Emotionally Unstable Things I’ve Done While in Love

 

First of all, I need to clarify something:

I’ve been in love with my current boyfriend Seunghoon since I was eight years old. Somehow instead of fading over time, it just became stronger and more psychologically concerning every year.

At the same time, unfortunately for everyone involved, I also tend to become emotionally obsessed with other men very easily.

Sometimes it’s attraction.
Sometimes it’s infatuation.
Sometimes it’s genuine emotional attachment.
Sometimes it’s apparently severe enough to qualify as a public incident.

Since it’s BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) awareness month, I guess this is the perfect time to admit that a lot of my emotional reactions throughout life have not exactly been…stable.

And before anyone asks:
yes, in retrospect a lot of these things sound irrational, embarrassing, manipulative, dramatic, or completely insane.

The weird thing about emotional impulsivity though is that when you are actually inside the emotion, it rarely feels irrational in the moment. At the time it feels urgent. Catastrophic. Like your entire world is collapsing in real time.

Only later do you look back at yourself and think:
“…what the hell was wrong with me?”

 

So here are some of the most emotionally unstable things I’ve done while in love.

1. Ruining an entire luxury vacation because I wanted to stare at Seunghoon through a webcam.

At the time Seunghoon and I were not dating yet, he was just my best friend.

Meanwhile I was on a two-week vacation in a luxury resort with my brother and sister. Objectively this should have been a good situation. Beautiful beach, expensive hotel, perfect weather, normal happy people enjoying themselves.

Instead I decided I no longer cared about the outside world because I wanted to stay online with Seunghoon 24/7.

So while my siblings wanted to go swimming, sightseeing, or leave the hotel like functioning humans, I refused to go anywhere because I needed to be in the room with my webcam open waiting for Seunghoon to appear online.

I stressed Seunghoon because I constantly wanted attention.
I stressed my siblings because I refused to participate in anything.
Then I called my father crying and begging him to cancel the final week of the trip so I could go home earlier.

You can imagine how much my siblings appreciated that.

2. The cake incident.

A lot of people asked me about this after the first blog post so here you go.

We were around eighteen and after years of emotional suffering I finally decided I would officially ask Seunghoon to be my boyfriend.

After an extremely serious thought process, I somehow concluded that the best idea would be to hide a handwritten confession inside his birthday cake so he would discover it dramatically while cutting the cake.

In my defense, it sounded romantic in my head.

So I bought the cake, hid the note inside, and brought it to karaoke where we were celebrating his birthday.

A slightly drunk and probably overwhelmed Seunghoon paid absolutely no attention to the note and accidentally ate it.

At that moment I genuinely believed my life was over.

Not “oh this is awkward.”
No.
I mean complete emotional apocalypse.

I became convinced he did it on purpose, hated me secretly, and that our fate together was doomed forever.

So after the party I went home, cried the entire night, made dramatic plans about disappearing and avoiding him forever, drank too much, spiraled completely, and eventually ended up in the hospital with a nervous breakdown.

Meanwhile Seunghoon had no idea any of this was happening.

3. Throwing a tantrum because a cashier called Seunghoon cute.

We were around ten years old.

A cashier complimented Seunghoon because he helped her carry a bag and said he was “cute” and would become “a real catch someday.”

This information destroyed me emotionally.

I became irrationally jealous, threw a complete tantrum, locked myself in my room crying, and refused to come out during our planned movie night.

So instead of watching the movie with me, Seunghoon ended up watching it with my siblings while I emotionally collapsed alone in the dark.

4. Going with a group of semi-aggressive guys because I felt ignored by Seunghoon.

I spent THREE HOURS getting ready because I wanted Seunghoon to notice me. The outfit was carefully calculated. The hair was calculated. The suffering was calculated.

Meanwhile Seunghoon did not notice any of this because he was too busy admiring the sunset and talking about how pretty the hills of Busan looked.

So naturally I took this extremely personally.

Later that night we met a group of guys who were half flirting with me and half insulting both of us. They kept implying Seunghoon was weird and that I was a slut while acting weirdly aggressive the entire time.

For some reason my emotionally unstable brain decided:
“Yes. These are the people I should follow.”

Things escalated into an actual physical fight with Seunghoon and despite being deeply in love with him, I still went with those guys afterward and slept with them even though I knew they had hurt him.

Honestly writing this now makes me realize how self-destructive I could become whenever I felt ignored, jealous, unwanted, or emotionally abandoned.

The next morning I was sitting there quietly taking care of Seunghoon’s bruises while feeling like the worst person alive.

He forgave me anyway.

5. Hiding inside a gym overnight for a gym instructor.

This man was a gym instructor and former rapper, which normally would not even be my type because I don’t really listen to rap.

But one day something shifted psychologically after watching him quietly eat a protein snack in the corner of the gym after leg day.

Suddenly I became convinced he meant something important to me.

So instead of behaving like a normal person, I decided the best possible course of action would be hiding inside the gym toilets overnight until the gym closed.

I slept there.

Then the next morning when he arrived to open the gym, he found me waiting for him inside like some emotionally unstable cryptid.

Surprisingly this strategy worked much better than it should have.

6. Locking my cousin’s friend inside his own apartment so he would spend more time with me.

This one is genuinely insane in retrospect.

He was sweet, kind, very well-built, and I liked him a lot. We already had something going on, but I wanted more attention and more time together.

So one day before he left for work I hid his keys so he physically could not leave the apartment.

At the time my brain genuinely categorized this as “romantic.”

He protested initially but eventually gave up and spent the day with me instead.

Honestly the plan worked surprisingly smoothly until his mother came home later that night and ruined the hostage situation.

7. Painting a picture of Seunghoon and me together when I was eight years old and treating it like a sacred object.

When I was a child I painted a picture of me and Seunghoon together and kept it above my bed because I genuinely believed if I prayed hard enough God would eventually make us end up together.

I became completely emotionally attached to this painting.

We had to take it with us on every single trip.
Every vacation.
Every hotel.

If somebody forgot it, I threw full tantrums because I believed something terrible would happen to our future together if the painting stayed behind.

At one point we actually missed a plane because somebody forgot the painting and we had to go back for it.

Then when everyone blamed me for the situation, I got angry, refused to leave, and stayed behind with my dad instead while the rest of them continued the trip.

Honestly it became less of a painting and more of a psychological support artifact for my obsession.

And somehow after all these years, we still have it hanging on our wall now.