How Do Narcissists Love?
Although most narcissists can show passion early on in a relationship, that usually doesn’t last very long. The initial high of a new relationship fuels their egoistic needs for a while, but for most narcissists, their relationships are transactional. They are playing games, and they are playing to win.
While they perceive, express, understand and manage emotions, they use these abilities to manipulate people so they can get them to love and admire them, thus helping them receive their narcissistic supply. They use a variety of techniques to seduce and impress you early on, and they can certainly make a great first impression. They can be adept at making love, and this can win them many conquests. They also use love bombing to overwhelm their partners with their expression of love for them.
Although all of this can win them your love, as the intimacy in the relationship increases, the narcissist typically loses interest. They are unable to sustain most relationships for more than six months to a few years. That’s because the more intimate you are, the more likely you are to discover the truth about them – that is, their vulnerability. This causes them to prioritize power in a relationship over intimacy, and of course, as we’ve seen, they loathe vulnerability because they equate it with weakness.
As a relationship progresses, they prefer to use dominance and superiority to maintain control while avoiding genuine intimacy. They use games to get their needs met, and they also always keep their options open by flirting with other people and even cheating on their partner. Although the narcissist may develop genuinely positive feelings for their partner, those are usually based on friendship and shared interests rather than romantic intimacy.
When they marry, they typically change pretty quickly to someone who is cold, excessively critical, and full of rage, particularly if you dare to challenge them or refuse to give them what they want. They will usually only support your needs if it is something that is convenient for them and/or satisfying to their ego. When you disappoint them – and you will – they will quickly turn to devaluation, and they start looking elsewhere for someone who will prop up their self-esteem.
Narcissistic Love
Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas defined love as “to will the good of another.” Others have described it as the union of two people, a union that necessitates that each see the other as a separate person. When you love someone, you are motivated by their needs, wants, and feelings, and you desire to give them encouragement and support. In short, you take pleasure from their happiness. The last thing you want to do is hurt them.
With mature love, you are concerned about the other person – you want to help them live their best life, and you support their personal growth. You want to know and understand their experience and worldview, even if it is different from your own. You give them your attention, respect, compassion, support, and above all, acceptance. This requires time and discipline, and you have to want to know and understand them. That’s what creates a problem for the narcissist.
Narcissists lack empathy, which makes them unwilling to examine and understand the feelings and needs of other people. Some research suggests that this is due in part to structural abnormalities in their brain, specifically in areas associated with emotional empathy, but whatever the ultimate cause, the result is that they are unable to respond meaningful and emotionally to others and express care and concern for them. That’s a big hurdle to truly loving someone.
They have trouble seeing themselves clearly, so they also can’t see others clearly. The best they can do is experience other people as mere extensions of themselves. They don’t see them as separate individuals who have their own needs, desires, and feelings. They also tend to overestimate their own capacity for emotional empathy, and their rigidly constructed defenses distort their perceptions of the interactions they have with other people.
These defenses cause the narcissist to use techniques like bragging and withdrawal to keep others at a distance and prevent any appearance of vulnerability. They will also project the negative parts of themselves onto the people around them, and they use denial, entitlement, and tools of narcissistic abuse to ward off the shame they feel inside. These tools include things like gaslighting, lying, shaming, blaming, and even callously insulting others or attempting to destroy them, all in the name of sustaining their carefully crafted illusion of perfection.
Although narcissist uses these tactics to defend themselves, the truth is that they impair their ability to see or even entertain someone else’s reality. That means they can’t see that another person loves them. Though they have a degree of emotional intelligence, they use that for manipulation and exploitation rather than developing a genuine understanding of other people’s realities. They are, in effect, desensitized to the pain they inflict on those they supposedly love.
For partners who leave the narcissist, they usually feel bewildered by what just happened to them. I know I did. I couldn’t understand how he changed from such a charming, seemingly wonderful man to a cold, angry man-child. I did feel crushed, utterly confused, discarded, and betrayed. It was a very low moment in my life when I realized that everything he presented to me was nothing more than a seductive veneer – a facade designed to lure me in for his own benefit. He didn’t seem to feel love for me at all. And how was it in you? Did you have a similar story?
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