaining that he’s out of my age range but I wish him the best of luck. After all, I’d feel devastated if I winked and got ignored. Three minutes later, one of the men messages me that he’s very youthful for his age and he thinks we’d be quite compatible. He also asks for my phone number.
As I try to figure out what to do next, Steve asks me to copy a stack of papers. I feed the copy machine in the production room while running back and forth to my desk to see if anyone else has emailed or winked. My profile was posted at least ten hours ago, and I wonder if it’s a bad sign that no one appealing has contacted me yet. I’ve already scanned over all of the men in the Cambridge area and added the hottest ones to my favorites list (a crush list of sorts). None of them have emailed me or winked, though a few have looked at my profile and passed by, giving me the pinched feeling of dismissal. This wide-open vantage—knowing who looks at you and having others know who you look at—throws an extra layer of fear and hope into the mix. You don’t just look at other people’s profiles. Your looking is itself on display. And at any moment, a message might come through—or not. The tension renders me useless for anything other than hitting the refresh button.
Finally, around 4 p.m., I have messages. This must be the time everyone gets bored at work and starts cruising the site. There’s a message from a Pakistani man who writes in broken English and, though I am sure he is sincere, my standard of English fluency and literacy disqualifies him. A forty-year-old father of two with a refrigeration business and love of motor homes sends me a message that reads like standard job application. I am hugely disappointed, and when I look at my “viewed profile” list, I see that all of my favorites have looked at me and moved on. I know it’s only been a day, and that it’s unreasonable for me to expect that my “perfect match” will appear so soon, or that I won’t have to sift the wheat from the chaff. I need to be patient and not take every slightest thing to heart.
Yeah, right.
Over the course of a week, online dating possesses my body and soul. I come to work early, stay late, check my email every three minutes, and troll through the little squares of men’s pictures and the pages of profiles, wondering at and weighing the possibilities. Even when I want to stop, I can’t. Every minute holds the possibility of a connection or a rejection. I send out three emails with carefully constructed greetings and witty comments. No responses. I switch the wording around on my profile, add more hobbies, increase my income level, take my income level off entirely. I say I want children, then decide I don’t. I’m losing ground within myself; with each passing day, I have less sense that I’m desirable. I wink at a redheaded yoga instructor with the body of an Adonis; no response. A sculptor who lives in a converted mill for artists sends me a reply: “Thanks for your message, but I’m looking for something different.” It seems that all the men I want ignore me, while those I’d cross the street to avoid find me irresistible. By the end of the second week, I’ve racked up an impressive seventeen winks from men over fifty. I’m ready to pull the plug when I finally hear from some good prospects: a biblical scholar doing work at Harvard and a physics student at MIT. Both look cute and well groomed in their pictures, and both are in their early thirties, like me.
I meet the Bible guy for coffee first. He’s nice enough, but we can’t move past the religion theme in our discussion. His specialty is the Dead Sea scrolls and mine is Camp Good News. We meet somewhere close to the New Testament but can’t make it much further. I see the physicist for coffee next. We have more things to talk about, and I think he’s pretty cute. All goes well until we wander over to the Cambridge Common and sit on the potato famine statue and the conversation turns too personal. I’m the queen of self-disclosure. You can’t spend a third of your life in therapy and AA meetings and not accidentally lapse into gory details. I don’t mention any specific diagnosis, but I say enough that I probably raise numerous red flags along the mating speedway. I don’t hear from him again.
“Did you like the physicist?” Ethan asks in our session. I’m not sure what I felt. In my mind, a sense of compatibility doesn’t need corroboration with facts. The physicist might have had potential. Then again, if my past scared him, he didn’t meet my criteria. But what if I’d withheld most of that information until he got to know me better? I find myself in a dilemma. To appeal to others, I need to not scare them with my past. I have to seem like a happy, well-adjusted person. I’ve peeked into the women’s online profiles while in stealth mode and see that everyone has put their best foot forward. Even the angry punk chicks make it sound like they have their shit together—making good money by day and moshing in the pit by night. What kind of positive face can I put on? I refuse to create a fictional self only to demolish the image when the truth starts to come out. I’m complicated. I try hard. I give good head. What else can I say?
My third date is with a computer programmer who rides a motorcycle and says in his profile that he thinks Rush Limbaugh is a twit. This time we talk on the phone first, a wise tactic I should have used with the first two but didn’t. Then we meet for a dinner date. Motorcycle boy is tall and lean, with pale blue eyes and long brown hair. He breaks easily into laughter and is strangely unaffected. He’s a curious combination of geek and bad boy, and while his appearance is less polished, having just come from installing a new water heater in his parents’ home, he reminds me of boys in high school who didn’t know how cute they were. His name is Taylor, and within a week he will become the center of my world.
On our third date, Taylor and I have yet to kiss—a record for me—and I also have yet to broach the B word. As I’m giving him a tour of my studio after a movie (“and here is my kitchenette”), the opportunity arrives. We end up sitting at the little table where my papers, books, and sketching supplies are spread out, sipping herbal tea.
“Is this your handwriting?” he asks, pointing to the pages of notes on BPD I’ve been taking down. He lines up the papers and I’m afraid he’s reading them, but what he’s really doing is comparing the script across the pages. I open up a journal and show him how different my lettering is when I’m in different moods.
“That’s nothing,” he says. “You should see the different types of writing someone with multiple personality disorder has.”
I stop flipping through my journal. “You know someone with MPD?”
Taylor opens his month, then stops. “It’s kind of personal.” I nod sympathetically but have no intention of letting this go, because if he knows someone with that disorder, there’s a chance he might understand what I go through.
“Personality disorders are rough,” I say.
“Yeah, we were friends for years and sometimes she acted really weird, but I just figured that was something she did—not, you know, a huge problem. But then she got kind of out of control and she told me. So I did a lot of reading…”
I put my tea down and look at him. “Taylor, I have a personality disorder too: borderline personality disorder.”
“What is that?”
Oh, how long I’ve been anticipating and dreading this exchange. Numerous words pass through my mind: “instability,” “impulsivity,” “disorder,” “syndrome,” “psychopathology”…
“Dysregulation,” I finally say, channeling Marsha Linehan. “It’s a disorder of dysregulation.” Taylor doesn’t understand what that means. “Well, take how I feel. It changes—a lot, and quickly. And I react strongly to things. And my views flip-flop… Sometimes from one extreme to another. Pretty quickly.”
“Huh… What’s with the word ‘borderline’?”
“That’s because a long time ago doctors saw the symptoms as somewhere betwee
n neurotic and psychotic.” I try to maintain a casual tone; I want him to think it’s no big deal. I’ve got this thing under control. But it is a big deal. It’s like two people having the presex disclosure talk, and one needs to confess to having AIDS. I’m inviting him into my world of shaky attachments, my howling insecurity, my overwhelming passions; it’s a world I’ve mastered on a basic level but have yet to share with anyone successfully.
“Huh,” Taylor says again, and looks around my studio. Every book, pencil, and teacup is in its place, my futon sheets are tucked in, and my pillows fluffed. Here, in this sanctuary, I’ve created the picture of a well-ordered life, and it isn’t false. And yet it also isn’t true. I don’t pick up my tea because my hand could be shaking. “You seem pretty stable to me,” Taylor comments. “Working. Paying your bills. I haven’t noticed you changing much this past week. Things can’t be that bad.”
“I’ve done a lot of therapy,” I say. Should I also mention that I’m always fairly good at the beginning, and that it’s when I get attached that all hell breaks loose?
“Do I need to worry?” Taylor asks. His candor is unnerving.
“I think…I think you’d need to learn about BPD, just the way you did with your friend who had MPD. You’re going to need to be aware of how it affects me, and us—if there is an ‘us.’”
“It’s official,” I tell Ethan. “We’re dating and I haven’t slept with him yet.” Outside, the flowers burst with fragrance, and I’m giddy, verging on delirious.
Ethan says he’s happy for me. His expression, a mixture of attention and distance, ratchets my delirium down a few notches, which is a good, I think. If he were as happy as I am, I’d probably go off the edge. “I think it’s important that you don’t sleep with him for some time,” Ethan adds.
“What?! How long?”
Ethan is scribbling in his notebook and tears off a page. It’s a contract: no sex for a month. I whine that it’s not fair—everyone else is doing it—but I sign the contract knowing that it’s a good plan. Both Ethan and I are aware of how quickly my reality changes as soon as I’m touched. In fact, it’s already begun to change. When Taylor looks at me, I feel myself coalescing around him, like I’m a wraith, a thunderstorm, and a scattered puzzle, all gathering into his eyes. I don’t feel this with therapists, or with my mother and father. It’s only a lover who holds me this way.
I show Taylor the contract. “A month?!” He’s taken me to his house for dinner and a video. And as much as he’s alarmed by my therapist’s sudden imposition on our future sex life, I’m also overwhelmed by the state of his house. When he told me he owned his own home, I was duly impressed. Visiting it, I’m less so. A century-old one-floor bungalow, the house is covered in cat hair and a chaos of papers, gadgets, motorcycle parts, toys, and cardboard boxes. It feels like a hard sneeze could blow the whole place to bits, and I start sneezing as soon as I walk in, even though I’m not allergic to cats.
“I’m a little bit less organized than you,” Taylor says when we enter. He grabs a large lint roller and vigorously swabs the futon until its green canvas cover appears. His kitchen is in dismal shape: the garbage and recycling piled halfway to the ceiling in one corner, the linoleum cracked, tools on the table, and boxes cluttered underneath. I’m appalled to see (and smell) the kitty litter box positioned next to the stove. We eat hot dogs cut up into macaroni and cheese, a culinary compromise I’m willing to make in light of the fact that Taylor has been a bachelor for a long time. I try to view everything about his house as the result of not enough female influence, from the dusty curtains he says were the originals, left by the ninety-year-old previous owner, to the lack of food in the fridge. At least he owns a house, which is better than I’m doing.
After dinner, we sit on the fairly clean futon and stare at the no-sex contract. I try to explain that this is necessary for me if I’m to learn how to have a healthy relationship.
“What’s wrong with us dealing with the issue ourselves?”
“It’s important that I have some concrete structure. I could get really thrown off balance if I jump in too quick.”
“I get that,” Taylor says. “If you knew me better, you’d see that I move very slowly. And I’m not impulsive, like you say you are. It’s the idea of someone else being in control that bothers me.”
I put my head on his shoulder. “If it’s for the best, can we just do it?”
Taylor fiddles with my fingers and traps my thumb under his index finger. It’s the tiniest gesture, but it makes me feel securely held.
He turns to me and asks, “So, can I kiss you?” I tell him I’ve been waiting for him to kiss me. “Can I touch you?” he asks. I say yes.
That night, we sleep in his bed, chaste spoons covered with cat hair amidst piles of laundry and cardboard boxes. And I am, quite possibly, happy.
15
Empty Room
It would be so lovely to end the book right here and say Kiera and Taylor lived happily ever after. After all, this would be the perfect ending to my nightmare journey, wouldn’t it? But it’s obvious by now that with BPD, falling in love, intimacy, attachment—all open the trapdoor to yet another dark place. With Taylor, it’s like watching a truck barreling toward me in a dream, with my legs stuck in cement. As always, the first couple of weeks are so very good. Taylor is an intoxicant. His sweat smells like spice. The thought of him sends me into a fugue state. When we talk, I feel listened to, deeply. Even when he’s discussing brake calipers, I loll in an opium den of feelings, skin tingling.
Taylor and Bennet are similar in many ways. Both are tall, lean, muscular, and at ease with tools, machines, and things with sharp parts. Their minds are similar too. Both are storehouses of information—reason mind to the core. I’ve exchanged Bennet’s long explanations of guitars and amplifiers for Taylor’s in-depth analysis of motorcycles and computers. Most importantly, they are both fixers, men who thrive on solving problems and repairing broken things. Bennet restored furniture, rebuilt guitars, and sponsored a gaggle of newcomers in NA; Taylor rebuilds motorcycles and computers and will show up at any hour of the day or night if you need to jump-start your car. Both men have the patience and determination to work with broken things, and that’s to my benefit. I need a certain kind of person to grow intimate with: someone who doesn’t view my vulnerabilities as weaknesses; someone who can remain calm in the face of my upsets; someone whose own world and sense of self is strong enough to withstand the storms that will pass through it as I learn to trust. Taylor is all this, and more. Perhaps most importantly, he doesn’t judge.
There is, however, one last similarity with Bennet, and when I find out, it’s like I’ve been punched in the stomach and can’t regain my breath. We’re cruising into our third week as a couple and still haven’t broken the no-sex contract. I’m leaving Ethan’s office after an hour of gushing about how good life is when Taylor calls my cell. He wants to know if it’s okay if a friend of his crashes in his living room Friday night. I’m not sure why he’s asking, and then he explains that his friend is a she.
“And who is she?” I try to keep my voice steady.
“Her name is Tanya.” He pauses. “I don’t want to freak you out. That’s why I called and asked.”
“Is she a close friend?”
“Umm…kind of. She’s my ex.”
I’ve been walking down Cambridge Street and suddenly the ground lurches. I step under a pharmacy awning, and before I can take a deep breath or do anything I’ve learned in DBT and CBT, I start crying.
“Crap, I was afraid of this,” Taylor says quietly.
“You’ve never mentioned her before!”
“That’s because I didn’t think it was important. Or seemed appropriate.”
I’m trying not to sob. “Not appropriate until she wants to spend the night with you?”
“Wait. Look, she wants to crash on my couch in the living room, not in my bed. I probably won’t even see her. She’s coming back from a concert late.
”
Be good, I tell myself. Be reasonable. A part of me knows that I’m overreacting. Another part is howling and wants to bang her head on the sidewalk. Yet another part recognizes and appreciates that Taylor is thoughtful enough to ask my opinion. But I’m not going to set myself up like I did with Bennet by being all nice and accommodating. “It’s not okay,” I say, my heart pounding. He wants to know why. “Because it’s inappropriate.”
“If you had an ex who wanted to crash at your place, I wouldn’t object.”
“That’s not fair!” Taylor told me at the beginning that he doesn’t get jealous—ever. So there’s no way I can ask him to empathize with my own storms.
He counters that it’s not fair for me to tell him how to handle his relationship with Tanya.
“But you asked for my opinion, and if you know it upsets me, why would you do it?”
I look up and notice that passersby are staring at me. I’m bent over like I’ve been kicked in the stomach, and I’m holding the phone to my ear with both hands. The tears won’t stop.
“I’ve got to go,” I say. I know this is a good time to page Ethan and put those all important skills into practice before I do something idiotic like throw the phone into a wall or jump into traffic. I also want to punish Taylor for having an ex-girlfriend. This wasn’t in the plan. I page Ethan and he calls back in a matter of minutes. Sometimes when I page, he asks me pithy questions and can direct my thoughts in a new direction. At other times, like now, thinking doesn’t work. I just sob.
“I don’t know what to do,” I sob.
“Can you try to do a distress tolerance skill?”
Buddha and the Borderline Page 14