I joined this site a few months ago because of a break up I went through in January. It was three months long, ended terribly. And I've never been so heartbroken in my life....A few days ago someone sent me an email suggesting that I look into narcissistic abuse. I thought I would share my story again here and see if I could bring myself any closure or find others who could relate to my situation or bring me any advice on the topic. This is my story....

After the breakup I felt devastated and literally could not understand how I could live without him. He had a lot of baggage but I accepted him anyway because I could feel how much pain he was in. He had a four year old child, apparently according to him, his ex got pregnant on purpose and then after seven years of being together she told him she didn't love him anymore and left him. On top of that his dad came out recently, his parents had to get divorced after having been married for over thirty years, and his grandpa was a convicted child molester. And after his breakup with his "ex", which I later found out was a divorce with his EX WIFE, my ex tried to kill himself by drinking himself to death (when his son was around two years old), and ended up in rehab.

I met my ex online in November and we were only together for three months. He told me and did a lot of things that I didn't want to see as red flags. I fell in love with him the moment we first spoke and I just wanted so desperately to make him happy and help his pain go away. He told me about his family issues, how his ex "girlfriend" came up to him one day and told him she didn't love him anymore and left him...and I felt his pain. I wondered why such an amazing, special person deserved to feel any of that pain. I only wanted to see the beauty in him. He didn't actually tell me about his child until we met in person, about three weeks after talking almost every day online.....I slept with him on the first date, out of lust..and out of already having fallen for him. It was a very special, intimate night for me...but only after we slept together did he tell me about his kid. Not when we first spoke online, not before we met in person, AFTER we slept together, during which he started begging me to not leave him. I stayed....despite my confusion and shock...because I had already fallen for him, and realized he had been through a lot and that everyone deserved to be loved despite their pasts. This is something I probably should have taken as a red flag...not his child, but his dishonesty about his child.

It seemed like in the beginning of our relationship he had treated me like a queen. He told me he would do anything for me, that he would never want to argue with me or hurt me, that I was his angel, that he couldn't imagine his life without me, that he wanted to marry me, wanted me to meet his kid and move in right away. He told me that I had saved him and had transformed his life from one that was black and white to one that was full of color. He told me I looked at him in a way that no one else ever had and that now he finally understood what real love felt like and that it was a kind of love that his ex was never able to give him.

Needless to say he broke up with me suddenly after three months and painfully told me he never meant a word he said to me. He tried to convince me I was bipolar and insane and that I was just like his ex who had a severe personality disorder, according to him. I told him after a month of us being together that I was in love with him and he used that as a weapon against me in the end. It was extremely difficult for me to be so open with him and I had a flat out panic attack when I told him. I came from a two year relationship, during which my ex never told me he loved me. I told him I loved him after six months and suffered for another year and a half until we finally fell apart. When I told Andrew I loved him, I had a panic attack and blurted it out, but he said it back and I literally just cried out of happiness. I was overjoyed.

I admit, I got extremely vulnerable and insecure after I told him I loved him. I constantly questioned if he felt the same way, I would get upset and fight with him if he didn't respond to my texts for an entire day or if I wanted to talk about our relationship and he didn't want to. Or if we fought and he went to bed instead of making sure I was okay. I got paranoid that I cared too much for him and that he didn't care for me enough.
I know my insecurities irritated him and pushed him away in some ways. Right before we broke up I could sense something was wrong and I rushed over to his place with a gift I bought him, wanting to hold him.... and he threw my arms off of him, cussing under his breath, and put a pillow him between us so that I wouldn't touch him. I stayed the night, hoping that he would crawl back to me and hold me, but he never did. He just yelled at me anytime I tried to kiss him or touch him. The next morning I wrote him a letter apologizing, I sent him loving messages telling him I wanted to change and didn't want to lose him, conveying how much I cared about him....

And two days later we were over. And he told me all of these terrible things....telling me I was a complete nutcase for ever saying I love you to him, especially after a month. He said, "What kind of crazy person says I love you after a month in a full blown panic attack?" When I asked him why he even said "I love you" back or why he would tell me he loved me multiple times, almost every time we hung out, without me even instigating it, he said he was just happy and "felt like saying it" at the moment but didn't mean it...and that goes for everything he said....marriage, meeting the kid, everything. He said he never meant it. And that I WAS THE ONE who changed, and that's why he took back everything.

And I believed him. For four months now I have been telling myself that I deserved how he treated me, that I am actually insane and that I lost the best person I had ever met. I have cried every day from the pain. I tried to see him about a month ago after many many many attempts at trying to get him back and trying to convince him I cared about him and wasn't crazy. Finally after ditching me and leaving me waiting at a bar for him or waiting by the phone for him to let me know if he could hang out, and him ignoring my texts, he finally asked me to come over. I tried to act as though nothing had happened, I tried to act cool and calm. And we ended up drinking and sleeping together......after which he told me he had so much fun with me and asked me to start staying the night at his place again and that he wanted to see me the following week. Neither of those things happened. I tried texting him multiple times to hang out, he would ignore my texts and give me excuses that he locked his phone in his car, "maybe tomorrow". And tomorrow never came. I ended up texting him when I was falling apart, begging to see him and wanting him back and he never responded.....and about a week later I found out from his friend that Andrew came up to him and asked him to date me so that I would stop texting him and get off his back.......I was devastated. He acted so friendly and caring and loving when I saw him again..he barely let me climb out of the bed and walk out of his door. He started telling me how pretty I looked. And then he completely ignored me once again and made me out to be this crazy person. I felt as though he had broken up with me twice.
It was a complete stab to the heart. After sleeping with him I somehow believed things would come back to normal and that he would want to see me...but he completely used me and left me and tried to sell me to his friends.....

Since then I have been making a list of all of the red flags that I saw during our short relationship, but chose to ignore because of my codependency and my inability to let go of the original picture of himself he painted for me....the perfect "family man" who impressed my parents and was romantic and was a southern gentleman and loved animals and children.

- He lied to me about being married. He blurted it out accidentally when he started to tell me he went to rehab. He started telling me he went to rehab a MONTH into our relationship during a conversation I brought up about my brother who went to rehab. I don't even know if he would have told me if I hadn't brought up my brother. During our conversation he goes...yeah I ended up in rehab because of my ex wife...uhhh I mean ex girlfriend. I said, wait...what? Andrew...you told me she was your ex girlfriend. (I asked him earlier, right when we started dating, why he chose not to marry his ex girlfriend after having a child with her and he said, "I wouldn't marry someone just for that reason....I would want to be sure they were the love of my life first.")
In response to my confusion he said, what are you talking about? I thought it was obvious that we were married? My son has my last name doesnt he?
And I sat there, completely confused, wondering if I IMAGINED the conversation I had with him earlier about why he didn't marry his ex girlfriend. And he gave me this explanation of how his marriage to her was just a piece of paper that he wanted to get in order for his son to have his last name...and that they never had an actual wedding ceremony. He started putting the focus on his son and how "important" it was for him to have his last name. Why did I stay at that point? Confusion, maybe not wanting to believe that he flat out lied to me about being married...and I continued to feel sorry for him. About a month after we broke up I found out from his friend that Andrew actually DID have a wedding ceremony, with flowers and family and friends and everything. And that his ex wife had a ring as well.

- I found out from his friend after our breakup that he had a bad argument with his mom over the phone and he took her dog which was staying with him and threw it out of the window....This guy, who claimed that he wouldn't hurt a fly and cried when animals were hurt in movies.

- He wouldn't stop talking about his ex and all she had done to him...I feel as though she was brought up almost every time we saw each other...how crazy she was, how if I met her she would seem so perfect but that in fact she was a manipulative, insane woman. How when he met her he thought she was a gift from god but that she had changed and ruined his life. He would compare me to her which made me so uncomfortable, not only in matters of love, but how I was "prettier" than her and so forth. I let him talk because I felt sad for him..but I should have recognized this as a sign that he wasn't over his past relationship and that he just enjoyed demonizing people so that he could play the victim.

- He told me after his divorce that he started texting his wife hate messages telling her he wished she was dead. And he kept telling me that she was fighting for full custody and that she had his son for five days out of the week and he only had him for two...I should have questioned why...but he always filled my head with stories about how crazy she was and how much she ruined his life and how she took his son away from him... so I always took his side...and always focused on his pain and victimization instead of actually taking his aggression and anger as a red flag.

- He told me he never celebrated anything and that he spent his birthdays alone...that he didnt have any friends..Whenever we argued he always said, Victoria, please don't be mad at me...You're the only one who is nice to me.

- He told me he would go to bars all of the time alone and get so wasted that he would pass out on the street. Every time I came over, he always had a drink in his hand..ALWAYS. He wouldn't leave his apartment without drinking a full glass of whiskey or smoking a joint, even if he knew I was waiting for him or that we would be late.

- He told me after his dad came out he yelled at him calling him all of these derogatory names. I often heard his phone conversations with his mom and he would yell at her and showed constant annoyance when talking about his family. One time he had to talk to her with the shower running so that I wasn't able to hear the way he was speaking to her.

- Almost every time we went out he would want to leave the place we went to, despite me wanting to stay. He always complained about how crowded it was, how it wasn't his scene...even though I wanted to stay.

- The first night he met my whole family which was on my birthday in January my twin brother asked us to all go out to a club or a bar after dinner. Instead of agreeing to come he said, "Party at my place, I'm going to sleep,"...in front of my whole family who he had just met that night and on MY birthday. I had a conversation with my sister after she had met him and she said..I really didn't like how Andrew said that. And it was our first time meeting him. Couldn't he be more polite? He also complained the entire time during dinner about his stomach hurting. The ENTIRE time. To my whole family.

- He would tell me how all of these people would wrongfully accuse him of being a bad father. I always wondered why anyone would accuse him of such a thing. Now I know that it wasn't an accident.

- I told him I wanted him to use condoms and start using protection because I didn't want to be on birth control anymore and it gave me adverse reactions. I told him that it was important for me and I didn't want to take any risks, especially because of what happened in his previous relationship. He agreed and told me he would buy them immediately and then never did. When I asked him why, he lied to me saying "I had one in my apartment and tried to put it on and I hated it. I'll never use them"....I knew that he didnt have any condoms in his apartment because I had asked him the first time we slept together and he said no....He flat out lied to me.

- He only saw his son twice a week but would always complain to me about how annoying his son was, how hard it was to be a single father and how hard it was to spend all of this time constantly watching his son. This was his SON he was talking about..this beautiful four year old boy. And he would always say, "Dont worry it'll be easier when you're around...I felt as though he almost expected me to alleviate him from his own SON. And then he would come up to me later telling me he wanted to fight his ex wife in court to get his son for more than two days out of the week...none of it made any sense.

- He seemed materialistic, telling me I needed to clean my earrings or he would text me that some girl at the bar he was at was so ugly out of nowhere. His Instagram was filled with pictures he took of people that didn't know their pictures were being taken. It upset me seeing how he paraded and made fun of these innocent people.

- There were times when he snapped at me. I remember the night of my birthday I got really sick and he took care of me. And in the middle of the night I rolled over and wanted to put my arms around him and he yelled at me saying "C'mon Victoria I just spent all night taking care of you and I have a four year old that wakes me up all the time, get off me and stop asking me to cuddle"

- On a personal note, I had a physical issue when we were intimate. It was painful for me to have sex with him. But I still wanted to sleep with him to feel close to him. I remember one morning I tried to sleep with him and in the middle of everything he got up and started getting dressed. I was confused and I ran out of his apartment, feeling completely embarrassed and self conscious. He walked up to me and told me that he doesn't "enjoy having sex with someone when it hurts for them". He was so insensitive, knowing that I had that problem.

I feel as though there were SO many issues and red flags that I ignored. Because one, I had no respect for myself and two, I was too focused on him and his happiness and I was truly codependent and so in love with him and the fairytale picture he first created in my head that I didn't want to see anything else....Anytime anything was off, he would counter his strange behaviors and negative comments with something sweet and romantic, telling me I was the best thing that ever happened to him.
And all I did was blame myself whenever anything was off. All I wanted to do was take his pain away and love him. All I saw was the good person that charmed me and seemed so perfect in the beginning............

I've realized from this relationship that my codependency made me blind to a lot of things and that I do need to work on myself, but I also have realized that I was a victim of a narcissist and psychopath.
Now I understand what a con artist he was. He truly fooled me and my family. All the promises, love, marriage, moving in....were things I latched onto and fantasized about. But for a man to say things like that so early on and then take them back and throw me away like a piece or garbage, telling me I was insane and just like his ex and to make a joke of me to his friends telling them to date me so that I would never try to contact him again.....its just unforgivable and terrible.

If any of you have had similar experiences I would really appreciate any advice on how to move on from this situation and overcome the narcissistic abuse I endured. If you would ever like to talk, please feel free to message me as well. I'm here for you. Lots of hugs and love,

V.