Was I Dating Another Narcissist?
Photo by Shifa Sarguru on Unsplash
After being married to a covert narcissist for sixteen years, it took me some time before I was ready to get back out and date. I wanted to focus on myself and heal from the psychological damage prior to letting anyone new into my life. I was very cautious with the men I met, paying close attention to how they spoke and treated me during our initial interactions.
My Unicorn
I tried to protect myself from making another mistake of dating a narcissist by purposely not talking about my likes, dislikes, wants or dreams to prevent men from mirroring me to make themselves look compatible. When I finally met someone of interest, I asked him a series of well thought out questions for two weeks straight. Questions like, what do you do when you are angry, what’s the main thing you want to accomplish in the next five years and what are your love languages? As I got to know him, he seemed very unique. Different from any man I met in the past from the way he thought and analyzed things. I began to call him my “unicorn”. The more questions I asked, the more I was drawn in by his appeal.
He told me he was a “giver” and “confident” man. Not confident in an arrogant way, but confident in himself and what he brought to a relationship. He was a “giver” in how he liked to treat the women in his life and his understanding that you need to constantly date a person while in a relationship to keep the connection and spark. All great things that lured me in.
Our Relationship
I let my guard down. This can and will happen depending on the situation. As the weeks progressed, the conversations became somewhat boring. I stopped bombarding him with questions and he didn’t spark up intellectual conversations. We lived in two different states, therefore, the phone was our only means of staying connected. I tried to include him in things going on in my life to get his valued opinion. If I didn’t specifically ask for his guidance or opinion, he didn’t engage in the conversation or he would change the subject. Even in conversations where I explicitly expressed something was bothering me, he didn’t engage. A characteristic I chose to let slip by in the beginning. However, I began to notice how he loved to talk about himself and his day. If I didn’t actively engage in the information he was sharing, he expressed that I wasn’t showing interest in him or his well being.
Red Flags
He gave me an engraved jewelry box two months into our dating. I thought it was a sweet gesture. However, when I received another engraved jewelry box six months later for Christmas, I realized he didn’t know anything about what I liked or disliked. I don’t wear jewelry. When I questioned him on what he knew about me, he got silent for a moment and then replied “no”. He immediately tried to rectify his response by spewing out a number of irrelevant things he claimed I liked which were all things he “liked”. It was very apparent at that moment that he knew nothing about me nor did he care.
Additional red flags that arose over the course of our relationship were the instances of gaslighting. If I expressed certain things he said were mean or hurtful, he immediately replied with, “you took it wrong”. When expressing my feelings on how he made me feel low or invalidated, he told me what I did to him (blameshifting). He also couldn’t handle constructive criticism and often raised his voice in frustration when I simply questioned aspects of things he brought up in conversation for further understanding. However, the biggest red flag was his use of the silent treatment and he used it often. The silent treatment is a common tactic used by narcissists to control and punish people when they feel slighted.
Was I dating another narcissist?
We didn’t date long enough for me to make a full assessment based on prior experience; however, I did notice enough red flags to say he definitely exhibited narcissistic traits.
The challenge you have to face in this scenario is two-fold:
Are you being vigilant enough to see the red flags as they are raised?
Once you see them, what will you choose to do or what action will you take?
Hopefully, you won’t have to go through every dating experience after surviving a narcissist living “on alert”. However, paying attention to signals, and trusting your new, stronger, more aware and confident self, means you’ll be better equipped if you do encounter a narcissistic personality again. You now know what it looks like, feels like and what you are most certain of — is that you will not let anyone break you down again.
Was it My Fault, An Abuse Survivor’s Story and Guide to Navigating Narcissistic Red Flags. Click here to order.
