Hi Fin Bass, you might be right about all of your assessments regarding the men in your life, but not likely. I encourage you to check yourself. Maybe talk to a therapist. Check out the work of Alison Armstrong. She talks about something called a “frog farmer.” You might be one. It just means you lack skills. No big deal. Skills are learnable. When you have relationship skills, all men are wonderful except the men who really do have personality disorders and they are still difficult. But I am talking about a very small percentage of the population. I am talking about men who were diagnosed by a professional, reputable therapist. I don’t throw those terms around casually and I recommend that you stop doing it. That being said, if the list you provided is accurate, you have terrible luck. I only have one antisocial personality disorder man in my life. Interacting with him is challenging which is why we do therapy together once a week. I have learned that he sees things differently than I do. Sometimes he is right. Sometimes I am right. Sometimes neither of us is right or wrong, our perspectives are just different. He isn’t bad because of his diagnosis. He just struggles in relationships and that’s why we work so hard in therapy.

I really encourage you to look into the work of Alison Armstrong and maybe John Gray, too. When you strengthen your relationship skills, you will have no problems in your relationships with men.

https://youtu.be/Ff_w1_Cacoo?si=6rOpwZpSbIJ7RfJ7

Here is one of Alison Armstrong’s interviews.

Best wishes!

Last relationship 8 years in a limerant bubble with a narcissistic personality disordered guy.

Relationship before that 6 years stuck to a psychopath.

I realise why, my father was a sociopath who pretty much ignored me. My inner child desperately wants to get daddies love. That fantasy love that never existed in my childhood. It’s just crazy how hard and fast I fall for them and how good I am at finding them.

I am suffering that horrible moment when I thought the sweetest, loveliest person is maybe at worst a narcissist, at best a selfish “flattered by interest” LO. Or maybe “hungry for emotional validation”.

Sammy’s comments about limerence and grief are really hitting me rather hard.

Thinker, WOW, I’m going through that now. I see you posted this almost 4 yrs ago. You might not even be around LwL now and fully Limerent healed. I’m in the middle of Limerent “games” with my LO. We have not seen other a month next week. But we have been communicating electronically. My LO game is uncertainty, unpredictability, and a dash of Out-Of-Site, Out-Of-Mind. So it has me on a yoyo at times.

Coming to LwL helps me tremendously to get this shyt off my chest and out of my head. Reading the stories of my fellow LEs does wonders for keeping my LO in the view of a real person who pisses me off more than makes me blissful.

Thanks for sharing, it helped me immensely!!! But I gotta graduate to FULL NC!!

@Allie I.

Maybe I’m a bit unusual, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a narcissist I didn’t take a shine to. They don’t really set my teeth on edge. Even when they’re cringe-y, they’re also kind of fun. 😜

I had at least one narcissistic parent, so maybe that means my tolerance for people with personality issues is unusually high?

On the other hand, there might be something intrinsically captivating about narcissists on a biological level. I think, if a narcissist wants to make a person feel loved, the narcissist will do a much better job than a regular person of showing that love – at least initially. The problem is the narcissist can’t keep the loving charade up and often “needs” the target more than the target needs them. The love-bombing comes with strings attached.

I had at least one narcissistic LO and not once during the interaction did I ever suspect he was a narcissist. The reason I never suspected he was a narcissist was that he was mirroring me, and mirroring me perfectly. Being with him was like looking in a mirror at my own beautiful, airbrushed reflection. He shared my values. He shared my taste. He adopted my hobbies. It was like being with a more likeable version of myself!! 😆

The downside of this narcissistic interaction was that I never felt like I got to know the real him. And I really wanted to get to know him and his true preferences/interests, etc. I think, at the end of the day, he wasn’t capable of showing me his true colours. He had no colours to call his own. He could only mirror me (or mirror other people he wished to impress/befriend). 😲

I felt loved. But I felt like I was being loved by a phantom. I felt like I was being loved by someone who was hollow. There was no “I” and “Thou”, “you” and “me”. Losing him was traumatic because I guess I was losing that mirroring gaze. No one has ever looked at me in quite the way he looked at me – with the same total admiration, real or feigned. 😉

This is why people feel like they’ve been “expelled from the garden” when limerence ends perhaps. Because they have been literally kicked out of Paradise. No more divine communing with divine Mommy substitute! 😜

Here’s an interesting video I came across. It’s called “Narcissism: Why you Can’t Get Over Them w/Sam Vaknin”.

The video is a discussion between Richard Grannon, who is a life coach with a background in psychology I think, and Sam Vaknin, who is quite a famous online commentator on narcissism, pioneering much of the jargon used today.

If one doesn’t want to watch the video in full, a summary might go something like this:

The reason we can’t get over a narcissist is the narcissist makes us feel as if no one will ever again love us as the narcissist loved us. The narcissist’s (real or feigned) love came to us as an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When we lose the narcissist’s love, because the narcissist devalues us or discards us, that loss triggers a grief reaction. This grief reaction is approximate to the grief reaction experienced by a child who had the perfect loving mother and suddenly became an orphan. The orphaned child can never get its mother back, and other loves of course simply can’t compare to the love that was lost.

Some insightful person in the comment section accompanying this video also points out we don’t just mourn the narcissist at the end of a relationship with a narcissist – we also mourn the idealised image the narcissist had of us and we mourn the fantasy of the perfect relationship we seemingly shared with the narcissist.

We’re really mourning ourselves, in other words, or an incredibly compelling version of ourselves. Narcissists make us fall in love with ourselves by mirroring us so skilfully. Maybe we’re even mourning some version of ourselves loved unconditionally through the eyes of a mother, because according to these two experts this is what the narcissist is offering us – the promise of unconditional (and mutual) maternal love. It must feel like a heady spiritual connection.

People here have talked about a connection between limerence and grief before. I wonder if this video links these two concepts in a potentially helpful way?

Was there ever a follow up article to this one? Have slowly concluded that my LO is a narcissist, but still find it hard to believe even in the face of all the evidence. Would love to read more on LO narcissists.

An interesting new avenue…

Actually, maybe I have but I didn’t know it at the time. She never claimed to be an empath when I knew her.

I met the roommate of one of my NROTC classmates. I was attracted to her and made a long-distance run at her. We crossed paths for maybe 2 years. It never took off. I was looking for a serious relationship and she was looking for grad schools. There wasn’t much chemistry between us.

She seemed to be three things you listed but I never really got to know her that well. I have no idea of how happy she was. The best “goodbye” I’ve ever received from a woman came from her. She could charge other women for lessons in how to dump someone. I think her telling me “goodbye” was harder for her to say than it was for me to hear.

She went on to marry, have a child, and divorce. She later became an ordained Zen priest and runs her own spiritual healing business. I never saw any of that when we were dating. Of all the women I’ve dated, she was the only one to make it onto one of the subs I was on. I find that oddly ironic.