The Worst (and Last) Thing The Narcissist Said to Me
The straw that broke the camels back: It wasn’t when he told me that he hates me.
A number of incidents that led me to realize that I needed to leave my narcissistic ex—and that was long before I even knew what a narcissist was. There were so many blinking lights and red flags, and I had closed my eyes to all of them.
While I clung on for years; to him and the faint, yet seemingly undying hope of betterment, the last few months of our relationship revealed the confluence of all the many small streams into a doughty river. I found myself fiercely reaching for whatever I could grasp, not to drown.
The betrayal
After feeling unseen for so long, my hunger for acknowledgment and starvation for any form of physical and mental attention led me to have an affair.
It’s not a solution to this problem that I recommend, but in hindsight, it was the eyeopener I needed to start seeing my marriage for what it was: a big, fat, lie. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to leave otherwise, and I don’t dare to think about what my life would be like, had I not. Therefore, I’m grateful that I did what I did.
The words unsung
In the months after I came clean about my affair and we were still living together, I kept wishing for him to say the right things. I yearned to hear the words—any words—to make me want to stay. I grappled for something to keep us afloat.
I spent hours writing him messages. We went to therapy, and I tried to initiate conversations, giving him a chance to say it. I wanted him to tell me, and show me, that he understood: I wanted some proof that he empathized.
I wasn’t looking to justify my affair, but I wanted him to see the full picture. I wanted him to tell me that he was sorry too and that he was ready to take his share of the responsibility and do whatever necessary to save us.
I know now, that expecting empathy from a narcissist is akin to squeezing blood from a stone (nowadays he frequently uses that same idiom to justify why he simply can’t pay any child support. This, in the same message where he attaches a picture for our daughter; of himself—in his new car—on his way to work. *Eye-roll*). Expecting an apology from him was a futile pursuit.
The same old song
Instead of saying what I wanted to hear, he said the complete opposite things. Each time we talked, instead of throwing me a floating device, he ripped whatever straw I clung to out of my hand to watch me drift further away—all while yelling “I can’t believe you’re doing this to our family!”
In past arguments, he accepted responsibility for nothing: He never took any blame, until a pivotal point in the fight, when he flipped 180, and took all of the blame, saying something like, “ok, it’s all my fault, I’m a worthless piece of shit.”
I knew the narrative by heart and it followed the same storyline each time. As if running a bulldozer over the whole ordeal, either extreme meant taking no responsibility whatsoever. But it was never that black and white and my goal was never to place blame. I wanted to communicate and understand, to move through issues and try to get better.
We never moved through; we always bulldozed, to later brush the remains under the rugs and into the corners until we could no longer keep them from seeping out of every crack.
Para bellum
It was the end of February and the sea had been rough since I confessed my transgressions sometime in the first week of January. Both, underslept and ill-fed, we were dragging our feet, trailed by truckloads of unsorted baggage.
We’d been taking turns staying on friend’s couches and we knew that some kind of decision had to be made, so we set aside an evening to talk.
Rumors had it, he’d been on a three-day bender, just himself and his drug-dealer, and had slept it off on the floor at work. I was well prepared for what was to come; I’d seen it all before, and then some—but never had I smelled anything like what awaited me when he knocked.
The last crusade
There he was, my husband, disheveled from a drug binge and a couple of hours of sleep. Clearly, without even taking a shower, stinking, like he’d been sleeping in a mixture of body fluids, he bolstered his way through the door, determined to convince me to stay married to him.
You would think that a man, deadset on fighting to keep what he claimed to love the most, would at least have had the decency to clean up and put on vomit-free clothes. Some might even make an extra effort under those circumstances.
Not him. He came and immediately started raging. At one point I was told to “sit down and shut the fuck up!”
—You don’t get to talk. I’m talking now!
Nothing new so far. Our last fight followed the same old script, but instead of one long episode, it played out like a ten-year anniversary compilation of a sitcom, with consecutive short snippets and highlights from the past.
Perhaps what kept me so abnormally calm through most of our seven-hour long finale, was the fact that I was no longer petrified of losing him, nor was I afraid of him.
In a sense, all was already lost, and the only thing left was the sliver of hope that in a spark of clarity, he’d find the words to win me back.
(As I write this I can’t remember what I thought I had to come back to. I don’t recognize the person who believed she deserved less than the bare minimum.)
Instead of a win, he served me the final blow:
—You don’t care about me!
—Say again?
—You don’t care about me, and you never did!
His words shattered me
For the first time in months, I fell apart.
I’d heard it all; that he hated me, that I was a failure, and that I was crazy and in need of professional help. He’d told me that I didn’t understand him, didn’t do enough for him, and didn’t respect him enough. But, that I didn’t care? That I couldn’t accept.
I knew I’d been far from perfect, and I could’ve done better. I, too, had made many mistakes. But if there was one thing I always did, it was to care.
Didn’t he realize that I had worshipped the ground he walked on since the day we met? Hadn’t he seen how diligently I’d worked my ass off for our marriage to work? Had he not noticed any of my continuous efforts to be the best partner I possibly could for him.
If I had cared for one thing in my whole life, apart from our daughter, it was him.
I had been obsessed with him, and not necessarily in a healthy way, but, oh mother, had I cared! He’d been everpresent in my mind, and his name, always at the tip of my tongue. I had cared to the extent where I didn’t make a single grocery run without thinking about what he could possibly want for breakfast. I had cared so much I forgot to ask myself what I wanted.
I had loved him, deeply, endlessly, and unconditionally — and, apparently, in vain.
His words pulled the rug out from underneath me. His words ripped what I held onto from the last decade of my life and replaced it with boundless grief.
I had poured my all into nothing. I was in shock.
Our demise
The words that followed, while they sound viler on paper, didn’t faze me in comparison. I cried and I pleaded in disbelief:
— What can I possibly do to show you just how much I care about you?
— You can get on your knees and suck my fucking dick!
I surged further downstream. Angry, confused and desperate, I squealed from water-filled lungs:
— But, don’t you see how much I admire you? You’re amazing, you’re so talented, you’re…
My ‘woke feminist’ husband and supposed intellectual equal interrupted:
— I don’t give a damn what you think of me. If [insert successful male in his field of work] thinks I’m talented, that matters. Your opinion of me is worthless.
The burial
His last words were the dagger to the head of my zombie-like hopes. His putrid presentation that night, the personification of the decomposing corpse of a dream for reconciliation.
I buried the cadaver the next day, along with all of our bulldozed remains. I redirected the river to nourish fertile ground. Like a seed, I planted myself in it, ready to grow anew.
