Beware The Hidden Signs Of A Controlling Relationship…

Click by Lavalife, Nick Krewen — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:42:10 +0000

When Martin met Marie, he thought he’d died and gone to Heaven.

Out of the dating scene a while, he was surprised to find this sultry brunette catching his eye at the grocery store. She accepted his invitation for lunch, laughed at his jokes and seemed to reciprocate the mutual attraction.

He fell hard and fast but a few weeks into the relationship, Martin began to notice a gradual change in Marie’s behavior. She began making little suggestions — things they should do, restaurants they should visit, meals they should try, that special shirt or belt that he should wear on their dates. And Martin, wanting to please, willingly accommodated her numerous requests.

Changes in behavior

"She’d be sweet as pie about it," Martin recalls. "Even if I disagreed with her, it’d be difficult to broach the topic because she’d do it with a smile."

But even Martin was flabbergasted at Marie’s reaction when he told her, after a month of exclusively spending consecutive weekends together, he was going to take the coming Friday night and kick back a few beers with the boys.

Marie sulked and threw a tantrum, and Martin saw the first signs of what would become a living hell: Life with the Controller.

"She expressed shock and disappointment when I had anything on my social calendar that didn’t include her," he remembers. "And she’d never let me forget it."

Kindness quickly turned to criticism and within a few weeks, "The Lecture" replaced love. Martin felt his self-worth quickly turn to mush.

"I felt horrible, because not only was I apparently not meeting her needs, but since no one had treated me like that before, I blamed myself," he concedes. "I believed that I deserved it, otherwise she wouldn’t have been saying those things. The lectures were frequent and endless."

Martin says the key phrase Marie would often repeat was ‘You need to change.’

"It was never about bad habits," he realizes. "It was an assault on my character. Many things were insidious, particularly her ability to extract me from my friends and family over a relatively short period of time without me realizing what was happening."

Seeing it can be tricky

…

Are YOU Dating a Narcissist? Find Out Here…

Melody Brooke — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:15:37 +0000

"I’m In Love – With Myself!"

This past month one of my dearest friends fell into a familiar trap. She found herself head over heels in love with someone who was even more in love with himself. It took several weeks of bending her mind around the idea that what he loved was not her, but his version of her.

Actually, most of us do this to one degree or another. We find someone we think is “perfect” for us because of certain things that we think we see in them. This is not generally a bad thing. The problem is that sometimes our image of what we want is very far from the truth of the person we are projecting all this on. Most of us can sort that out as we go along and begin to see who the person really is and not just our projections. Narcissists can’t do that. They only see what fulfills their own wish of what the person they are with is like.

My friend’s guy was a very attractive, intelligent and savvy 40 something man whom had never been married, he said, because he kept meeting women who were “not available”. When he met my friend, he was very excited because she was very available, and quite lovely. My friend is open, intelligent, and sensitive, and quite sensual. He was easily able to draw her into his illusion of himself, because he seemed to be what she wanted. He had many years of practicing the illusion that he himself had fallen prey to believing. By profession he was a women’s “Coach” and offered workshops on achieving goals to women of the community. He talked the talk of being someone emotionally aware, and spiritually attuned.

Here was my friends’ biggest mistake; she opened her heart before she had enough information. She committed her love to him before she had spent enough time with him to gather the information as to whether he was really a good potential partner. But, in her defense, she was taken in by a master at the craft of seducing women. He knew that he needed her to commit her heart quickly in order for him to be free to behave in accordance with his true nature.

You see, once she had committed to him he knew it would be difficult for her to back out. Human beings have a hard time changing our idea of what we think of someone once we have committed publicly to our view. To have to say we were wrong about someone means admitting that we used poor judgment. None of us wants to admit to that!

So, even though my friend pretty quickly got a lot of information about him that indicated he was a poor partner choice, she could not easily say so without losing face.

Fortunately for my friend, she had good advisors close at hand who could see through what was happening and help her regain her boundaries long enough to tell him she was through with him. This wasn’t easy, because people who are in love with themselves have a hard time admitting defeat. His response was to insist that he would not give up on her and begged her to marry him. Fortunately my friend had become strong enough at that point to resist his overt efforts at getting her to conform to his wishes; never mind what hers were.

How do you know if you’re dating a narcissist?