An acquaintance (25F) with BPD is attaching to my boyfriend and me (25M/24F) in strange ways whilst simultaneously spreading bizarre rumours about our relationship. Help, please.

Heya,

I have an issue with a friend/acquaintance of mine. I met her a few years ago, as she is an old friend of a friend of mine, but kept a distance from her due to her strange/erratic behavioral patterns. She overshares massively, has a chronic need to be the centre of attention at all times, has very poor boundaries, and what looks like a very dysfunctional romantic/sexual life including two separate on-again-off-again-partners that she cheats on one another with, all of which she again overshares massively. The oversharing also lead to her telling me within minutes of meeting her that she's diagnosed with a bunch of mental health issues, mainly BPD and depression. Notably, she also told me her therapist thinks she's a chronic liar in a kind of jokey way (think 'Can you believe he would say that?!?'), which I, due to recent events, believe to be an accurate assessment on her therapist's part.

As I said, we were never close. However, an event a few months ago suddenly propelled her into my boyfriend's and my life and created this absurd situation we find ourselves in now.

By chance, she lives very close to my boyfriend of three years. He knew her from parties and group hangouts, but had no close relationship to her. In the middle of winter, she suddenly showed up on his doorstep, claimed that the heating in her house had failed, and that she urgently needed a place to stay. Thinking it would only be a night or two until the heating was fixed, my boyfriend gave her the guest bedroom.

What resulted was a three-week stay from hell, with her offering new excuses as to why she couldn't move back home or get a hotel room on the daily. By week two, he was so exhausted that he asked me to move in with them temporarily to 'buffer' her behavior. Amongst other things, she massively overshared a lot of trauma with my boyfriend, walked around stark naked multiple times despite being told to please cover up, insisted he stay up till three in the morning with her every night to continue her trauma-oversharing conversations, cried when he refused to do so due to work obligations, and whipped out her phone to show us nudes of hers. In hindsight, we should have kicked her out, but back then, the entire situation was so surreal that that somehow did not seem like an option.

Since having moved out, she keeps trying to find ways to move in again, citing how much fun we had last time we stayed together. My boyfriend and I have been dating for three years and are currently looking to move in together, and before we placed an embargo on sharing moving-related news with her on all of our mutual friends, she'd react to each update on our flat-finding process by calling and texting excessively, asking whether she could go househunting with us. She also keeps texting us about all sorts of things, mundane to dramatic, often multiple times a day.

We have gone more or less NC with her, and this worked for a few weeks. Yesterday, however, I was informed by a friend that she has done something truly bizarre.

The friend who talked to me also knows her, but she (the problematic person) apparently wasn't aware that the friend also knew me. During a brief conversation my problematic friend and the other friend had at a party, the problematic friend shared some truly bizarre lies about my relationship to my boyfriend with her.

She claimed that my boyfriend and I are both gay and each other's beards. We are apparently planning to enter politics and need to cover our gayness for that. She alleged that I have an affair with one of my female friends, and that my boyfriend frequents a popular gay nightclub in our area. Apparently, on the rare occasions my boyfriend and I do have sex, we only do so for the purpose of procreation, as a child would cover our gayness further and help maintain the illusion of an All-American heterosexual family we need for our political aspirations.

All of this is nonsense. I'm bi, my boyfriend is straight, neither of us are cheating on one another, we aren't trying to have a child right now, and whilst we're both in related fields, we have no plans to start a political career of our own.

I have checked in with a few people who know both her and me and have discovered that she has spread this nonsense to a few people in my social circle. For the most part, they dismissed it due to its sheer absurdity, but two people were legitimately confused and very relieved when I informed them all of this is untrue. Still, I am worried. I don't know who else she could tell these lies. I'm worried she could escalate further. I don't know how to approach this with my friend group- no one there is a fan of hers, but my boyfriend and I seem to be experiencing the weirdest of her behaviors. I don't know how to protect myself.

Any advice?

Tl;dr: A friend of a friend, whom my friend group tolerates for that friend's sakes, is weirdly attached to my boyfriend and me. Simultaneously, she claims my boyfriend and I are gay and faking our relationship on order to further political aspirations we do not have. I am worried how this information might be spreading and don't know how to protect myself.

Submitted July 31, 2021 at 06:59AM by ewokblubber https://ift.tt/3zVnmMx