The desire to remake his partner
Narcissus clearly feels how the shadow of non-ideal people falls on him and literally prevents him from building ideal relationships. After all, if it were not for these people around with their shortcomings, he would have done everything long ago.
With all his inherent grandiosity and power he runs into relationships with people, choosing a quite ordinary person (because there are no others). And in the course of the play he tries to make a superhuman out of him.
Faced with the fact that another person cannot become “normal”, the narcissist cannot bear it, devalues everything and leaves. This is in the best case, when he saves his nerves, time and generally moves on, even if to his narcissistic, but exit. Much worse, if the narcissist is not going to admit his own defeat and continues to torture and torment in this relationship. He is willing to endure endless resentment and waste his life on the “wrong person” just so he doesn’t fall into that humiliating experience of “I failed”…
This is fragments from the forthcoming book “Fragile People: A Secret Door to the World of Narcissists”
To publish and finish the book I need your support. I’ll be glad to have your help. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/
Little Narcissus suffered from human failings. Other people’s. She had already carefully weeded out her own.
That’s why people didn’t stay near her for long. After all, she also approached them with all responsibility. And once she got to know them, she would almost immediately work on correcting their limitations. And if faced with the impossibility of changing a person, she immediately left him. So as not to traumatize their sensitive nervous system.
No matter what you say, but in order for a narcissist to get away from someone, to stop molding him an ideal, and from the relationship — his narcissistic project of the same ideal, he has to resist his powerlessness for a long time. And often, even after ending the relationship, devaluing the person and going out into his own life, the narcissist still carries it away as his narcissistic defeat, not as an objective impossibility to change the other person…
Because inside lives the “if I had tried harder, I would have succeeded”.
If you are someone who is “lucky” enough to be in a relationship with such a narcissist, I beg you:
- As soon as possible, give up the idea that you can fulfill the narcissistic needs of the ideal and perfection that is demanded of you. The most you can do is endlessly say, “I love you, but I can’t become perfect even for you.”
- Do not conspire with the narcissist to realize the relationship as a narcissistic project in which everything must be clean, smooth and, again, perfect. The most you can do is say, “I’ll try very hard to make it work, but being held hostage to the grand idea that we have to pull it off, I can’t even do that for you.”
- Oddly enough, it is your imperfection and non-ideality that can allow a narcissist to allow the same thing to happen to himself. If he doesn’t “break” you before then, of course…
