Sorry in advance for the long post! I’m struggling with the realisation that someone I was/am still in love with is a narcissist. For context, I met a man a year ago when I joined his band. We spent a lot of time together and became good friends. I fancied him from the beginning, and he later claimed he’d felt the same, but nothing happened because we didn’t want to mess up the band. A few months later he got a girlfriend. However, several months ago he finally confessed feelings for me and pursued me very intensely for a while, messaging me all the time etc. Nothing physical happened until he’d broken up with his girlfriend, and I said we should take things slow as they’d just broken up. I was really happy and, since we’d been friends beforehand so he knew me fairly well, thought this would be great. However, not long after, despite saying he wanted us to be together long-term and apparently telling everyone about me including his family (who I met), I could sense something wasn’t right so I felt forced to end it. He sometimes seemed distant despite saying how much he enjoyed spending time with me, he kept bringing up ex girlfriends, made a few offensive comments and generally seemed to have lost interest. This did make me feel anxious and insecure, considering how full-on he’d been at the beginning. I bought it up a few times but he generally just seemed confused when I did. We met up a few weeks after, but he said whilst he hadn’t changed his mind about me, us being together was not a good idea as it was making me crazy and insecure. He also conveyed that he’d never really cared about me other than as a friend. I didn’t protest and insisted we stay friends.

For the last few months I’ve been beating myself up for managing to repel such a great guy so quickly by being so crazy and insecure. I even posted on here and received similar feedback. However, last week I read an article about narcissistic personality disorder and realised it fits him perfectly.. which has changed things, so I wanted to post again. He is single-mindedly obsessed with external validation and has tied his entire self-esteem to musical success and fame. If anything goes wrong with the band he gets very depressed and told me he thinks about ending everything. He has created a band of people around him (who I also became good friends with) to serve his musical interests and boost his ego, and he is very hard to say no to. It helps that he’s also very good looking and charming and has an incredible effect on women, which I obviously fell for. But he has a dark side too; I know he fell out with some old friends ending in a physical fight on stage. He and his current friends go out all the time, take lots of drugs and drink loads- before meeting him I was sober but by the end of the year I was going out with them all the time, which was fun but I couldn’t really handle it. He also needs drama in his life, and is very pretentious (he likes opining about art, literature etc., but it doesn’t always land). His close “friends”, and me, know he is like this but just laugh it off since it goes with the sensitive/ troubled/ passionate/ artistic persona. However, I have now realised that he truly believes everyone takes him very seriously.

I feel totally betrayed realising that as a narcissist he never cared about me or anyone other than himself, even as a friend, and that this person I thought I knew so well for a year.. is completely fake and, worse, manipulative. I also feel an intense connection to him because our childhoods were very similar- we both had fathers who I believe were also narcissists- they both had multiple affairs throughout their marriages, eventually left when we were around 10 and moved across the world where they started business ventures and got into debt, and had multiple flings resulting in half-siblings we know little about. His eventually died a few years ago whilst mine is still here (to everyone’s surprise). I do think seeing my own parents’ relationship made me extra sensitive to noticing that he wasn’t fully emotionally connecting to me, as I saw my father never did to my mother.

I know realising he is a narcissist should make me happy that things went wrong so quickly, having read about what they can be like in relationships. But, apart from losing interest rapidly and a few borderline comments, he didn’t actually do anything too badly wrong with me, which makes it harder to hate him. He managed to sustain a relationship with his previous girlfriend (who he left ostensibly for me) for 6 months, although I don’t think she ever twigged about the narcissism- they are still on good terms and she didn’t know about me. Although I could see whilst they were together that he never let her in emotionally either. But he also had a previous relationship that lasted several years and ended in drama (he wouldn’t go into details), and he always used to mention her. I just feel like a failure because I couldn’t sustain a relationship with him for as long as he did with his exes, and I still care about him because I know he is in pain emotionally and I relate to it because of our common family backgrounds and musical interests. I also feel extremely depressed and upset by this situation and ironically he is one of the only people I know who understands these feelings!

He asked me to play another gig with the band next week (he needs someone who plays my instrument) and I agreed, before realising about the narcissism. I now know he is just using me, and I’m disappointed in myself for agreeing but feel like I can’t say no at this stage because I’d let the others down too. I’m just struggling on a daily basis because I know I should cut him out, but I miss him (or who I thought he was) so much, and feel like I’ve become obsessed with thinking about him and processing what has happened this past year. I also worry that he will achieve fame (his dream) and I’ll have to constantly be reminded of him. I also know he has already got another attractive woman in the band since I left, and I would not be surprised if they get together- maybe they already have, and I’m going to have to witness it and pretend not to care next week. I’m just struggling to move on and accept this whole situation. Any advice much appreciated. Thanks for reading.