I am a newbie here, so please excuse me if I have problems with the local lingo!
Up until just a few weeks ago I never knew that such a thing as NPD existed. Purely by happenstance I stumbled across a reference to NPD with a link which I followed and came to the list of the seven signs of NPD. It fit my wife to a ‘T’! Up until that time I just thought that she was a bad tempered, aloof, egocentric, know-it-all workaholic.
Before we were married, she was sweet, kindly. After we were married is when I learned the rules, truisms, and preconceived notions. My N ‘knew’ what marriage was supposed to be like: Husband working and Wife raising the children. Only problems were I didn’t make enough money for my N not to work, and she enjoyed her job.
The most important rules were that her wants, needs, and feelings were paramount; and that ‘everything’ must be finished before we could do anything enjoyable. Having inherited the house from my N’s mother — another long story — there were always chores and ‘things’ that needed to be done. At the start I went along with this notion, but after awhile I noticed that there were always other ‘things’ that came up that prevented us from spending any quality time together.
Another rule was that she had to have the final say in everything, just like a child needing to be the one to put the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle. I could never finish any task to her satisfaction, she always had to re-tap the last nail, brush on the last dab of paint, move something to somewhere else and then be able to pronounce it ‘Finished!’
The rules regarding sex were especially restrictive regarding time, place, setting, and position. The worst was that my N could not have any ‘negative’ feelings regarding her partner, me, and considering that my N has been angry at me for something or the other since shortly after our honeymoon, it is a wonder that we had the once child. But my N wanted a baby more than anything else, including a husband, I was providing a valuable service. Once my services as a sperm donor were no longer required things went from worse to awful.
The truisms were just as deadly:
Because she was her mother’s daughter, she was the ‘perfect’ wife and later on the ‘perfect’ mother.
I never had a good idea. If I said “Hey, let to A, B, & C!” My N’s response was to reject my suggestion out of hand. BUT if our neighbor, or one of her friends would say “You should do A, B, & C.” it was the greatest thing ever in the whole universe!
After our daughter was born things got even worse:
I was a lousy father. (I could not measure up to perfection as a mother.)
I was a lousy husband
I didn’t spend ‘her’ money properly
I didn’t keep the house the way she wanted it
Women don’t need sex like men do
She wasn’t sexy
She didn’t like sex
She had other toxic behaviors related to her NPD:
She could not ‘deal’ with the fact that I suffer from depression. I remember one very painful incident where I ended up lying on the dinning room floor with tears streaming down my face and my N just standing there, looking very annoyed at me. It was our daughter, bless her, that came over and tried to comfort me.
If I came to her wanting her support in some endeavor, such as making a change in my life, her idea of support was to say, in effect, “Fine. Let me know when you’re done.”
MY N was very good at making bargains: “If you do that I’ll do this.” If I suffered a setback in my stated goal, it was “You’re a failure, so I don’t even have to try to keep up my end of the bargain.” Somehow she never started in on her part of our bargains.
I was being ignored so badly that I found I had to misbehave to get any attention from my N. I knew what buttons to push to get her to pay some attention to me, not very good attention, but attention none the less. Of course, that just made me ‘childish’ and not at all worth any respect as a man.
Eventually, to my everlasting regret, I had an affair. They say that the wife is the last to know, and in my case it was true. My N didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t, see just how lonely and hurt I was. To her, our marriage was ‘perfect,’ because she was living the life that she wanted: the benefits of sex (a child, and someone to do the heavy lifting) without having to have sex. I wanted companionship, someone who would listen to me, and yes, someone to share an intimate relationship with. And I mean intimate in the broader sense, rather than just sex. This was in an insult to her as a wife, not necessarily a crisis to be addressed. We tried joint therapy, but my N saw this just a club to beat concessions and answers from me, rather than a tool to help us try and fix our marriage.
When I did leave my paramour and was accepted back in to ‘her’ house — it was always her house because she had lived there with her mother — my N had won. She had beaten ‘The other woman’ and that was all that mattered. This was the time that we should have gone back to joint therapy, but addressing, let along trying to fix, out problems was out of the question. I say again my N had won. Later on, during arguments, her club was ‘Look, buster, I took you back, and I didn’t have to!’
I learned to late that marriage was just not worth any effort on her part. I was the one who was going to have to make all the adjustments.
So now here I am, looking for some friendly ears and some advice. Thanks for taking the time to read this post.
