Is my husband a narcissist?
Throwaway account. I am at my wits end and at a complete loss. I never thought I would end up here and I never thought I would have something I thought so wonderful go so wrong. My husband and I were friends for a couple years before we started dating. I never thought he had any interest in me and a mutual friend at the time kept stating how he was going after her so it shocked me when he made note of his intentions. I decided to give it a try and it worked really well. He was sweet, kind, attentive he was adamant that he wanted to be there for me. He was steadfast that he was going to marry me. He ended up proposing, we got married. Shortly after we got married, he got hurt and I ended up taking care of him through surgeries, picking up the mental load, a good proton of the financial load, and the housework and all of that stuff for a couple years. Even on days he felt better, He didn’t do much due to laziness And this caused fights. This never fully changed, he’d promise to do more and within a few weeks went back to nothing. After he got better, he chose to cheat. I caught him because something in me felt wrong. He started to become mean and distant towards me so I checked his phone one night just because something was in my stomach telling me something was off and I found six months worth of attempts to sleep with prostitutes and dating sites. I need to clarify that I trusted this man completely without hesitation so that not in my stomach was painful in so many ways. He even claimed he was single father of an autistic child for sympathy from these women. The day I caught him I told him he need to figure his shit out, and I literally just went to work and I had a major breakdown at work. He begged for me to give him a chance to fix it to make it right and because this was out of what I knew him to be, and because I loved him, I gave him the chance to make it right. The thing is, I had gotten him a part-time job working with me during his time. He was better physically but hadn’t figured out what kind of job he wanted to do and he was going to school and he actually used those times to cheat; he also started abusing pain meds. For backstory: He was a drug addict when he was younger, and he had this friend that he did all of his druggie things with , we will call this guy Bob. but this just wasn’t the man I knew. He set up a therapist and things felt like they were moving to a better place but within the six months we were going to therapy, he felt all it was was me going there to talk about my triggers that was caused by him and I should be over this already. Therapy ended because there was no use going. He never followed through with the things asked of him, simple things like helping with housework, giving words of appreciation and comfort, when you say you’re going to do something doing it. Now I was not an angel during all of this either we had gotten into some very big screaming matches, and I was angry and hurt, and I would push for my answers and things would escalate to the point to where he would run to his friend Bob’s so he didn’t have to talk. Overtime I stopped doing that. I got very good about not engaging and not escalating as much. However , In his mind that never changed despite it being proven he never acknowledged that my behaviors have changed in order to make things better. I am always the bad guy and his immediate thoughts are negative of me. My husband has said, increasingly hurtful things such as if I have to have a surgery then I need to figure out someone to take care of me cause he’s not doing it, he’s not gonna change because he knows I’ll never leave, and when I bring this up later after things have calmed or I’m therapy, he acts like he didn’t say it or doesn’t remember saying it. We saw another therapist and it still goes back to him, not pulling his weight, expecting me to do everything, even though he says he doesn’t, the disregard to my feelings and his actions, the putting that friend Bob over his family. He may help with something on the house once a month if I’m lucky. His excuse is always he doesn’t know what I want done though He can see the dirty dishes,etc. He does manage to take out the trash, which is twice a week most of the time he manages at least once a week. I’ve been paying a guy to do the lawn so he doesn’t have to with his back and because he won’t do it. Literally works, sleeps, watches TV, and hangs out with his friend. His response is he didn’t like the new therapy because it’s just a mediator between us talking and we should be able to talk to each other and work it out. However, he’s also gotten quite vicious in my opinion, and will do things that he intentionally knows will hurt me when he’s mad in the past it would be something like turning off his location because he knows it would trigger me, purposely ignoring me, withholding attention and love, saying certain things. What I originally thought was we were just bad for each other and if we both changed some of our bad habits, things would get better, but even though I’ve made significant effort to do a lot of changes and work on myself, and people have realized it as well. It doesn’t change when it comes to him and how he acts. He finds ways to justify acting the way he does and doing the things he does. He’s adamant he hasn’t cheated again because he says he is a faithful husband now. But I don’t know how I would trust that considering he does shady things at Bob’s and purposely withhold the stuff he does.
Fairly recently he chose to go out for his birthday to bobs and they drunkenly crashed a golf cart so bad that Bob ended up in the hospital and I found this out later from Bob’s wife. My husband had no intention of telling me that this happened. Funny enough, his back is now hurting severely worse. And when I called him out on the fact that he kept this from me, he got mad, and went to Bob’s. Took absolutely no accountability, which seems to be the pattern now that I’m looking at everything with what I feel is almost a hopeless feeling. He even lied to my face and said he wasn’t in the golf cart, which there is proof he was.
He has a habit in my opinion of self sabotaging. I worry that he’ll just spiral if I leave, but I’m also getting to the point to where I either shut down and start treating him like a shitty roommate, I get vicious or we end it because no amount of me turning the other cheek and giving him grace seems to help. He just takes more and gives less. While telling me he’s trying and I’m the problem.
The thing is our kiddo has a few year left of school and I don’t want this to negatively effect him. But I well we managed to keep this away from our kiddo, his step kid, this is going to overflow to affect them.
To add fuel to the fire today, I checked his messages because I have access to some because the agreement to me staying was me to have that access for my comfort. I don’t always check his stuff, frankly, I barely ever and I don’t have access to most of it now because we’ve had fights and he changed passwords and such and I’ve left it be. Well he got called for jury duty and he no longer lives in that county so I went ahead and did his exemption because he’s lazy and doesn’t do that stuff. He got mad that I looked at the emails that I’m allowed to look at and that I did that. I explained that I thought I was helping, and then as soon as I realized he had locked me out of that account I mentioned that again he’s going against what he promised, but that this is a perfect example, even though it wasn’t intentional of how the things you do without considering the other person affects the other person. And I use it to explain how every time he makes these decisions to not help but put the burden on me, to leave to go to bobs and leave his responsibilities, to not show up , to lie, that directly affects me in our life, and it doesn’t feel good to have someone make those kind of decision decisions without even considering the other person. I feel like nothing gets through to him and it’s always me the bad guy, but I’m always the one bending to try to make it work. yet again he’s at Bob’s house because he doesn’t want to deal with the fact that we have to have a conversation about what is going on. A few friends have suggested he’s narcissistic and unfortunately, I can’t help but feeling like if I do something more, I can help him understand. I really need an outside view of this.