Thanks to the people who have been running the world for the past decade plus, narcissism has become a buzzword people like to toss around for anyone who exhibits even the mildest case of self-absorption. But there actually are plenty of people out there who fully meet the real psychological descriptions of a narcissist. Unfortunately, the people who are in relationships with those narcissists are probably realizing that they’re not having a great time with these extremely selfish people. They may be wondering when it all went so wrong.
Luckily, some recently published science can answer that: your relationship with your narcissist partner was never good to begin with. That honeymoon phase? Yeah, you never had it.
According to research published in the Journal of Personality, relationships involving narcissistic partners don’t follow the typical rise and fall arc of a relationship. They don’t start great and then fall apart over time. Instead, they were bad from the start. And then they just kind of stayed that way, straight through to the end, if they ever even end.
Why Some Relationships Skip the Honeymoon Phase, According to Experts
Psychologists Gwendolyn Seidman and William J. Chopik of Michigan State University analyzed data from nearly 6,000 couples over six years, drawing on the long-running German Family Panel. They found that partners of narcissistic people reported lower relationship satisfaction from the very start of their relationships. That dissatisfaction didn’t worsen over time compared to other couples, because they were starting at such a low point that there was nowhere else to go, and it certainly wasn’t going to go up.
The study separates narcissism into two types. “Admiration,” which is charm, confidence, and the need to be seen as special, all help explain why these relationships begin at all. And then there’s “Rivalry,” which is the more toxic version of narcissism, which includes such delightful attributes as hostility, competitiveness, and the need to put others down. The rivalry portion is what the researchers found most closely correlates with lower satisfaction for both partners.
This probably explains why, if you suspect you’re in a relationship with a tried-and-true narcissist, you probably noticed that the relationship was never really great to begin with. It hit a cruising altitude of bad and just stayed there.
There are tons of little nuances in studies like these that give each individual relationship its own quirks that could have contributed to its downfall, but the researchers feel like they’ve seen a broader pattern emerge over thousands of couples, suggesting they might be onto something here.
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