I was really excited after The Current Conscience's Yashar Ali posted this on his Facebook page last week:
Do you ever find yourself wondering why you can't get a stupid guy out of your mind, sometimes months and months (and years) later when you are focused and determined in every other part of your life? Do you ever wonder how a guy in your life can move on so quickly when you're left still suffering?
I got out of a terrible relationship midway through last year and I still find myself frequently reliving all the nasty, emotionally abusive things he did to me. I was really hoping for an insightful post from Yashar about recovering from a breakup with a narcissist and the "it's not you, it's really, really him" talk that needs to happen over and over again in the aftermath.
But then came this disappointing post about the pain of heartbreak, and the way that men cover it up. A valid post to be sure, but certainly not what I'd hoped for. That's when I realized that if there was going to be a blog post about what it feels like to break up with a narcissist, I was going to have to write it.
I was with my ex - let's call him Wolf - for about a year. We'd started out dating casually. I was clear that I didn't want anything serious. About a month in, he declared in that he was falling in love with me.
I went back and forth for a while deciding what to do, but in the end I decided to give it a shot. After all, what is more worthy of a leap of faith than love?
But as soon as I committed, the man who had once begged to pick me up from the airport disappeared. I couldn't get him to commit to something as simple as a weekend away. He kept trying to shoehorn me in between soccer games and game nights with his friends. A tough situation at work left me drained and upset, and he balked at spending too much time listening to me as I hashed through my strategy.
A pattern of little lies and vagaries emerged - about the last time he'd had an STI panel, about his previous relationships, about why he was three hours late to meet me on Christmas Night. I suggested that we see other people - but he swore up and down that he didn't want me to make that sacrifice, even as he made it clear that he found just about every other woman he met incredibly attractive.
I put up with being treated that way much longer than I should have - that's my baggage.
The end came when I returned from a long business trip, during the last leg of which I learned that one of my childhood best friends had died of the heart defect that had plagued him over the course of his entire life. I was devastated. Wolf came over that night, but was just as distant and inattentive in subsequent days as he had always been. I needed support and he was out to lunch.
I confronted him. I told him firmly that I found his behavior to be disrespectful of my time, energy and emotional investment. He accused me of being hostile. He held up his coming over the night my friend died as if it had been a heroic act of self-sacrifice given that he had a meeting the next morning and had planned to spend the evening at home playing video games.
I backed off - rationalizing that I was oversensitive due to the death of my friend. I even apologized for confronting him. But I continued to feel drained, used, utterly dissatisfied with what I was getting from a relationship with someone who supposedly loved me.
Six weeks later, I confronted him again - this time so gently that I could probably have walked over eggshells without cracking them. Then he dropped the bombshell, "I don't love you. I never loved you."
The bottom dropped out of my world. My friend was dead. My boyfriend - the same guy who changed the rules on me by declaring his love - had now decided that the premise for our whole relationship had never been true. Talk about a run around.
I broke up with him, and then I spent the next two weeks attempting to move on. He sent a long, melodramatic e-mail telling me what a miserable coward he was. We talked a couple of times. He told me he still wanted me. I was skeptical, but willing to listen - again, my baggage.
We had plans to get together on a Friday night in late September. As I was going to meet him, I got an e-mail from a mutual friend of ours confessing that they'd slept together a couple of times right after we broke up. I almost stood him up, but instead I came to the restaurant and told him respectfully that his sleeping with our friend so soon after we broke up was hurtful to me. He didn't seem to think I had any right to be upset. Then he told me that he'd met yet another woman, and that after just three dates she was the only one he wanted to see. He told me that she was very sweet, and that her father had died when she was sixteen years old.
He walked me home and as we said goodbye in the parking lot of my apartment, he tried to kiss me. And that's when I knew.
I went inside and puked my guts out. I was so disgusted. It was like I'd been unknowingly injected with some kind of drug that made me hallucinate a decent, loving young man where a slimy, lying loser stood. I questioned everything he'd ever told me. It was like I was waking up from a dream within a nightmare. I thought about that poor young woman he had just started dating, and how the pain of being used by him would surely trigger whatever feelings of abandonment she still struggled with from her father's death. I was furious with nowhere to direct my rage.
I am proud to be friends with most of my exes. The guy who broke my heart in college? I'm going to his wedding this summer. The guy I was engaged to? We call on birthdays. The guy I dated after that? He's helping me with the strings arrangements for my new record. But Wolf? Never.
And yet, I'm in pain every day. But it's not the pain Yashar talks about. It's the pain of knowing that the connection between us has to die, that the feelings I developed for this person can never be expressed in any form, because the person I loved never really existed. It's the pain of knowing that he'll never be capable of hearing my anger, understanding what he did wrong, apologizing, and making amends. It's the pain of knowing that he never truly saw me for the wonderful, kind-spirited, flawed person that I am - and that he never will.
And sometimes I wonder about the nice young woman he started dating that September. Are they still together? How does he treat her? Does she know yet? I wish I could give her my number so I can be there to help when he does it to her, too.
Yashar's original post on Facebook drew a lot of comments - I wish that some of them had more closely informed what he wrote. Most particularly this one by a very smart woman named Charlene Ann Jardine:
