Remembering Why You Care About the Borderline in the First Place

I can understand why non-BPs would engage in a lot of discussion about the pathologies, the rages, the rotten things borderlines can do. Because they hurt and they hurt badly. A borderline has the capacity to destroy her/himself or anyone close -- and often both. It's healthy to discuss these things, to vent this pain. But there's also a *reason* why it is that you became close to a BP to begin with -- and sometimes, in the course of the books and the discussion and all the clinical terminology, it seems that such reason becomes lost. You don't fall in love with a borderline because you have some hankering to be destroyed, because you somehow made a horrid mistake in judgment. You did it because there were good qualities, that are just as inherent and characteristic of the borderline as the bad ones. And as the destructive bad qualities began to manifest themselves -- for as long as you have stayed around or will stay around -- it is because you believe that, in the end run, those good qualities will supersede the bad ones. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. You aren't masochists, you are optimists -- which may or may not turn out to be warranted. It certainly gives a good understanding of why all of this is so painful for you -- it is hard to give up on that optimism and "let go.