What Is It Like to Be With a Narcissist?

A personal tale of demise

It’s like punching the sharp end of a knife and thinking you might get the better of it. Say whatever you may, it doesn’t matter, they will see it however they please. You will never get through that knife; it will cut you.

It’s like moving into a beautiful house, only to find out that it is irremediably infested with termites. That house will come down on you, and the longer you stay, the worse you’ll get hurt.

It’s like living inside a play where everything is scripted, except the joke is always on you and you never know when it’s coming.

It’s like stepping on eggshells all the time, like walking in a minefield, like an unpredictable roller coaster. It’s like Space Mountain, in Disney World, when I was seven. It’s pitch dark, and you never know when you’ll suddenly plummet down.

So why do we stay? Why did I? Well, there’s that beautiful house I mentioned.

At first she seemed like a dream come true! She did my grocery shopping for me, she fixed up the house, she was so loving, and I was the love of her life! She talked about having a baby a little too soon, but hey, let’s go with the flow and worry about that later. She said “I love you” on her birthday, one month after we started seeing each other, and introduced me to her family. Her mother loved me, she said.

She took care of me. I needed to learn to let myself be taken care of, she said.

Her for-show persona was insecure: her ex had stopped kissing her because she’d gotten braces. She was insecure sexually and would sometimes stop in the middle of what we were doing. She would sometimes cry. I was her savior as well, and I was hooked.

But narcissists slowly take over your life. They really need that spotlight in your group of mutual friends, so you back off. They don’t pay attention to your stories, your music, your writing, so you stop sharing, you stop talking. You listen. You may not like it, but it’s what you do. You let them do the driving, because when you drive they can’t seem to keep their back-seat driving to themselves or their hands off your horn. They read your private journals, but they confess their evil deed and they cry, so you forgive them. They move all your furniture around, because they’ve moved in and you’ve got to concede to having something their way. You haven’t made room for them in your life.

Finally, they don’t really see you anyway; they see their made-up version of you. At first, unrealistically perfect, later a total and utter disappointment. But neither version is you, so you’re invisible. And you’re depressed, and you feel like you don’t exist. They’ve destroyed you, and now they want to fix you. But you are still not you.

In the end, they discard what is left of you and move on to their next target. If you’ve been a good narcissistic supply, they’ll be back, usually when you’re starting to feel better and get over them. And very likely they’ll reel you back in for another round of all of the above, maybe shorter if you’re lucky. It’s hard to resist the desire to “get it right this time”. But you won’t.

So if you see your significant other in this description, get out. Get out while you can. They might cry, they might make a scene. Don’t fall for it. They don’t want you to break up with them. That’s the role they signed up for and they’ll probably do it a week later, unless they can’t for financial or whatever other reasons.

Get. Out.

You’ve been warned.

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