I have BPD and I’m struggling really badly with my boyfriend’s social life and I genuinely can’t tell if this is incompatibility or if my brain is just making everything feel 100x worse. He’s honestly a really sweet and understanding guy and every time I bring something up he listens and reassures me instead of getting defensive, which is why this is so hard. We’ve only officially been dating for a few weeks, but we’ve known each other a few months, and I already feel emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed. He has a really big social friend group with both guys and girls, they party/drink/smoke/go on trips together, and that whole dynamic is really hard for me. I (21) don’t really enjoy partying like that the way he (23) does and had for years so that also feels like a bad mix. What especially triggers me is that he’s really close with a couple of his guy friends’ girlfriends specifically like following their spams, having their locations, taking close pictures with them at parties, being in group chats with them, etc. It’s not even all the girlfriends in the group which almost makes it bother me more because it feels more personal. To him it’s just “they’re my friends,” but to me it feels like blurred boundaries and I can’t stop overthinking it.
He’s a really overly friendly guy and does a lot of things that i find to be personal/intimate but just causal and meaningless to him. He also follows a lot of random girls online and some accounts that make me uncomfortable, and now I feel like I’m hyperaware of everything. I haven’t even met his friends yet because I’m scared to. They invited me to a party this weekend cuz they wanna meet me and part of me wants to go so I can finally see what the dynamic is actually like, but another part of me already knows I’ll get super anxious and triggered watching how he interacts with everyone there, especially the girls he’s closest to. I really care about him and I don’t want to control or change him because I know he’s not necessarily doing anything wrong, but I also don’t know if I can handle constantly feeling this activated by someone’s lifestyle. I just don’t want to keep being with him if i know deep down im going to keep feeling upset about every little thing. Has anyone with BPD dealt with something similar, and if so how did you tell the difference between actual incompatibility vs your triggers taking over?