Guest Posted August 21, 2006 Posted August 21, 2006 Where do I start? We recently determined my boyfriend of two years to have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, altho' not as bad as most have it. Bad enough that in the past he's lied to me about things. Having been cheated on in a previous serious relationship, I tend to go into self-preservation mode, often becoming very paranoid about who he talks to, etc. Once early in our relationship, it went so far as me checking his email and finding out a lie. We just celebrated our two year anniversary of dating and things have been good. However, curiosity killed me, and I checked his email again to find some harmless but upsetting emails between him and an ex from a LONG time ago. Things along the lines of him discussing being depressed, saying if he were single, he'd look her up, and her telling him to get rid of the insecure girl and be happy being single. Needless to say, I was hurt, and confessed to what I did, not thinking about the repercussions of me looking at his email in the first place. We are just so damaged. I am messed up from my first true relationship, where the guy pretty much lied to me the entire time we dated and up until two months before we were to be married. Prior to that, my first sexual experience was rape. Every guy I've been involved with either lied to me or used me, and now I'm with a guy who yes, lied to me, but we worked it out, and things were good, and I sabatoged it. He needs to trust me and I ruined that. I guess time will tell if he can forgive me and if we can work on recovering our trust in each other.
Guest Posted August 22, 2006 Posted August 22, 2006 more info: i think he's just narcissistic, not necessarily full blown NPD, but he has a tendency to tell little lies (not just to me, friends too) to make himself look better, and has the empathy problem, meaning he often can't think outside of himself and has a hard time caring. the initial lie he told me was about where he was living when we first started dating. if i had known he was living with a girl (they had kind of dated for a couple months and it wasn't a long term living arrangement) then i would never have gone out with him and he knew that. the second lie was at a time when he was 'down' and he was hanging out with a friend who was looking to cheat on his wife. i expressed my discomfort, but thought maybe the guy needed him as a good influence. well, he ended up being put in the position of "wingman" instead, and when we talked about it he left out this other woman entirely. he had mentioned once that there was a friend of the other chick that he would talk to when his friend was hitting on his girl. anyway, he was extremely uncomfortable and also recognized that this was hurting us and got out of the situation before anything happened. it was early august that i googled narcissism and found descriptions detailing almost exactly his behaviors and our relationship. i sent him the links and he was going through a hard time but accepted it. he's done some reading of his own. we were in SUCH a good place where he was opening up to me and we were at a level of trust that we'd never been at before when i completely f*cked it all up by reading his myspace email just out of curiosity to see what he and this girl had been talking about. the more i think about it the more i realized how much i really did screw it up and how much he needed me and i just couldn't let it be. i made an appointment with a psychologist (appt in early sept) because i think i really do need help. not only with my trust issues and f*ckups, but dealing with his narcissism in relation to that. my mom is very much a snoop too, i think i learned it from her. also, we live together, and have been for a year and five months. we have a lot of financial entanglements as well. unfortunately makes it even more difficult should we decide to break up. he has children from a previous marriage that ended when his ex cheated on him. i really want to have hope for our relationship, i'm hoping that all this might actually put it all out there and we can grow, but at this point it could go either way. that scares the hell out of me.
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