u/undeadtradwife

I discovered three months ago that my ex is a compulsive liar. He had been lying to me for years about a little bit of everything, but I discovered two big lies he had been telling me for years (lying about his finances being the biggest one) and I gave him an ultimatum. Go to therapy and address the lying issue or I couldn’t be with him.

He told me he “needed to think about it” and SIX WEEKS later came back and told me he “doesn’t think it’s right for us to be together if we want to change each other”.

I guess I feel stupid at how dumbfounded I feel. We were together for eight years and I never thought when faced with the decision to go to therapy or lose me forever he would choose losing me forever. I had no idea all this time just how disposable I was to him and I’m completely numb and devastated. It feels like a bad dream.

My husband and I separated two months ago and I am moving out this summer. Last night before bed (he sleeps on the couch now) I asked him for a hug and started crying. He started to cry too, and I told him I wasn’t angry with him and that I forgive him for everything (he is a serial liar). Then he REALLY started to cry and it was so heartbreaking. It honestly seemed completely genuine to me and not like a performance. But this has me wondering if he’s really a narcissist. Would a narcissist really care that I forgave him? Let alone enough to cry? Maybe he’s not a narcissist and just has narcissistic traits. But him being a narcissist makes everything confusing and traumatic about our marriage suddenly make sense.

We broke up six weeks ago and will live together til I can move out in July.

But I’m still doubting if I should even leave. I know past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, and I know it’s only a matter of time before he is unbelievably cold to me when I need a partner the most. It’s just simple statistics and I know that.

But today we went to CostCo and he got me something from the food court. I said I didn’t know if I wanted X or Y and he said cheerily “get both!” It’s moments like this that remind me why I fell in love with him in the first place. He can be so generous, kind, cute and sweet. But sometimes he is so unempathetic and cruel that it feels like he’s two people.

He has never hit me or cheated on me, which makes it even easier to convince myself I should stay. But he’s treated me in ways I would never treat him, and repeatedly abandoned me or sabotaged me when I needed my partner the most. Whether he does this intentionally or not I really don’t know, but I want to believe he doesn’t do it on purpose or to be cruel to me. The cruelty is a side effect of his selfishness that his brain uses to keep him alive.

Even tonight, I asked him at 7pm if he wanted to watch a movie with me. He said no because he was “gonna start getting ready for bed.” It’s 10pm and I’m in bed and he isn’t. He does this ALL the time. Saying he can’t spend time with me cause he needs to go to bed early, then he spends hours “getting ready for bed” and doesn’t come to bed for 3-4 hours. It feels like he’s just avoiding spending time with me.

I’m just so confused. This isn’t the relationship or the partnership, or the life I want for myself. So then why do I keep second guessing myself and questioning if I should stay?

Please help.

This man essentially left me for dead last year. I was withdrawing off the mood stabilizer I got on (because he kept suggesting I get on meds even after I kept saying I didn’t want them, and then when the meds made me suicidal he tried to say he never suggested I get on them).

I was withdrawing hard and thinking about hurting myself one morning, I asked him if he could ask his boss if he could work from home that day (he was hybrid) because I was afraid I would hurt myself if I was home alone all day. He told me no. I cried and begged him to just ASK his boss if it would be okay. I said I’m not asking you to call in, or use PTO and fall behind at work, just please ASK if you can work from home today. He kept saying no and telling me “I don’t wanna piss my boss off, I don’t want to get in trouble, I don’t want to get on his bad side.” Then he escalated it to “I don’t want to get fired.” (WHY would asking to work from home one day when you’re already hybrid get you fired?)

I spent two hours that morning following him around the house sobbing and begging him not to leave me alone that day. I was very explicit that I was having suicidal thoughts and was afraid I would hurt myself. He ended up leaving me to go to work.

That was almost a year ago, and the other day I asked him why he did that to me. He looked me in my face and said “I didn’t understand that what I was doing was wrong.”

I just do not believe this. He’d have to be a psychopath for that to be true.

This is just one instance in a long list of cold, unempathetic, fucked up things he’s said and done to me over the years.

But I finally told my mom and sisters about this story, and they didn’t really act like it was that big a deal? One of my sisters was even like “clearly he can’t be the kind of partner you need.”

Doesn’t EVERYONE need a partner who will be there for them in their darkest time? Like that’s not just a me thing. I understand if I was always feeling suicidal I would need to get ongoing help, but I had never been suicidal before and knew it was just temporary from withdrawing from the mood stabilizer I had been taking. I just wanted him to work from home for one day. I moved away from my family to be with him and didn’t have anyone else to go to for help. (I did end up calling my mom after he left for work that day but she wasn’t helpful, and I knew she wouldn’t be but I was desperate).

I just feel like if someone did that to my friend or sister I would be so appalled, disgusted and outraged, but their reactions are making me question if I’m being dramatic by leaving him and moving across the country to start a new life somewhere else.

My husband and I have had this issue for about 5 years where I beg and beg him to spend more time with me. We both work from home and get off at the same time, but he will spend maybe 30 minutes a day with me on the weekdays, and maybe an hour on weekend days.

The rest of the time he is doing stuff around the house (not things I asked him to do, I honestly don’t know what he’s doing most of the time), or he’s in his office, working in the yard (again no clue what he’s doing out there, we have some squirrels he likes to put nuts in a feeder for, but he will spend HOURS out there and it shouldn’t take that long).

He acts like these things are “chores” that he HAS to do, but I never see the fruits of his labors. He spends hours moseying around the yard or holed up in his home office doing god knows what. He also “starts getting ready for bed” around 8pm, but never comes to bed til 10-11, sometimes later. I have no clue why getting ready for bed would take hours.

I’ve cried and begged him to spend more time with me, and he INSISTS he WANTS to. He says if he could he would spend all his time with me. But nothing ever changes.

I have wasted my years sitting on the couch waiting for him to be ready to spend time with me, which he is randomly at the drop of a hat, never on a schedule. I’ve stopped going out and doing things on my own, or taking time for my hobbies out of fear of missing my “window of opportunity” to spend time with him. If he wants to spend time with me and I’m doing something, he WILL NOT wait on me. He’ll get wrapped up in something else for hours, even if I only need 15 minutes to wrap up what I’M doing so we can spend time together. And just like that my opportunity to spend time with him is gone.

He is also not really mentally present when we do spend time together. I cannot watch a movie or show with him without him looking at his phone, getting up and walking around, standing and staring out the window, etc. I say I feel like he’s not even paying attention and he swears he is.

But if we’re doing something HE wants to do, he will spend ALL DAY WITH ME. Usually this is in the form of playing a video game. He will spend every second with me we’re not working playing this game, hours upon hours, for days or weeks at a time until we’re done with the game, and then I know I’ve lost him again and it’s about to go right back to me begging him to spend time with me.

He’s blamed all of this on his ADHD, and I bought it for years. But I’ve recently started suspecting he’s a vulnerable narc (he ticks ALL the boxes TO A TEE) and I’m wondering if this is part of it. It feels too calculated to not be.

I recently came to the realization my husband is a vulnerable narcissist and suddenly so much of the past 7.5 years makes sense. I’m thinking back to behaviors all the way at the beginning, all the way back to our FIRST DATE even, that were red flags that I ignored or had no clue were red flags.

One that sticks out to me is on our first date, we were about to leave and we both went to use the bathroom at the same time. I got out first and was waiting for him, and when he came out of the bathroom he grabbed my face and kissed me. I thought to myself how it was weird his hands were DRY and when he stopped kissing me I asked, “Did you wash your hands?” He balked at me and, as if I hadn’t said anything, said, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me, I never kiss women without asking first.” This sentence in itself is a red flag lol. But I asked again, “Did you wash your hands?” since he had COMPLETELY IGNORED ME the first time.

He starts going on and on about how his “genitals are clean” so he doesn’t need to wash his hands after he pees. He said this to my face, after using a PUBLIC RESTROOM, and then GRABBING MY FACE AND KISSING ME. He did it in such a light hearted way, but it was the beginning of a pattern of impenetrable defensiveness even when any rational person would easily recognize he was in the wrong.

There was also an incident about five months in where he said he wanted to make grilled chicken for dinner, and I suggested he didn’t make it that night because it was clearly not done thawing out, and if you try to grill partially frozen chicken it gets rubbery. He replied, “Okay princess.” I immediately called him out for being passive aggressive and rude, and he INSISTED he was calling me “Princess” genuinely and not as a dig. I KNEW how he said it, it was 100% a dig, or a way to accuse me subtly of being high maintenance. Plus he had NEVER (and has since never) called me princess before this incident.

We argued for hours until I finally packed my things to leave and told him if he didn’t tell the truth he would never see me again. RIGHT as I was getting into my car with my bag, he comes running out of his house crying and admits that he had in fact called me princess as an insult for what I had said. I have no clue why I didn’t fucking leave then. I love him, but sometimes I wish I could go back to that moment five months in and save myself seven years of stress, confusion, and pain.

My husband who I suspect is a vulnerable narcissist puts on this mind numbingly irritating performance for others. When he’s with his parents he will grab his mother’s hands and kiss them, grab his dad’s face in both hands and kiss him, give long speeches about how much he loves them and his siblings, blah blah blah blah blah. He lays it on so THICK and not just with them but with EVERYONE.

I’ve gotten annoyed with him SO MANY TIMES for making an inconsiderate amount of small talk with service workers, especially people working in drive through windows. It doesn’t matter if we’re in the middle of an argument when we pull up, he will put on this giant fucking “HEY MAN! How you doing tonight? Good? That’s great man. You off soon? That’s AWESOME man, that’s what I’m talking about! You got anything going on this weekend? You playing any games right now? Watching any shows? Oh we’re in the middle of this show, it’s about XYZ” and on and on and on until we pay and get our food and then it’s “HEY MAN, I appreciate you so much boss, you’re awesome, I hope the rest of your day goes well and you have a great night man!”

Whole time I’m seething bc he’s trapped this poor fast food worker in a conversation where it’s his JOB TO BE POLITE, and this kid probably has 100 things he needs to be doing right now. I’ve explained to him so many times that these long drawn out conversations are actually incredibly rude because that kid has to be nice to you but is trying to keep a mental list of all the shit he needs to do when you finally release him from this conversation.

My husband also does the most GRATING fake laugh. Like if a comedian were trying to do an impression of someone doing a phony fake laugh, it’s that. He does it to fucking everyone and it sounds nothing like his REAL laugh, but I’ve confronted him so many times and he insists that it IS his real laugh. I’m talking fucking doubled over, knee slapping, loud exaggerated HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! And if he’s sitting, he’ll kick his fucking feet! He’ll pretend to fall to the floor, the whole nine yards. I’ve straight up told him EVERYONE can tell that’s a fake laugh, and it’s WAY more insulting than just NOT laughing at someone’s joke.

That’s part of what’s most embarassing, everyone can see through how phony and performative he is but he’s so sure he’s got everyone fooled.

My husband (we are separated) has all the traits of a “vulnerable narcissist” to a tee. But when I read about narcissism people always mention their exes or spouses being angry people who name call, yell, etc.

My husband has never been this person. He has never even raised his voice. He is almost infuriatingly pious about his temper. He is like a monk. He has never yelled, raised his voice at all, called me names, etc.

He has definitely said and done some incredibly cruel and hateful things to me, but never in this way. It’s almost like he is incapable of feeling anger the way most people feel it. He will be incredibly cruel and cold, punish me with silence / ignore me for hours or days, but doesn’t get stereotypically “angry”.

Does anyone else experience this? I ask because I’ve gone back and forth between him maybe being a narcissist, or maybe he is on the autism spectrum? I feel like some of his behavior would be explained by autism, and the anger thing might be one of them. I would feel awful accusing him of being a narcissist if he’s really autistic. But I’m really struggling with the anger bit when I read about narcissism, it feels like the only puzzle piece that doesn’t really fit.