Love

Narcissists do not experience love deeply, if at all.

This is one of the hardest things of all to come to terms with as a victim, especially one who has given the narcissist years of their life and had a family with them. If you were married to a narcissist you may have to accept that they could not love you - not in the deep way that you are able to love, anyway.

If you ever question a narcissist about their concept of love, you might get some eye-opening answers. Many will idealise it, fantasising about a Disney-style, love at first sight, til death do us part type of love. Some will reject the concept entirely, telling you that ‘love isn’t real’ and others may bring a slightly more bizarre notion to the table. I remember a narcissist describing a husband and wife he had known who had both contracted the same fatal type of bowel cancer, the wife shortly after the husband. His eyes welled up momentarily as he explained that this was an unmistakable sign of true love - the ultimate in romance; dying from the same cancer.

To a narcissist, love is completely conditional on whether the recipient of their charms is giving them enough narcissistic supply, by doing what they want, being a flawless human being, and by adoring them, regardless of the behaviours they are being subjected to. No one person will ever be enough to keep a narcissist topped up adequately with narcissistic supply, and the narcissist’s partner has an impossible task in trying to meet the terms above. The transactional nature of a narcissist’s love also applies to their children, no matter how things might superficially appear.

It causes the victim of narcissistic abuse much confusion when they first realise this, and they alternate between memories of the narcissist in the early days of lovebombing, staring deeply into their eyes and vowing their undying love, to those when the mask of the narcissist finally dropped. They start to see the devaluing, and the gaslighting, and all the other behaviours I have described, but they cannot reconcile this with how the narcissist behaved towards them at the beginning (and in all the subsequent times when the narcissist ‘hoovered’ them back in, just as they were about to leave the relationship).

At this point, the victim is experiencing a difficult psychological phenomenon; so called ‘cognitive dissonance’. Here they are struggling to hold two opposing beliefs about their relationship or marriage in their brains at the same time. As a victim, you may find yourself fluctuating wildly in your beliefs to begin with. “He loved me, he loved me not.” It’s extremely difficult, but it will subside eventually, although it can take months or years to settle.