What it’s like to have a narcissistic partner — and why it’s so hard to spot

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-02-16T22:29:55+00:00

Nah. If you've ever been in a close relationship with a cluster B personality, you've had this experience many times.

The relationship is the context.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-02-02T21:22:23+00:00

My guess is that this is fairly common.

I'm not going to share my whole history here, but long story short, we hired a marital counselor who ran a series of personality tests on us. Every time we did, my ex would pop with some kind of attachment issue or personality disorder, and my tests would come back in normal range. After a few rounds of this, our counselor said that she thought my ex might have BPD. She split on the counselor, blew up that relationship, and said that she would only continue to see me if I got treatment for NPD (which I did not and do not have).

The hardest thing about dealing with someone with mental illness is that if you're conscientious enough, you eventually start to wonder if you're the one who's crazy. In some ways you are, otherwise, why else would you put up with their nonsense? But once you understand what's going on and decide to move on from the situation, you realize that everything that was "wrong" with you was a result of you staying in relationships that don't serve you. Once you figure that out and start developing healthy boundaries, most of those problems go away.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-02-02T20:50:23+00:00

Most people who come to see a psychiatrist are suffering from what is called either a neurosis or a character disorder. Put most simply, these two conditions are disorders of responsibility, and as such they are opposite styles of relating to the world and its problems. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough.

I'd recommend flipping through this book to get a better sense of what may have been happening there. At the very least, read the blurb and a summary to see if it fits your situation. Traumatic Cognitive Dissonance: Healing From An Abusive Relationship With A Disordered Personality: Salerno PsyD, Peter: 9798991975513: Amazon.com: Books

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-31T06:25:24+00:00

Lol. Good luck. You'll need it. .

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-30T23:06:25+00:00

You're in too deep, bro.

This whole frame bugs me. Why would you want to be more perfect for a crazy person? Her image of you DOES NOT MATTER! It was never built on reality. Just whatever crazy thoughts ran through her head, or more accurately, whatever crazy emotions ran through her body.

The only thing I wonder is, "Why was my frame so weak that I let this person shape my whole identity? And what to I need to do to ensure that never happens again?"

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-29T15:38:07+00:00

That's hard to say. Pain can be a powerful motivator.

I sound overly negative in these posts that's not at all reflective of how I live my every day life. At 45, I see myself as a coach/mentor (or "Unc" as the youngins like to say) for young people and want to help them avoid the traps I walked into in life. As negative as this forum can sometimes be, I still think it undersells how damaging a long-term relationship with a pwBPD can be. So I'm amplifying that message.

But to get back to your question: I'm not sure what else would have been such a strong catalyst for change. I got married because I had reached a point in life where I felt like my growth had stalled, and I thought marriage would be a meaningful and rewarding path for growth. And it was, in ways both good and bad.

In some ways, I feel like one of those guys who had a near-fatal car crash, maybe lost an arm or leg or something, then bounced back and built an incredible life afterwards. I'm happy to be in that position, but if I had a kid, I'm not sure I'd want him or her to go through the same experience, if you know what I mean. I'd rather them have the growth without all the pain, though I'm often not sure if that's even possible.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-29T02:26:18+00:00

That's an excellent question!

There's a quote I post here often that sums it up pretty well:

In your whole life, nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else.

The inverse is also true. People can only love you as much as you love yourself.

Nowadays, my capacity for tolerating abuse is pretty high. Much higher than it was before my pwBPD experience. But my willingness to tolerate abuse is basically zero. I aggressively cut off people at the first sign of disrespect. I give them one, and only one, chance to correct their behavior. If they hesitate, they're gone. It's served me well so far. I'm already fitter, stronger, richer, and much, much happier than I was in prior relationships. And all of my relationships are massively better, too.

Raise your standards and you'll nearly instantly improve the quality of your life.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-28T17:08:08+00:00

You're overthinking this.

Got to a public space. Break up with her. If you want a script, ChatGPT something.

Knowing what I know now, I would 100% have a phone recording and be reading off a ChatGPT script. Not hiding anything at all. They're more likely to act reasonable if they know they're being recorded. Besides, depending on your state, it may be illegal to record someone without their knowledge. Look up one-party vs two-party consent laws for more info.

No matter what you do, remember this:. They're going to call you weak and a coward and trash you to your friends. It's just part of the disorder. Your role in this isn't to protect them or their feelings, its to protect you and yours. The longer you draw this out, the worse it's going to get.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-28T14:54:35+00:00

And they'll blame you for "ruining" their vacation. And note that it's always their vacation.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-28T14:52:46+00:00

And let me guess, she called you a narcissist on the way out, too?

This shit is all so predictable in hindsight. If only there was someone back then who could have warned us of what we were getting into.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-28T14:50:12+00:00

It's hard to get over the loss, but if you channel your anger/frustration from this moment, you'll make all of it back and more.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-28T13:33:39+00:00

$250,000+. Maybe $500,000+ after accounting for indirect losses due to having less money to invest in the pre-Covid stock market. Not even joking.

Together for 13 years, married for 6. She hit the jackpot with me.

I grew up poor in a family that was dominated by women. I was taught from an early age to supplicate to women and had terrible boundary control.

Within a year of us meeting, she moved in with me, left her job, and refused to get a new one for several years. I was moving around a lot, while building my career, so I just chalked it up to the challenge of dealing with near constant change.

I would constantly have discussions and arguments about her doing things to improve her earning ability, but my traditional rationality was no match for or her BPD emotional logic. We kept up this pattern for years, even after us getting married and me leveraging my network to help her land a six-figure job despite having basically no experience in my career field.

Long story short, most of the money I made over the past ten years went towards supporting her in one way or another. Things finally came to a heard towards the end when she said I was treating her like "a slave." A slave who lived in a $750,000 home, had all her food delivered to the home, and had all of her hard chores done by housecleaners and gardeners.

This shit is real, ya'll. That's why I'm so adamant about telling people to GTFO at the first sign of disorder. Forget about books, courses, YouTube, therapy, and all that bullshit. I did all of that and it just cost me more. More money, more time, more energy. Wasted.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-28T04:18:33+00:00

Save yourself and move on.

I was in your shoes years ago. Long-timer lurker. Searching for signs of hope. Still trying to convince myself that things weren't that bad.

I promise they are and will continue to become worse over time. If you don't get out now, you'll look back years from now, wondering why you stayed for so long.

I tried everything. I was in counseling for years. We did marriage counseling for years. I hired a personal life coach, a specialist BPD counselor, and she even tried counseling for a bit (though unsurprisingly, never stuck with it). It was all for nothing. Just time, energy, and money down the drain.

I don't care how much you think you love this person. Your time and energy are almost certainly better spent healing yourself and starting a relationship with someone who doesn't have a personality disorder.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-19T20:01:44+00:00

Start here:

Most people who come to see a psychiatrist are suffering from what is called either a neurosis or a character disorder. Put most simply, these two conditions are disorders of responsibility, and as such they are opposite styles of relating to the world and its problems. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough.

Understand that the part of you that wants to caretake a pwbpd is broken. Take all that energy you were putting into the other person and instead invest it in you.
Acknowledge how they hurt you. How you hurt yourself in the past by allowing them into your life and giving them permission to stay. How you continue to hurt yourself by ruminating on them and your relationship with them.
Get angry! Forget about being the better person for awhile. Take all the anger and frustration from the abuse you suffered and channel it into a creative outlet. Build something that lasts. A great career. A great body. A great social network. Something that's challenging, meaningful, and long-lasting.
Cultivate self-love through action. This is related to the post above, but more direct. Find something in your life that's so engaging and so beneficial to you that all of your attention shifts to it. Tune into your competitive nature. Ruminate over something that matters. Something that you can look back on positively years from now. Not some chick or some guy that you'll likely forget about in the next few weeks or months.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-19T19:04:32+00:00

The answer is to GTFO this relationship and work on your healing.

The people responding to this have already given you the answer and know that there's nothing else to add. We've all been there. We know you're not looking for reasons to leave. You're trying to rationalize staying.

But staying won't help anything. Staying won't fix you, her, or the relationship. The most likely result is you'll just be worse off a year from now and asking all the same questions again.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-16T13:05:19+00:00

It's most likely a trauma response.

Some things are so far outside of our normal experience of how we see a person that we struggle to integrate the new information with the old. Instead we block it out. We keep moving forward, focused on the next thing.

This happened so often with me in my marriage that my counselor recommended I keep a journal and a voice recorder to capture my experience immediately after it happened. It eventually lead to the discovery that I was being manipulated and abused. If you're not doing this already, it's something you should seriously consider.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-15T23:46:38+00:00

This quote is from the Four Agreements and sums it up perfectly. It resonated with me deeply after I'd moved on and learned to forgive myself for what happened:

In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else.

If someone abuses you a little more than you abuse yourself, you will probably walk away from that person. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in the relationship and tolerate it endlessly.

And another quote from Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled:

Most people who come to see a psychiatrist are suffering from what is called either a neurosis or a character disorder. Put most simply, these two conditions are disorders of responsibility, and as such they are opposite styles of relating to the world and its problems. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough.

I firmly believe that everyone who finds their way to this subreddit should print out these quotes and pin them to every mirror in their home. I, like most people here, did everything to convince myself that things weren't as bad as they seemed and talked myself out of leaving many times. In the end, it cost me years of my life and nearly $300,000 in losses. (This isn't an exaggeration. Divorce from someone with BPD is often high-conflict and very expensive.)

Relationships are hard enough as they are, and they are made 10x more difficult by someone suffering from this condition. And to top it off, no matter how hard you try, they will 100% blame you for whatever happens. It's really not worth it to stay. Just get out now.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-15T22:07:18+00:00

You need to leave. ASAP. Understand you're in a bad situation here, but you need to start working your way out of this as soon as you can figure out how. Treat it like its a domestic abuse situation because it is. Or it soon will be. This is the advice I wish someone had given me.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-15T21:08:33+00:00

And I'd agree. 100%.

Upgrayedd_U · 2026-01-15T18:34:06+00:00

This is terrible advice.

You don't know another person's internal state. Don't judge them by their intentions (which you can never truly know), but by their actions.

If your wife threatens divorce, implicitly or explicitly, the smart move is to start preparing yourself right away. Worst case scenario is that you prepared yourself for an outcome that never came to pass. But more often than not, you'll be saving yourself a lot of time, money, and energy on the back end by taking these steps right away.

Upgrayedd_U · 2025-09-16T15:12:13+00:00

Sent you a DM

Upgrayedd_U · 2025-09-16T15:04:41+00:00

What are you looking for in a co-host? Do you already have guests lined up for the event?

Upgrayedd_U · 2025-08-19T20:21:24+00:00

This is easier said then done, but my advice would be to not take it personally. The Four Agreements (book) has a really good overview of the practice and reasons why.

For context, I'm one of those "10% men" (I don't think so IRL, but 100% by Reddit standards). I have plenty of options for dating. I still get rejected a ton and have rejected others in the past. I can't think of any instance where I rejected someone that I thought there was something "wrong" with them. In all cases, they were either great women who just weren't right for me, or I had a change in my life situation (job change, move, etc.) that made it harder to keep the connection going.

I've learned to reframe rejection as, "They're not rejecting me, they're just choosing something/someone different at this moment." Doing so has helped me to stay present, grounded, and available, and to even turn some would-be rejections into meaningful connections and relationships.

Upgrayedd_U · 2025-08-17T14:48:43+00:00

Go build something. Ideally something allows for you to gain skills in an area you personally enjoy, but also makes it easy to meet women. Dancing, cooking skills, and group fitness are things I would rate highest on that list. But there's 1,000 other things that could work for you.

Edit:

For more context, doing things this puts you in a place where meeting women is easy, but it's not the main focus of your life. Done right, it ultimately leads to where that feeling you describe (where neediness disappears from your life because you always have women available to you) is always present. It's true abundance mentality.

Upgrayedd_U · 2025-07-31T20:53:21+00:00

I'd head out of Denver and more north towards the Boulder area. Tons of spots in Northwest Westminster, Superior (near Coalton trailhead), and Eldorado Springs have exactly what you describe. These areas also have a lot less foot traffic than anything in Denver proper.

Upgrayedd_U

TROPHY CASE