In Bed with a Narcissist: Recognising the Signs in a Relationship

We’ve all heard the stories.

At first, they seemed like the perfect partner. Caring, attentive, interested in you. In some cases, unusually interested in you.

You’re flattered by the attention. You feel seen. You bask in the glow of having finally met someone who really gets you - or so it seems.

And perhaps they are delightful. At this point, you don’t know.

As the relationship progresses, small things begin to bother you.

The flash of rage at a waiter who gets the order wrong. The irritation when you want to spend an evening with an old friend. The slightly disparaging comment about someone you love. The cancelled arrangement that apparently shouldn’t matter to you, followed by enormous offence when you need to change one yourself.

None of these things necessarily means you’re in a relationship with someone who is narcissistic. People get tired. People behave badly. People have dreadful days and occasionally say things they wish they hadn’t.

But sometimes the small things begin to accumulate.

You notice that disagreement is surprisingly difficult. Or that there seems to be one set of rules for you and another for them. You start thinking rather carefully before saying something you know they won’t like.

Perhaps you begin making little adjustments without really noticing you’re making them.

I’ll see my friend another night.

There’s no point bringing that up.

Maybe I did overreact.

Perhaps I should just let this one go.

And of course, letting something go occasionally is part of living with another human being. The problem is when you are always the one doing the letting go.

This is often where people become confused. The relationship may still contain affection, sex, humour, tenderness and genuinely lovely moments. The person you’re with isn’t necessarily horrible all the time. If they were, recognising what was happening might be considerably easier.

Instead, you can find yourself trying to reconcile two apparently contradictory experiences: the person who can make you feel extraordinarily loved and the person around whom you are becoming increasingly careful.

None of this tells you whether your partner is a narcissist. And in some ways, that isn’t the most useful question.

What you can begin to notice is the pattern.

Are you becoming more careful? Are disagreements becoming harder? Are your friendships, interests or opinions gradually taking up less room? Do you find yourself managing your partner’s reactions rather than simply being yourself?

One awkward dinner or unreasonable argument tells us very little. A pattern that gradually changes how freely you can live inside a relationship tells us considerably more.

When the Person You Meet Isn’t Quite the Person You Get to Know

Meeting someone through a dating app is now an ordinary way for relationships to begin. But there is something slightly peculiar about meeting a stranger this way. Initially, almost everything you know about them is what they have chosen to tell you.

Of course, we all present ourselves when we first meet someone. We wear the nicer shirt. We tell the better stories. We probably don’t lead with our most irritating qualities. That’s not narcissism. That’s dating.

What matters is what happens as the polished edges begin to wear off and two real people have to accommodate one another.

Someone can be charming, attentive and enormously interested in you at the beginning of a relationship without being narcissistic. The more useful information comes later: how do they respond when you’re tired, unavailable, disappointed or angry? What happens when you disagree with them? Can you say no? Can you have needs that inconvenience them? Can you remain a separate person and still feel loved?

Those ordinary moments often tell us considerably more about a relationship than the first few exhilarating weeks. But we need really good instincts to uncover the narcissists in the internet shark-pool.

Why the Warning Signs Can Be Hard to See

Some people with narcissistic traits can be extraordinarily attentive at the beginning of a relationship. Others aren’t particularly charming at all. There isn’t one type of narcissistic person, and there certainly isn’t one type of person who becomes involved with them.

But attention can feel very powerful when it touches something we have been missing.

If you grew up having to work rather hard for affection, approval or emotional attention, being intensely wanted can feel wonderful. Perhaps you are used to being the accommodating one — the person who notices everybody else’s feelings, smooths things over and doesn’t make too much fuss about your own needs.

That doesn’t mean you’re somehow destined to end up with a narcissistic partner. Nor does it mean that you don’t know what a healthy relationship looks like.

But our histories can affect what we notice, what we tolerate and what frightens us.

For some people, another person’s anger is particularly difficult to bear. You may find yourself backing down very quickly, apologising when you’re not sure you’ve done anything wrong, or anticipating disapproval before it has even arrived. You become very good at keeping the peace.

And because these changes usually happen gradually, they can be difficult to see from inside the relationship.

You don’t wake up one morning and decide to abandon your friends, stop disagreeing with your partner or make yourself smaller. You make a hundred quite understandable little decisions. Not tonight. It’s not worth the argument. I’ll bring it up another time.

Eventually, though, it is worth noticing how many of those decisions are travelling in the same direction.

A healthy relationship has room for two people. Your partner can be disappointed without punishing you for disappointing them. You can disagree without the relationship feeling endangered. You can have friends, interests, opinions and needs that don’t always coincide with theirs.

The question isn’t whether you have managed to identify every warning sign early enough. Most relationships reveal themselves over time.

The more useful question is whether, as the relationship develops, there is still enough room in it for you.

When the Relationship Starts to Feel One-Sided

One of the things we need to pay attention to is reciprocity.

All relationships become uneven from time to time. One person gets sick, loses a parent, has a terrible month at work or simply falls in a heap for a while. Sometimes you carry more of the relationship because the person you love can’t.

That’s very different from a relationship in which one person’s needs, feelings and preferences routinely matter more.

You may notice that you’re expected to be interested in their work, their problems, their friendships and their disappointments, while your own receive rather less attention. Perhaps you’re the one who changes plans, repairs arguments, remembers what matters to them and tries to understand why they behaved as they did.

And perhaps you’ve become extremely good at explaining them to yourself.

They’re under a lot of pressure.

They’ve had a difficult childhood.

They didn’t really mean it.

Those things may even be true. Understanding why somebody behaves as they do can be compassionate and useful. But understanding another person’s behaviour doesn’t make its effect on you disappear.

The question is whether there is movement in both directions.

Can your partner be curious about your experience when it differs from theirs? Can they recognise that they’ve hurt you without immediately becoming the injured party themselves? Can they compromise? Can they sometimes put your needs first without keeping score?

Reciprocity doesn’t mean everything is divided neatly down the middle. Relationships aren’t spreadsheets.

But over time, both people need to matter.

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Pattern Worth Paying Attention To

No single behaviour tells you that somebody is narcissistic. And most of us, at some point, have been defensive, selfish, controlling or spectacularly bad at listening.

What matters is the pattern — particularly what happens when your needs, feelings or wishes come into conflict with your partner’s.

What happens when you tell them they’ve hurt you?

Being told that we’ve hurt someone isn’t pleasant. Most of us become defensive sometimes.

But in a reasonably healthy relationship, there is eventually room for the other person’s experience. Your partner may disagree with your interpretation of what happened and still be able to recognise that you were hurt.

With someone who has strong narcissistic traits, your hurt can very quickly become a conversation about them. They may deny what happened, minimise it, attack your interpretation or become so wounded by the implied criticism that you end up reassuring them.

You began by saying, That hurt me.

Somehow you finish the conversation apologising.

That reversal is worth noticing.

Are they there when you need them?

Some people are wonderfully attentive when a relationship begins but much less available once your needs become inconvenient.

Again, one disappointing response doesn’t tell you very much. People get things wrong.

But if your partner expects considerable emotional attention from you while repeatedly disappearing, becoming irritated or changing the subject when you need support, there may be a deeper problem with reciprocity.

Is there room for you to say no?

Control doesn’t always announce itself as control.

It may begin with wanting to know where you are, being unhappy about a particular friendship, checking your phone, commenting on what you wear, or making it increasingly uncomfortable for you to do things independently.

Sometimes nothing is explicitly forbidden. You simply learn which choices will produce anger, sulking, withdrawal or an exhausting argument.

Eventually you may stop making those choices.

That is one of the reasons I think it’s useful to pay attention not only to what your partner says you are allowed to do, but to how free you actually feel to do it.

Do jokes regularly leave you feeling smaller?

Teasing and sarcasm can be affectionate parts of a relationship. They can also be used to humiliate.

If a joke repeatedly comes at your expense — particularly in front of other people — and your discomfort is dismissed with Can’t you take a joke?, the problem isn’t necessarily that you lack a sense of humour.

Pay attention to whether humour creates intimacy between you or establishes who gets to be powerful and who gets laughed at.

Do you find yourself being managed or manipulated?

Manipulation is not always obvious, and it doesn’t always involve elaborate deception.

Sometimes it is pressure, guilt, withdrawal, charm, anger or the suggestion that loving someone properly means giving them what they want.

The effect can be surprisingly subtle. You begin questioning whether your own wishes are reasonable. You say yes when you wanted to say no. You rehearse conversations beforehand because you’re trying to find the one way of saying something that won’t provoke a reaction.

If you are frightened to say no because you anticipate your partner’s anger, disapproval or withdrawal, that is important information about the relationship.

Do the usual rules seem not to apply to them?

A sense of entitlement can show up in surprisingly ordinary places.

Perhaps your partner expects special treatment from waiters, colleagues, family members — or from you. A queue is something other people should wait in. Their time is more important. Their inconvenience is an emergency, while yours is something you should manage quietly.

Of course, everybody is entitled sometimes. I suspect most of us have had moments when the universe has failed to arrange itself according to our preferences and we’ve been rather put out by it.

What matters is whether this is a pattern, and particularly what happens when somebody says no.

For a person with strong narcissistic traits, an ordinary limit can sometimes feel like an insult. The resulting anger may seem wildly disproportionate to what has actually happened.

Do you know which version of them you’re going to get?

Some relationships begin to feel unpredictable.

Your partner may be affectionate and intensely interested in you one day, then distant or irritable the next. Warmth returns when they want closeness, reassurance, sex, attention or something else from you, and disappears when their attention moves elsewhere.

People’s moods change. Nobody is consistently available, and inconsistency by itself isn’t evidence of narcissism.

The more important question is what the unpredictability does to you.

If you find yourself monitoring your partner’s mood before deciding whether it’s safe to raise something, changing your behaviour to preserve the good version of them, or feeling enormous relief when warmth returns after a period of withdrawal, the relationship may be teaching you to organise yourself around their emotional state.

Does appearance matter more than what happens between you?

People with strong narcissistic traits can be very invested in how they — and sometimes their relationships — appear to other people.

The relationship may look enviable from the outside while feeling quite different from within it.

Perhaps your partner is charming and attentive in company but dismissive once you’re alone. Perhaps they’re particularly concerned about how you dress, what you say or whether you reflect well on them around people whose opinion matters.

There’s nothing pathological about wanting your partner to make a reasonable effort at your sister’s wedding. Again, it’s the pattern that matters.

Are you a separate person standing beside them, or are you increasingly expected to function as part of the image they want to present?

What happens when you see things differently?

Two people are going to disagree. In fact, being able to disagree is one of the things that tells us a relationship has room for two separate people.

Someone doesn’t have to agree with your version of events to take it seriously.

The difficulty comes when disagreement itself becomes intolerable. Your partner may insist that their interpretation is the only reasonable one, dismiss yours as ridiculous or oversensitive, or keep arguing until you give up from sheer exhaustion.

Over time, you may stop saying what you think.

That matters.

A relationship doesn’t require agreement about everything. It does require enough respect for each other’s separateness that difference doesn’t have to become a battle somebody must win.

What Matters Is the Pattern

If you’ve recognised your relationship in some of this, you may still be wondering whether your partner really is narcissistic.

You may never have a definitive answer to that question.

Narcissistic traits exist on a spectrum, and people can be controlling, manipulative, entitled or emotionally unavailable for all sorts of reasons. A difficult relationship doesn’t necessarily mean that one person has Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

But you don’t need a diagnosis to take your own experience seriously.

What matters is the pattern that has developed between you, and what living inside that pattern is doing to you.

Are you increasingly careful about what you say? Are you frightened of your partner’s anger or withdrawal? Have you become less connected to friends, interests or parts of yourself that used to matter? Are you doing most of the adapting, forgiving and understanding? When something hurts you, is there actually somewhere for that hurt to go?

These aren’t small questions.

And recognising that something is wrong doesn’t automatically tell you what to do next.

Leaving a relationship can be complicated. Staying can be complicated too. There may be children, money, housing, attachment, love, fear and years of shared history involved. If there is coercive control, intimidation or violence, there may also be very real questions about safety.

Sometimes the first change is simply beginning to trust what you are noticing.

You don’t have to prove that someone is a narcissist before you’re allowed to be unhappy. You don’t have to win an argument about whose version of the relationship is correct.

You can begin with something much simpler:

Is there enough room in this relationship for me to be myself?

And if the answer is increasingly no, that is worth taking seriously.

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Want to Understand What’s Happening in Your Relationship?

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If you’re questioning patterns in your relationship, this free guide can help you make sense of what you’re experiencing.

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If You’d Like Some Help Thinking This Through

If you’re feeling stuck, confused, or finding it difficult to trust your own judgement about a relationship, therapy can give you somewhere to think about what’s happening and what you want to do next.

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