How old were you when you fell for your narcissist mate? We feel naive and gullible but I was only 18, just an inexperienced kid. She saw that I was useful and successful so she pounced.
I think you are definitely on to something there. My first serious relationship didn’t happen until I was 20–21, but I was sexually inexperienced and emotionally clueless at that age. The guy was a user, a cheater, and a thief. I didn’t have much, but I had a steady job and a place to live, which must have seemed like heaven to a perpetually-unemployed couch surfer bum.
Again, as you say “I was useful and successful so [the narc] pounced” I am really lucky that my circumstances forced me to move just as he was getting comfortable sponging off me.
I was distracted from relationships for a few years while I got my college career squared away, and then I found another ‘winner’ at age 25. That one, unfortunately, lasted about 12 years. But I grew up, realized that I deserved to be loved and appreciated and not just used, and did what I needed to do to be free and choose better relationships going forward. It was expensive and terrible, there were some legal issues, but it was completely 100% worth it!
I wish that, along with education about our bodies, sex and STDs, we also received education about healthy and unhealthy relationships in school growing up. It would really save a lot of us a lot of heartache, time, and energy.
I know that many folks would want all of these things to be taught to children in the home, by their parents or families, but as we see, many families are dysfunctional and there is no model of a healthy non-abusive adult relationship to observe growing up.
My parents were divorced and then married to other spouses a number of times as I was growing up; eventually there was a sane and healthy parental relationship for role-modeling, but that was long after my formative years in which I observed and internalized a lot of unhealthy behavior, mostly ending in having no healthy adult male role-models to observe. This created an anxious/avoidant attachment style which I re-created for myself more than once before finally doing some hard work on myself and making healthier choices.
I have a sibling who was stalked, courted, and groomed by their abusive narcissist as a freshman in college; the narc saw them on campus & fell in lust at first sight. The NPD stalked them enough to find out what clubs and organizations my sibling was in, and started attending those meetings, after doing enough research to pretend to know more than my sib did about this-that-and-the other. The NPDs knowledge of The Great Mysteries combined with lots of lovebombing[1] caused my sibling to marry young. A few more accidents and traumas, a good bit of emotional[2] , financial[3] , and physical abuse[4] , and my sibling is seemingly trapped for life.
Meanwhile, the abuser has gone on to find and have affairs with other college-freshman aged people (and younger). As you say, ‘inexperienced kids’ who are vulnerable to an adult flattering them, making inappropriate sexual comments, love-bombing, giving extravagant gifts, putting them in the middle of lots of exciting drama, etc.
When they are young, most people don’t really even know who they are, let alone have solidified life goals and life experience such that they should be choosing a partner for life. (I did say *most*—there are exceptions to every rule, some folks are very mature, emotionally aware, and have their goals for life set at a young age. That’s OK, too, but it’s rare, in my experience. And groomers/abusers will often flatter a target by telling them that they are 'mature' for their age, so in my opinion, it's a red flag to be described that way if you are younger than the person courting you.
So, yeah, I think our first romances are likely to be modeled on behavior we’ve seen in movies, on TV, or read about in books, if we don't have good family role models. We are likely to be dramatic, jealous, manipulative, and generally immature in our first love relationships. We are likely to believe that love is supposed to have a lot of drama, it’s supposed to hurt or make us feel anxious, it’s supposed to keep us up all night worrying and crying, fussing, and fighting, and finally lead to fantastic sex. And if we are with a narc, this is the way ‘love’ will always be, since they don’t mature and tend to thrive on conflict and chaos.
With age, experience, maturity, and a good sense of self worth, self esteem and self knowledge, the kinds of crazy behavior and mistreatment we used to tolerate, or even expect from others will no longer seem attractive. We will want a safe partner, clear communication, reasonable discussions, and mutual respect and affection. We don’t want to take on impossible quests, sacrifice our health, happiness, and security, or beat ourselves to death in order to ‘prove our love’ to a person with impossible and ever-shifting standards & demands.
With maturity and self-knowledge, we learn that drama, jealousy, and insecurity are exhausting. We don’t really want to be around people we don’t trust with our hearts. We want to be open and vulnerable and authentic. We want give and take, not just give, give, give, while the other person only takes, takes, takes. We learn to discern the difference between ‘drama’ and ‘passion’ and we come to prefer the depth and longevity of passion over the passing storms of drama.
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