My First Date With a Narcissist and the Red Flag I Definitely Missed

Why I think I gave a narcissist a second chance.

It’s the beginning of my sophomore year in college. My roommates and I have a buddy system. We won’t leave a girl alone. Two of my roommates go to the next party. I stay behind with my friend who’s met a guy she likes.

I go to the keg to fill my beer.

A drunk guy stumbles into me.

His beer goes all over my face and my beer goes all over my shirt. I can’t leave because I’m waiting for my other roommate. I decide to sit on the couch until she walks back into the living room.

The guy sitting next to me is chatty.

I realize he’s the guy my roommates pointed to as we walked into the party. I’m the last girl in the door and one of them says, “That guy is really handsome.”

He stands out in the crowd because he’s 6 feet 3 inches.

My three other roommates chime in agreeably.

“Really?” I say. “I don’t think so. I think he looks like a pretty boy.”

Now I’m sitting next to the pretty boy.

I chat with him while I wait for my friend.

It’s a gratuitous conversation at best. I’d really like to go home and shower and change my clothes. He starts to win me over. He seems nice. But I still don’t think he’s the catch my roomies think he is.

Finally, my friend reappears and I think we can exit this party.

It’s about 3 a.m.

“Would you like to go to my place and have some breakfast?” he says.

“Not a chance,” I say.

Now the pretty boy has fallen out of favor with me.

He’s that kind of guy. The guy who’s looking to pick up a girl for a night. I have never had an interest in that guy. I decide I don’t think he’s Mr. Nice Guy after all.

But for the next month, the pretty boy seeks me out.

My roommates and I have a warning system.

“Don’t go to that party because that guy is there asking about you.”

“Don’t go to the bar tonight because he’s in there.”

“I saw that guy and he’s still asking for you.”

I successfully managed to avoid the pretty boy for an entire month.

Until one night at our favorite college bar.

“Stop staring at me,” he says.

“I’m not staring at you,” I say.

Pretty boy’s humor is not lost on me.

It’s what I find most attractive in a person.

I relent and say yes to a date.

Well, if you can call it that. It’s a college version of a date. We are going to go to a party together. I’m still not super interested. His humor has my attention but not much else.

The date night arrives and I get ready.

I am waiting to hear from the pretty boy.

Hours later my phone rings. I’m aggravated for two reasons. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go out with him in the first place and now he’s rudely kept me waiting on him.

“Can you meet me?” he says.

“No,” I say. “It’s 11 p.m. There’s not a chance I’m going to be going out with you.”

“Oh,” he says. “I was out with my buddies and I forgot what time it was.”

Here’s the big red flag I missed.

Not to mention, that I ever foolishly gave him a second chance.

I didn’t yet know the word narcissist.

This was a guy who was in his own world.

It would have been bad enough if we had been dating and he had rudely gone MIA. But a guy who pursued me for a month and then did this on the first date was a massive red flag with or without narcissism.

I rationalized that he was a clueless college guy.

Everyone liked him. He wasn’t a player. He just seemed to be caught up in the social experience. Caught up in the party. That’s what I believed. I didn’t think he had any bad intentions, nor did I think it was intentional.

I thought this was a guy who’s never had a girlfriend.

He’s romantically idiotic.

I gave him another chance.

I should never have given him that opportunity. You don’t have to be a narcissist to be selfish, self-consumed, spoiled, or a jerk. A guy who asks a girl out on a date and then doesn’t call her until nearly midnight is one, any or all of those things.

I didn’t have to know he was a narcissist on that first date.

To escape a narcissist.

After giving the pretty boy a second chance, I fell hard.

Even I was shocked.

Three months later, I came home and told my roommates, “I’m going to marry that guy.”

Who knows why I gave him another chance? A part of me thinks once he made himself seem like a challenge, I was suddenly interested in the guy who had sought me out for a month.

Another part of me thinks I liked that romantic idiot part of him.

It allowed me my freedom.

I didn’t like guys who paid too much attention to me.

That’s the crazy thing about youth. We are all pretty stupid. We have no idea what drives our romantic interests. I thought I didn’t like clingy guys. In reality, I was drawn to someone who wasn’t emotionally present.

It’s all related to family of origin.

I had a father who physically abandoned me.

I gravitated toward a man who emotionally abandoned me.

Or so theorized our psychologist marriage counselor, once my husband was diagnosed as lacking empathy and being on the severe end of the spectrum of a narcissistic personality disorder.

There were some other red flags in those dating years.

But honestly, they were few and far between.

Most of the time, I thought I had landed the greatest guy in the world.

A tall handsome drink of water who was funny, charming, and the life of the party. My Aunt in her thick Long Island-ease used to say, “For goodness sake, he looks like a Kennedy and he’s successful too. If only I was twenty years younger.”

Everyone loved the pretty boy.

The cold college night in Scranton, Pennsylvania when he switched sides to put me in the path of an oncoming Doberman was definitely a red flag. I laughed it off because he was scared of a dog.

In truth, what man would do that?

What guy would place a woman in the path of Doberman to save himself?

The terrible accident I had where I defied all the odds.

That was another red flag.

It was the summer before my junior year of college. My then-boyfriend never found his way to the hospital in Virginia. He said his Mother wouldn’t let him borrow her car.

It was my high school boyfriend who visited me in the hospital.

I begged him to let me see a mirror since my family was keeping it from me.

I was horrified when I looked at myself.

“You’re still beautiful,” he said.

Even then, I knew there were few men who would ever love a girl enough to speak those kinds of words to her. Even then, I knew he showed more concern for me than the pretty boy.

Even then, I knew there was something terribly wrong with my college boyfriend being able to keep himself away from his girlfriend who had survived a horrible accident.

I’m not sure why I dismissed it.

I made excuses for the pretty boy.

As I had from the very beginning.