Question about narcissist people...

[Cupcake]

I've been reading about narcissist personalities. I've found that narcissist cause major problems for normal, stable people. They are terrible matches for sane people.

 

So I wonder, is it possible to narcissist to have successful and healthy relationships with other narcissist people?

[d'Arthez]

It really depends on how you would define "successful and healthy relationships." If you define succesful as what works for the narcissist, they can have a succesful relationship with anyone who puts up with them.

 

But what happens, if you put two narcissists together? I think it would be a frustrating situation for the both of them, as they desire from the other the same thing they cannot and will not give themselves. So that would probably lead to quite a few conflicts.

 

And the result? Hard to predict, as it depends more on just the label narcissist to take an educated guess at that.

[lindya]

I had a long, on/off relationship with a narcissistic individual. He often became infatuated with women who had pretty narcissistic attributes, but at the same time he'd express extremely negative feelings about their personalities and insist that he was happier being with someone who could provide him with emotional stability.

 

In these situations, more of your time and energy than you can necessarily appreciate goes into adopting a philosophical approach towards the narcissistic individual's self-centred behaviour and actions. Certainly, I wouldn't want to get involved in something like it again.

 

He's now in a relationship with a woman who, like him, was a frequent self-harmer during adolescence. I met her while he and I were still in a relationship. Ostensibly she was a recent and purely platonic "friend" he'd made...but inevitably it turned sexual shortly after she met me. She struck me as a weak personality whose appeal was entirely reliant on her portraying herself as a fragile ingenue. At the time I wasn't familiar with the concepts of narcissism and inverted narcissism, but my instincts pretty much told me what all the literature on these disorders seems to confirm.

 

I can't imagine that it's a very healthy relationship - certainly not something that many "normal" people would aspire to having, but from their perspective it's probably successful. As for whether it's healthy - I think both of them would probably tell you, in quite disparaging terms, that healthy relationships are dull and overrated. Ultimately, when you talk about narcissists, you're talking about people who can only really thrive in unhealthy situations.