People tend to put a negative spin on the word "agenda." Somehow, it's acquired a bad connotation.
Your wishes or desires in context of a professional OR personal transaction is your agenda. It's how you WANT things to go, as opposed to how they might, if you'd thought it through enough beforehand.
When we're looking for love, we have an agenda. We want to get various needs met, and we fantasize that another will meet our dreamed about needs.
There's nothing whatsoever wrong with this approach, except that it tends to blur our perceptions and cloud our judgment, because we so very much WANT our needs to be met, we overlook stuff we don't like, trust or respect about our partner, so our agenda can be served.
Men and women who get involved with borderline disordered partners will go to great lengths to overlook, make allowances and excuses for, and sanction a partner's injurious behaviors, so they don't have to surrender their fantasy of Happily Ever After. Wishful thinking doesn't end with the passing of childhood. Millions of adults engage in it too.
In short, no matter how badly they're treated, no matter how confused and tormented they feel during a relationship experience, hope springs eternal, and their agenda is kept intact.
You might ask yourself, how and why this happens! How does it make sense, that if we feel miserable with someone's treatment of us, we cling to the ideation it's all gonna work out somehow?
Young children LEARN to compartmentalize a parent's hurtful behaviors. The child presumes the mommy loves him as much as he loves her, so harsh or ugly actions on the parent's part are considered anomalous, and quite apart from the attachment he feels for her.
This child regards the loving, warm or "good" aspects of his parent as REAL, and the hurtful, dark aspects as completely separate and unremarkable. How could he otherwise reconcile the two distinct sides of the parent? The anomalous "bad" or painful experiences are somewhat trivialized. It's sort of like when your laptop doesn't perform as you need it to, and you've learned that all it needs is a reboot, to help it function normally again.
One of my BPD articles speaks to the phenomenal behavior a child adopts of scooping up the injurious, scary parts of a parent and storing em in a box, which he then stores high on a bureau's shelf. He separates these aspects from his beloved parent, and believes he's done away with them once they're boxed up and out of sight, so that he can more safely LOVE her again.
All is well, until the next earth tremor shakes that box and sends it toppling off its shelf. It hits the floor with a loud thud and breaks open, spilling its entire contents onto the carpet or tile below.
The child is hurting, but to soothe, bolster and reconstitute himself, he methodically scoops up the nasty, dark portions of his parent, and returns them to the box, hoping never again to be harmed by them. The box is stored once again on a high, nearly unreachable shelf. The child hopes once more, it will never fall and break open again, releasing a torrent of injury and pain to him.
You were programmed to adjust to and accommodate pain as a tiny child. Most of us were. You had to compartmentalize your pain and tell yourself comforting stories and reassurances about it, so you could survive in your home environment and NOT take a dive off a tall building to end the agony you intermittently experienced.
These techniques served to keep you ALIVE as a little girl or boy, but they've worked against you as an adult. You built such an incredibly high threshold for enduring anguish as a kid, not much of it fazes you now. You've grown insensitive and oblivious to most of it, in fact.
Everyone thinks in the aftermath of a relationship with a Borderline, "I've NEVER felt this level of pain before!" But in fact, you HAVE~ you just got so good at ignoring and making excuses for it, it's almost like it never existed.
The agony you feel in a BPD relationship, is identical to the agony you felt as a toddler and young child. Your partner and mother don't necessarily have identical personality traits~ but your lover makes you feel PRECISELY the same way about Yourself today, as your maternal object did, when you were just a wee lass or lad needing her warmth, adoration and protection.
This is why you've kept going back for more, just like you did as a little girl or boy. You needed to believe that if you just packed up and stored the BAD parts of your parent, you could somehow survive long enough, to relish some of the good ones.