The confusion of having a high functioning N

This week, mine is on a leadership course paid for a huge grant he won. His organisation nominated him out of ~1000 people for the £15k award and he was one of 10 people in his region who won.

He's been offered jobs in the last few years by people who have worked with him and think he's really good.

He can attract friends.

He dresses well.

He has attracted many women, and up to when he was seeing me, broke up with the 2 significant previous gfriends that he had (so his choice, not their's).

I still can't get my head around quite what's happened with him.

I thought mine was the whole package. I'm now 33 and am worrying that any man who is half decent will have been snapped up long ago! Will I just be left with Ns and Ps to choose from now???

If mine had been 'normal', say the 50% of the time when he was nice was more like 95% of the time, we'd have been living together happily long ago. He used to make comments about proposing and having kids. Then he'd spoil things and would make my brain hurt with his justifications as to why he screwed up.

I can't get my head around it. I think that he's probably lonely now, very lonely. When he D&D'd last Christmas, he said that the few weeks after were the loneliest he'd ever had. I have no doubt that he'll be feeling lonely again now. He had a close relationship and now he is struggling to develop friendships to fill the gap in his life.

I can't understand why they would ruin something so good. I can only think that they have such low self-esteem and are so disordered deep down that they have to sabotage anything that's good in their lives because they don't feel they deserved it.

When things were good with him, I felt so ridiculously happy that I almost felt guilty for it! Perhaps that's how they feel but on a much bigger scale.

I've actually wondered about asking people (my friends and family) what they thought of him. If they can say that they felt that sense of unease, that it would make me feel like it wasn't me.

I know a lot of people didn't like XN very much but he didn't usually make an effort with my friends. The few people he did make an effort with did seem to like him. One of his friends (now D&D'd) even told me once to stop "persecuting XN"!

A friend who works with XN told me that he has been stressed and chaotic. She noticed this before he and I had split up. He also told me himself that he'd been rude to a few people in work too but didn't seem bothered.

My friend told me yesterday that she's seen his anger get out of hand in work recently (a result of not having me to blame and take it on now perhaps) and that someone quite senior at their organisation is having serious doubts about him.

Hearing things like that make me feel so relieved. However, I have to admit that it also makes me want to give him a hug....I feel sorry for him.

I think mine is borderline as well as an N. A book I read said that 'borderline' is an old term and that some groups want it to be renamed 'emotional regulation disorder'.

Mine wanted to be normal. He was happiest when he was 'acting normal' because he made him feel that he was normal. He knew he was different and that caused him a lot of depression and frustration, which is why the Asperger's diagnosis that he initially had (now proved not to be true - and anyway, he's a liar, which does rule out AS!) seemed to make sense.

I think I may ask a few people what they thought about him. When I was with him, I knew people thought he was odd. My mum said she could see he had mental problems, another friend* told me he thought XN was "f*cked in the head" after he'd gone mad in a hotel room one evening. Most people thought he was boring. Other people expressed concern to me at spending time with him. "He's fine when you get to know him", I would say, "he's just shy and a bit depressed".

* The trouble is, that same friend (who I've had since I was 16 and I was not impressed) came onto me one night when his g/friend was asleep upstairs. They then had a physical fight and I had to separate them twice.

So everytime XN showed himself up, something else would happen to normalise his behaviour to me!