The narcissist who is married is probably the most prolific of all the other narcissists because of the game he has ultimately chosen to play. Indeed, the married narcissist can live in suburbia with the wife and kids and, at the same time, carry on one or more relationships outside of the marriage without appearing the least bit stressed about it. His abilities to lie on-the-fly, to convince all partners (including the spouse) that his intentions are always on the up-and-up, and to be, seemingly, in two places at once are unsurpassed and put him at a pathological level above the typical narcissist.
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Through my phone consultations and correspondence with both women and men, I have been able to make the following observations:
- A married narcissist will typically – but not always – be an online predator so that he can keep the extramarital affairs long-distance. He will have profiles on numerous dating sites that give his relationship status as either divorced or separated (when he, obviously, is neither).
- A married narcissist typically – but not always – will be a high-level narcissist, meaning that he is a narcissist with a good job and usually a good deal of money. At the very least, he is self-sufficient. I call this the 5-Star Deception. Having money makes it much easier for the narcissist to carry on multiple affairs or one that’s long-term without tipping off the wife. He may have a job that requires that he often travel out of town (and even out of the country) on a regular basis. Having money also means he can quickly book vacations or send flowers and/or extravagant gifts to appease the lover should she become disenchanted with the narcissist’s mind-boggling and hurtful behaviors. He may even play the most devious version of The Cell Phone Game and have two phones – one for each of his deceitful lives.
- A married narcissist always love-bombs his target more intensely than the typical narcissist simply because he’s under more of a time constraint. The sooner he hooks her, the less chance that finding out he’s still married will cause her to leave the relationship. Like any other narcissist, the end game is always to get away with the ruse – any ruse – for as long as he possibly can. Some women have been involved with married narcissists as the mistress for as long or nearly as long as the narcissist has been married.
- The target of a married narcissist may not initially suspect that this new guy is married because of his ability to spend so much time with her. After all, how can a guy be married and still be able to hop on the next plane out at the drop of a hat? OR how can he be married if he’s able to take off for a week to the Caribbean without appearing the least bit stressed about it? OR how can he be married if we’re always on the phone together? Because the narcissist compartmentalizes every aspect of his pathetic life, he can be completely stress-free with whomever he’s with!
- A narcissist marries for many reasons but the biggest reasons are that being married to a wonderful woman is good for appearances and it makes him feel (for a second) as if he’s actually a normal guy. The novelty wears off, however, and quick. That being said, the narcissist is rarely willing to give the marriage up because he feels justified in having both! After all, if all it takes to keep the ruse afloat on either side is to tell a few lies…well, shit! That’s easy! Don’t ever forget…a narcissist’s entire life is all about what he can get away with day to day.
When the long-term, already-hooked mistress/target finds out about the marriage (and she always does), the N will likely explain that he was just in the process of filing for divorce when they met but the affair simply distracted him. Now that she knows, he’ll get right on that! He’ll spew his narcissistic word garbage, insisting that the marriage is one of convenience only (“We haven’t slept together in years!”) and that his wife is a psycho who cheats on him and he’s been working with a lawyer to make sure she doesn’t take him for a ride. The truth is that the wife is living the same life as the mistress…a life full of suspicions, silent treatments, and some incredible (but obviously believable) future-faking. If the narcissist is especially pathological, he may even, just for fun, deliberately triangulate one woman with the other.
What I find particularly distressing are the stories where the married N actually convinces a long-distance lover to move to the city where he’s lives under the premise that a divorce is imminent (which it never is) or that he’s already divorced or that he’s now separated. The truth is that the wife has probably caught on or, at the very least, suspects there’s a lover and the move, for him, is for convenience only because he can no longer just hop on a plane. I’ve heard from countless women who’ve moved clear across country – and even across continents – at the narcissist’s request only to be given the silent treatment immediately upon arrival. A married narcissist will even deliberately target a married woman, convincing her to leave her husband for the new relationship and then disappearing himself soon after.
Interestingly enough, 99.9999% of the women that write to me who are involved with a married narcissist adamantly insist that they never – not in a million years – would have ever thought they’d be involved with a married man or cheat on their own husbands. It simply wasn’t part of their nature. Moreover, in as much as it causes them heartache to know she exists, not a single one has ever really bashed the wife. Why? Because deep down anyone involved with a narcissist knows that this guy is a fucking liar wherever he goes and to whomever he’s with at the moment. Typically, whether you experience the relationship as a wife or as a mistress, you eventually come to understand that the “other woman” is just like you.
So, for those who wonder why a mistress or wife continues to stay with the narcissist knowing what she knows, the answer is that the narcissist is the same person to each! He lies with the same believable demeanor and makes the same promises and will insist to one that the other is a psycho that he just can’t seem to get rid of…..it goes on and on. Both the wife and the lover are victims and in both cases, the victim wants to believe that this person that they love is telling the truth. It’s a codependency to hope that will get us in trouble almost every time.
Now, to be clear, this article isn’t about the married partner who has been monogamous for ten years and then fucks up and is sorry for it. While I certainly don’t condone that behavior, I have to make clear that there’s a difference. As we all know, narcissism isn’t about just one single behavior…it’s about many, many behaviors. We come to recognize these behaviors as narcissistic tactics and this is why those who suspect that their lover or husband is a narcissist are always right. If he is with you, you can guarantee that there is some woman somewhere getting the silent treatment. The married narcissist is very good at what he does or he wouldn’t be a married narcissist!
Will the married narcissist ever leave his wife? Click here…
Wendy
September 17, 2018 at 6:28 amI have yet to write about this, but decided it was a good time – and hopefully someone reading will get some satisfaction out of this. Last July I finally decided I wanted to divorce my narcissist husband after 16 years together. But I really struggled with the guilt (ha!). Unfortunately I didn’t move quickly. In November I settled a case which meant there was some money at stake. In the winter we reached an agreement of how much I would give him of my income, (as of course he was threatening to sue me) despite that he has a good job and I have 100% custody/responsibility of our son. However, before the agreement was entered, a woman that he worked with contacted me. Turns out he had been cheating with her for over a year. She had just discovered that he had another girlfriend and had also been carrying on long distance (online) relationships for at least a year. This woman had been pregnant with his child twice!! So over the past year he was involved in 2 other relationships (that I KNOW of)! Here I was struggling with guilt and I am no dummy, but he had me fooled. Now that he is backed into a corner and was so counting on this influx of money, his true, true colours have come out. I maybe suspected his narcissistic qualities, but I had no idea the extent. What I have seen the past 6 months still blows my mind and I have no idea who I was married to. The good news is – I have refused to pay him what I agreed to, the other women have dumped him and well let’s just say karma is making itself known to him…
Gemma
September 5, 2018 at 5:30 amMy experience as a mistress of a narcissist mirrors most of what everyone else says, but I think I can even go one further. I met my lover on FB as we are both political activists involved in various FB groups, but, his profile was a woman! I identify as bisexual and for the first few weeks we talked online for around 16 hours a day and I believed he was female, so I developed feelings for him not even knowing he was a man. After a few weeks he ‘cybered’ with me and of course it then became clear he was a man, but he justified the reasons he had to pretend to be a woman by saying as he was an academic he had to keep his identity secret. Thousands of his followers online thought he was a woman too! This should’ve been the first red flag. Fair enough to have a fake profile to protect your ID, but to change sex? Anyway, over the next few weeks he slowly began to tell me about his ‘real’ self and we started talking daily on the phone. We both live in different European Countries. He told me he was married and had to teenage kids and I got the same storyline that he didn’t have sex with his wife, they had separate bedrooms, they had no communication and lived their own lives basically. He attends conferences of his choosing for his job so we met up in my country of residence a few times for a week at a time. He wouldn’t attend the conference and we would spend the entire time together. In the beginning when we both said we had developed strong feelings for each other we agreed to take it slowly for a year or so and see where this led. He would say that no one knew what the future held. He was also 15 years older than me. He lovebombed me so intensely for the first five months my feet didn’t touch the ground, but looking back there were real signs of his narcissistic behaviour. Then, five months in my first devaluing happened. Despite what he’d told me in the beginning and led me to believe we were working to see if we had a future together he then announced he would never leave his wife. I suspect he is a covert narc as he constantly played the victim and martyr all the time. He told me that his wife had ‘saved’ him when the first met and it would be cruel to leave her. I later found out she is extremely wealthy (well, her family are) and it was her that payed for his education and put him through uni when he was 40. Her parents also bought them a 500,000K house, so I suspect the reason he wouldn’t leave her was simply to keep up appearances and so he didn’t lose the financial security. I was truly heartbroken when he said he wouldn’t leave her, but he twisted it all around and I ended up feeling sorry that he was trapped in this awful marriage despite the fact he swore he loved me more and wanted to be with me, and I agreed to continue as his mistress knowing there was no future. From this moment on his emotional abuse towards me got worse. He would call me up to 3 times a day and never tell me a time. So I started staying at home literally waiting for his phone calls. He would gaslight me and tell me I had read things wrong, heard things wrong etc when I would call him up on a lie or try to talk to him about how I was feeling. I started feeling like I was going mad because he told me I was imagining problems that weren’t there, was too sensitive etc and I started to not trust myself and what I’d read on his messages or heard him say on the phone. This is when I started getting anxiety and panic attacks. We were around 7 months into our relationship by this point. HE then started triangulating me with his wife and went from saying negative things about her to telling me all the great things she was doing for him. I became so insecure. Then he started telling me to take other lovers as he wasn’t there with me all the time. I thought he didn’t desire me or love me anymore and tried harder to get the person I’d fallen in love with back. Now I know that person never even existed and was just his fake persona. I’ve since found out he has moved countries 4 times and left jobs suddenly. One job he left he was suspended for and there was a court case. he never told me what the reason for it was, other than he was constantly bullied by all his colleagues in all his different jobs because co workers were jealous of has academic ability and because he was an empath. Yes, he really did believe he was an empath and thought he was the kindest person to walk on two legs. He was still carrying on his deception as a woman on FB and I think he got huge narc supply from this. While he was emotionally abusing me he would occasionally love bomb me again, which was so confusing because I couldn’t work out if he loved me or not at times. He used to make me feel guilty for everything that happened in his life, but in a covert way, with little comments. He would stay up late to talk to me online then tell me the next day he was exhausted and couldn’t function cos he didn’t get enough sleep. SO I felt responsible for this. He would spend hours talking to me on the phone every day at various times then tell me he got no work done and was behind and of course I blamed myself for this because he was calling me all the time. It was completely mind fucking. Eventually I started getting really depressed and the anxiety was out of control so I went to the doctors and got put on medication. At this point I took stock and started doing some research online and it slowly dawned on me how toxic he was. I told him I wanted time out and didn’t speak to him for 6 weeks. He didn’t contact me either. During this time I started confiding in friends about what had happened (I kept him a secret the whole time before) but I was really ill. I cried all the time, couldn’t get out of bed, tortured myself I might’ve imagined everything, tried to digest what had happened and it was awful. Then he sent me an email saying his heart was broken and he’d given me time out and he wanted to know what had happened and I told him all the emotional abuse he’d done to me. At first he tried to justify it all, but that didn’t work on me so then he admitted it all, said how sorry he was, said he’d go to therapy, confessed his undying love, told me he was coming over for another conference and we could be together again…luckily by that point I’d learnt what hoovering was and knew this is what he was doing, so I told him to do one and blocked him everywhere. I’ve been completely NC with him for 6 weeks now but I’m still in a bad place, although I’m better than I was. No one can imagine what it’s like to be involved with a narc, especially a married one and he managed to abuse and control me from over 2000 miles away. I feel dreadfully sorry for his wife and can’t imagine what her life must’ve been like with him for the last 20 years, or what the kids must go through. His abuse is so covert and he plays the victim so well. I still have times when I want to reach out to him but I’m staying strong. I give my utmost respect to all of you out there, the wives and mistresses, because we are all in the same boat. It’s not us, it’s the narc. They are poison. Good luck to everyone on their healing journey. Thanks for reading. xxx
Zari Ballard
September 17, 2018 at 2:59 pmHi Gemma,
Thank you so much for writing and sharing your story. I am so sorry for what has happened but I am VERY GRATEFUL you are out of it and holding strong. This guy is TOO MUCH! Masquerading as a woman? Good Grief! You are doing the right thing and I promise you that you will come out of this darkness. Keep it in perspective and know that this was never and could never be sustainable and that you deserve to live your life free of this madness.
Stay strong and I’m cheering for you, sister!
Zari xo
Erika
August 29, 2018 at 1:09 amI completely understand exactly what ur saying that u believe ur husband was trying to drive u to kill urself. I just had this argument not even
Week ago with my narc boyfriend of 8 yrs. No one understands what I’m talking about so i just stopped reaching out. I had to reach out to u because i know the pain is so immense that u just want to give up on life nut really u don’t want to give up. U just want them to stop hurting u. I hope everything is looking up for u now
Nina
August 23, 2018 at 3:24 pmI think I am in love with a N, he puts me down, withholds sex, never admits when he is wrong, arguments and disagreements are always my fault. He doesn’t like to talk about feelings or the relationship and if I dare to say he’s done something wrong it turns into all out war. When we do eventually have sex, there’s no love there but we hug and kiss a lot (albeit with a serious lack of passion). There have been signs that he may have been cheating or had plans to cheat, closing phone screen quickly when I look over, odd glances and behaviour at other women who I consider friends but I have no actual proof that he is cheating, I get a feeling and I don’t know whether to trust my instincts because they have been right once before and this has left me less trusting.
Most of the time we get along ok but sometimes when he expresses sentiment in words or actions it feels forced and not genuine.
He never keeps his word when he makes promises and never seems remorseful.
He bosses me around constantly and guilt trips me if I don’t fulfill his requests.
If he upsets me and I cry he gets angry at me for crying and tells me I’m being ridiculous.
But he has a way of drawing me back in everytime, like he always knows the right things to say to make me believe he loves me even though I have always been uncertain and sure that he doesn’t even know what love is, though he says it often.
And yet, after all of this I still love him very much, he has taken on my son as his own and is an amazing father to him. He tells me he wants a life with me and I would have loved that but now I’m wondering if it was all a lie?
Am I living with a N? and if so how do I get out of the relationship? I keep trying but he keeps drawing me back in, I need help I’m in love with him and still have hope for the future, my son loves him so much too and whether he is acting or not, when he is being loving it’s wonderful. I feel my character getting weaker everyday, is there any hope for us or do I need to hightail it out of there? Please help.
Jeanette Dahlqvist
August 5, 2018 at 5:33 amI am the mistress/girlfriend, all you say is 100% correct! He lives in Ireland and me in Sweden! When we met he said his marriage was over and just a matter of time he would get a divorce. He has a good job as a manager and we travelled to many wonderful places. He lovebombed me and I fell for it! When his wife found out he dropped me like a hot potatoe over night but then just 2-3 days later it was all back to normal. I knew something was wrong so contacted his wife, I know now the truth about everything and he has been a jerk for 30 years to her. I am not the first other woman. So divorce is ongoing. He still lies to me every day so I will try to cut him out of my life, I am suffering every day, always thinking what is a lie or not.its hard, so very hard.
Zari Ballard
September 17, 2018 at 3:31 pmHi Jeanette,
If you have spoken to the wife and have heard her horror stories, then you have no other option but to leave the situation. You do not need to to suffer or make yourself part of why the wife suffers any longer. He is an awful cheat and a pathological liar. There will likely be no divorce because a married narcissist likes to stay married because he then has someone to cheat on. A narcissist has no fun if he can’t be getting away with something. You know the truth so you no longer need to try to figure it out. It is clear what he is and the pain he has caused all around. Get out now and save your life.
Zari:)
CP
July 25, 2018 at 4:50 pmZari, Why do some of these married narcissistic men pull the church card? My ex malignant boss was bothering umpteen women at work. Then he would act all religious, Mr. Good Guy, Mr. Volunteer right after demeaning and belittling all these gals and his own wife then 20 minutes later be praising her and the women at work ? I swear they are messed in the head. He would act all nice, but full of crap. I don’t flipping get it? Is it Bipolar? Not only sexual, but financially as well. He wanted all the women to cater to him. Always wanting attention constantly. He could literally destroy someone’s live or ruin whatever and not care at
all. He tried wooing 3 or more single gals into stupid behavior. Why? I don’t get it. Thank you
Zari Ballard
August 12, 2018 at 12:53 amHi CP…they play the church card because it’s the one place they can go where they will 1) be accepted no matter what, 2) no one knows them if they go to a strange or new church, 3) God makes them look good, and 4) they can find easy, compassionate, and very empathetic people at a church. Narcs think that pulling the church card gets them off the hook IMMEDIATELY so they take things as far as they can take them with people or their targets and then they simply pull the church card. Mine did too. A good portion of them do!
Zari:)
Gemcat
July 4, 2018 at 8:08 amI’ve been no contact for 3 weeks and only now am I beginning to realise how covert my ex was. Firstly, I met him on a social media group and he had a woman’s profile! I know, I know, first red flag, but he justified it saying he couldn’t reveal his true identity because of his work. Like I fool I believed him. He told me from the start he was married and he knew that I was in a relationship but we’ve been more like friends for the past few years, rather than lovers. Anyway, he love bombed me…big time – for about 4 months. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. He told me he loved me after only 1 week. The texts, phone calls, IM’s were relentless. After 4 months he then ‘confesses’ he’d been thinking about things and really felt he couldn’t leave his wife, this was after 4 months of telling me we would take each day as it comes and would see what happened as time progressed. We lived in different countries in Europe, but he travelled a lot for work conferences. Anyway, after he told me this I went to bits and started getting anxiety and depression. I started ‘investigating’ him and found out that he had been suspended from a job he had in the UK – which insinuated it was not because of academic delivery so one can only guess here – he told me he was the victim of bullying and it made him ill. Even after all this I stupidly believed him that we were ‘soulmates’ and I agreed to be his mistress and we would meet whenever and wherever he was on conferences. The next lie I found out was about his age. He told me he was 10 years older than me – in fact he was 15 years older than me. He then started telling me all of his colleagues were narcs (oh, the irony) and were also bullying him and this is why he’d never progressed very far in his recent job. He’s had quite a few jobs all over the world and seems he’s been ‘bullied’ in each one. A constant victim player. Basically as the months went on I lost my self confidence, my anxiety and depression became worse and he started ‘devaluing’ me. He would triangulate using his wife. She’d apparently gone from being uncaring, cold towards him etc to suddenly doing really nice things for him and once he even compared her to me regarding the fact I play scrabble and she was the ‘family scrabble champ.’ He then started telling me I was free to see other people cos he knew he couldn’t offer me what I needed, when during the lovebombing he told me he couldn’t cope with me having another partner, even though he knew it was selfish. He really messed me up and would deny saying tings he’d said in the past etc – typical gaslighting techniques which I can now identify. He made me feel really insecure which I never felt in the beginning and I stopped going out in case I missed his calls during the day. He literally stripped me of my self confidence and life. We met a few times this year in the country I lived and of course during that time he would lovebomb me again. But he was also quite twisted sexually too. He liked to hurt me in the bedroom and said his fantasy was to have me naked with a chain around my neck tied to a pole so he could use me at whim. I’m now slowly beginning to recover and I’m on anti anxiety/depressant medication which has helped me a lot as the anxiety is easing. He never, ever got angry with me but towards the end he would say how exhausted he was (after staying late at work to call me) how he couldn’t cope with any more problems (meaning mine because of my relationship with him things got bad at home) and all I have felt the last 2 months with him is nothing but guilt. He would tell me his wife was depressed – which is hardly surprising – and would say it was because of their relationship, but in the next breath say she thought they had the perfect marriage. Coverts are fakes, frauds and emotional vampires whether they are single or not. Now I just want to get over him and his wife and kids, who are 16 and 17, have all my sympathy because I can’t imagine what their lives must be like. Strength to you all and thanks for reading.