If you read my first chapter, you might well wonder what exactly triggered that final decline. After all, we went 16 years, right? It couldn’t all have been that bad. And you’d be right - most of that 16 years was the slow, soul-leaching abuse that female covert narcissists (FCNs) dole out, mixed with just enough good times and manipulations to keep me hooked and working, always working to regulate her.

FCNs are always, always on the lookout for anything that might upset or dysregulate their own emotional state. To that end, covert narcissists tend toward a surveillance state that would make the NSA blush. Can’t have anything popping up that might up-end their fragile ego and emotional state, right?

So let’s set the table here. I’ve been a journaler for many years. I love the act of putting pen to paper and unraveling my thoughts in a slow and methodical manner, like a mechanic pulling the components of an engine and seeing what’s right or wrong. I love to look back a decade later and say “Oh ya, I was there that day”. Even the feeling of moving the stylus of a fountain pen around is satisfying after a day of beating on a keyboard and staring at screens. In short, I love journaling.

About four years into our marriage, Anne bought me a journal for personal use. She knew I had a penchant for buying higher quality, leather bound journals for writing, because life’s too short to be forced to write on high school quality paper. And so, rather happily and with the naive expectation of respect and privacy that I would have given her, I started using that journal to log interesting moments, work out issues from my childhood, and so on.

Imagine my surprise when the very next time we had a disagreement she immediately told on herself and began attempting manipulations using what she’d learned from reading that journal. When I rightfully called out her blatant invasion, her argument immediately became that I a)didn’t have any expectation of privacy, even in my own journal and b) “didn’t write about her often enough like a loving husband would”.

Lesson learned. The journal had not been truly a gift for my enjoyment but rather an additional means for Anne to draw supply from me, made all the sweeter by being able to do it sneakily and repeatedly. Her anger was that I did not live up to her unspoken demand.

After that day the journal became largely performative and I eventually found other ways to collect my thoughts. One of the chief ways of doing that was to create audio recordings on my phone late at night in the back yard while I wrangled the family dog. I would talk about lots of things but Anne’s frequent gaslighting and tantrums made regular appearances, along with her penchant for hypercriticism. Most often I would listen to the recordings in a day or two and then delete them; it just helped me to maintain a little sanity in a hostile environment. But some of those events were so egregious that I held on to them longer, both as proof to myself of reality as well as something I might need later on as proof of her erratic behavior.

Some examples:

• Phone calls with our realtor that needed a simple yes/no answer, but Anne insisted on being in the middle of them while refusing to actually contribute an answer. After the realtor and I finally picked a sensible path, within a day or two Anne would throw a fit about how stupid it was and insist on reversing course. And then want to change course again a day or two after that.

• A text message storm having a meltdown that I was “ignoring her” and “just wanted her to die”. After telling her my plans the night before, I had left the house early on a Saturday morning with the kids to run errands but I sent a text message quietly to say goodbye, rather than wake her. Keep in mind, Anne was chronically ill and generally confined herself to bed, (though when she wanted to she could go for hours in a shopping mall). I was constantly waiting on her hand and foot. She was also infamous for having meltdowns over being awoken too early after staying up most of the night doomscrolling social media.

Setting Up The Triggers

Creating those recordings was helping me keep my sanity, but it was also slowly changing my behavior. Rather than simply giving in to Anne’s tantrums and gaslighting to avoid the emotional punishment, I was quietly but firmly pushing back. I was becoming emotionally stoic when she would turn up the bad behavior and not letting it affect me.

While not a deliberate effort, I was running on survival instinct, drawing my own line in the sand, and refusing to lose who I was entirely. What I didn’t know at the time was that after 15 years of feeding her overinflated self-image and acting as an external emotional regulator for her, I was creating quiet signals and slowly setting up triggers for her covert narcissism to go first into a spiral and, later, collapse.

The list of things that can trigger a narcissist is endless but there are some core things that are most common. And I set off some of the very worst triggers in Anne.

• Indifference. Narcissists cannot stand people being indifferent to them. It’s a major form of rejection that absolutely terrifies a female covert narcissist (FCN) and rapidly deflates her self-image and by slowly pulling back from the emotionality of her attacks and letting her deal with her own emotional regulation I was rejecting her.

• Negative feedback/consequences. Again, deflating her self-image by rejecting her behavior. But rather than seeing the connection between her behavior and other’s acceptance, the FCN will simply see that as a rejection of her. And so it was for Anne when I’d push back, even gently, on her bad behavior.

• Narcissists need to feel like they own you. By pulling away emotionally and refusing to engage emotionally with Anne’s tantrums, I was breaking down her “safe” control over me and my emotions. That meant I was a threat to her own emotions because I wasn’t doing to work to regulate them for her.

Collapse

One day, just after Christmas, the surveillance state came for me when Anne found the recordings I’d created. What followed would ramp into the daily, hourly beratings that marked the last year of our marriage, and particularly the last four months. A narcissistic spiral that would eventually lead to my leaving the marital home and her eventual suicide. (See Chapter 1: Know the Beginning From the End for more on that part of the story.)

It became so bad that I actually gave up most of my electronic devices for her to hoard, which she then promptly began to go through looking for even a hint of some misdeed. And since there was, in reality, nothing there to find, her rage simply grew and grew. Her desperation extended so far that, in the weeks following her death, I discovered an online conversation between her and a hacker that she was considering paying to put back doors on all of those devices.

In the end I finally walked away from all of this almost a year after the spiral had begun. And when I did I refused to respond to phone messages and texts, setting up a female covert narcissist for her greatest fear of all: abject abandonment and rejection. For someone that one day thought they owned you and your nervous system (remember, FCNs hijack your nervous system so you’ll help regulate theirs), it’s a tremendous shock to the system to be suddenly cut off.

In the end, Anne’s seething narcissistic rage and need to control led to her suicide. And even then, she attempted to take a revenge beyond her passing. Coming full circle, had it not been for my penchant to journal things, she may well have succeeded.

Just What Is a Female Covert Narcissist?

The term “narcissist” gets tossed around a lot in in modern discourse, and often incorrectly, but in this article we’ll focus on a smaller subset of that. In my first couple of articles I referenced my late wife, Anne, as a female covert narcissist, or FCN. Generally, covert narcissism is a sub-type of narcissistic personality disorder where the subject tends to demonstrate their self-centeredness, their need for admiration, and manipulative tendencies in subtle, often well masked ways. One might think of them as the polar opposite of the bold and domineering grandiose narcissist we’re more familiar with. Additionally, the female covert narcissist tends to present a little differently from the male version (that I won’t cover here), hence the distinction by sex.

Now, I could go through a long and boring list of traits filled with clinical language of what one could expect from a FCN, but I’d rather not cause your soul to leave your body from boredom. Instead, I will give personal examples of these key traits from my own lived experience as this series of articles progresses and, hopefully, do so in a manner that both keeps your interest and makes the information “stick”.

The Early Days of Being With a Female Covert Narcissist

When I first meet Anne, our first in-person interaction was easy, seamless, almost like we’d been friends before, or like there was almost no work to do to know each other.🚩 My first date with Anne on a summer morning turned into a second date that evening. Saying she felt so safe with me that she could just open up, Anne very quickly laid out her vulnerabilities, telling all about the bad relationship she’d just left, and how badly other prior relationships had ended as well. 🚩 In no time at all I was reciprocating, laying out all of my hopes and dreams, spilling my fears, and even my own vulnerabilities. 🚩

I did my best to stay objective for the first few weeks, going so far as to date a couple of other interested ladies. But those interactions could not compete with the excitement of being with Anne and pretty quickly faded out.

We couldn’t keep away from each other, sometimes to the exclusion of things we should have been doing instead. Everything we did together in our newfound love had that happy golden glow around it 🚩where seemingly everything the other person does is wonderful and seems to align with your own thoughts and beliefs.

Being Mormons, we weren’t engaging in sex before we were married, but like most new couples at this stage, it was nearly impossible keep our hands off each other. And all the while there were exciting conversations that regularly revolved around sex, intimacy, and, at their core, Anne reinforcing her sexuality with me without any prompting from me.🚩

As our relationship progressed and Anne and I were engaged, there came one late evening where we were relaxing on the couch together and I was getting ready to head home. Anne began to playfully wheedle me for details of my dating in the weeks right after we’d met. I quite honestly told her that in the early days after we’d met I’d gone out with a couple of other girls, not knowing where we’d really end up as a couple, but nothing serious. Immediately the playfulness disappeared and I was informed that it was a severe betrayal that I had done so because “we were dating.” (Anne conveniently forgot that she had previously told me that she herself had continued to date others for a few weeks after we’d met, but when brought up I was gaslighting her.)🚩

What followed was a rash of threats, anger, gaslighting, and ultimatums for me. So, of course, I begged for forgiveness, made many promises, and eventually “convinced” Anne to accept my apologies and go on with our engagement and wedding. Even as I made those promises I had that unsettled feeling like I knew I was somehow making a terrible mistake. I was. But I was also addicted to the relationship.

Break It Down

Notice all those red flags above? Any one or two of those might have been OK, but taken together that’s a strong warning to RUN, and don’t look back. Now, one could argue that, taken singly, each of the red flags means nothing in itself, and that’s true because most people will show a little narcissism from time to time. But to recognize a FCN, you really have to take in the whole picture to understand what’s going on, and I cannot emphasize this enough: female covert narcissists are absolute MASTERS at faking empathy and connection.

#1. Intimacy and Connection Are Too Fast. FCNs are extremely adept at faking a deep connection early on. They’ve learned just the right things to say and do to create an illusion with which to pull you into a relationship and get you addicted to their charms. You’ll often hear variations of things like “I’m easy to fall in love with” or “we’re soulmates” or, in Anne’s case, “twin flames”.

New relationships are by nature exciting and fun, but they should come with some building time as two people slowly and naturally come to a deeper understanding of each other. Time is a key ingredient to truly, deeply knowing someone because it’s difficult to keep up a facade for an extended period. FCNs push this process extremely quickly because it gets both of you a great big high and leaves you dependent on her for more. Once you’re hooked, they’ll use it against you like a jujitsu move to control and manipulate you by extracting promises that will serve them throughout the relationship.

#2. Plays the Vulnerable Victim. Being a sympathetic victim is a frequent tool in the FCN’s toolbox of manipulation. By highlighting previous bad relationships, she seeks to use your need to be needed and to be seen as a protector to draw you into an “us versus them” dynamic with her. And this dynamic is key because it helps keep you focused on external threats to her while working to fend off anything that might tip her unregulated emotions, rather than the ever increasingly dysfunctional dynamic that takes place in every narcissistic relationship.

#3. Past Relationships Always End Badly. This is a nearly universal rule. No matter the cause of previous break ups, the FCN will always show herself in a good light while projection, gaslighting, and even outright lies may all be deployed in the service of dramatizing the split and downplaying or even erasing any role they may have played in it. This also plays into flag #2.

#4. Weaponizing Limerence. Most of us can think back to the first time we fell in love. Everything about the other person was wrapped in a warm golden glow of idealization with intrusive thoughts about them bringing butterflies to you stomach. Every idle moment is filled with wonder and delight thinking about your new love and even their significant flaws seem to fade away into the background. Limerence is an emotional rollercoaster, fueled by uncertainty, and loaded with a host of physical symptoms: racing heart, euphoria, loss of appetite, trouble sleeping, or even feeling “high” around the other person.

For a FCN, that feeling is just as addicting; it fills their need, their craving, for for external validation and approval. But like any high, it doesn’t last and, sooner or later, the limerence will falter, the mask will slip, and you will bear the blame.

#5. Love/Sex Bombing. Like narcissism, this term has gotten a lot of use in popular culture in more recent years, not least because it can be mistaken for plain old lust in a society where many couples are engaging in hookup culture. That tends to muddy the waters on this flag a bit. But you can see through this ambiguity relatively easily by realizing that it’s not only about being bombarded with hot monkey sex, but more importantly she is working to create a false emotional intimacy very quickly.

The distinction here is important because, while sex can be an important building block and maintenance item for a good and loving relationship, it can also be a tool for hijacking your nervous system and getting you addicted. For the FCN, it serves the purpose of forming an emotional bond that will last and give her the best supply. The emotional bond that you feel is her primary goal because it keeps you around even after the mask slips and the true narcissist starts to show through.

#6. The Mask Slips. At some point in the relationship the mask will slip, and the FCN will create a scenario in which she claims to be hurt, and in her mind she may be, so that she can use all of the sensitive spots, all of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that you’ve divulged to her against you like emotional jujitsu. Her goal: to extract promises from you that she can use like shackles to keep you in the relationship.

These shackles will be your integrity, loyalty, protectiveness, honesty, and more. No matter how many years go by, no matter how hard you work to satisfy her needs, those same hurts that were used to chain you down in the first place will continue to come up again and again. If you attempt to set a boundary and call a halt to these manipulations, you risk a major blowup because she will feel like you’re rejecting her. And this, too, will go into her stockpile of ammunition against you the next time she needs to manipulate you for her own ends.

The Big Question: Why??

Here’s a simple answer too a complex thing - covert narcissists seek to hijack your nervous system so that they can manipulate you into regulating theirs. Read that again, and think about it for a moment before going on.

Deep down, narcissists of all stripes are broken and wounded, and they know it. They live in abject terror of of being rejected or “exposed” for being somehow less than others, thus their endless need for narcissistic supply. Put another way, they have a pathological need for external validation to temporarily fill the void where authentic self-worth should be. Most often they fill this void with the sort of vapid, empty validation one might expect in a world of social media and passing acquaintances, but it never lasts.

For evolutionary reasons, female covert narcissists are particularly adept at manipulation and faking empathy, and they come with a two-fold mission: 1) they seek a stronger type of validation to fill the void, especially if you happen to be strongly empathetic yourself and 2) someone to help regulate their emotional state both with that validation and by running interference against outside influences so that she feels safe from rejection.

Much like a sugar high, the shallow external validation one gets from common sources like social media and passing acquaintances doesn’t last long and needs replenishing quickly, often with diminishing returns. But if normal supply is like a sugar high for a narcissist, supply from an empath is like heroin. They know that the empath sees not only their outward persona, but also the broken and wounded person hidden within them, holds a space for both, and naively chooses to stay anyway because they can see the potential of the narcissist. This does not necessarily, however, change their supply-seeking behavior.

FCNs will ultimately seek to hijack your better nature and use it to control you to get you to act as a buffer for their own fragile ego, placing you in the role of rescuer, if you will. And if for any reason she feels you aren’t fulfilling that role to her satisfaction, she’ll hit you with accusations, threats, loyalty binds, or any number of other manipulations to get or keep you there.

The FCN needs to feel like she owns you to be safe from her fear of rejection. Threaten that enough and she’ll go to extremes to manipulate you back into the relationship and, if that fails, she will begin the discard process, which we’ll touch on in another article.

Be well.

-Fritz

Leave a comment

Out of necessity, this will be a longer one, so buckle up. It’s a gonna be a bumpy ride.

The End

It was 4:03 AM on a Friday morning, just a few days before Christmas, and only a few days past our 16th wedding anniversary. Like every other night for the past four months, I was exhausted from being up for 22 hours, 12 of which had been consumed with being screamed at by Anne for offenses mainly imagined. I was laying on the floor next to the bed for the sin of refusing to be gaslit on this night, physically bruised from her attacks, but emotionally numb from it all. It was at this moment that I decided to take my life back and finally step away from a marriage that had become mentally, emotionally, financially, and physically abusive, come what may.

The question of walking away and leaving my home and marriage had been on my mind many times over the past 16 years, but on this night the camel’s back had been broken. Keep in mind that for at least half of our marriage, Anne had been chronically ill, so I’d been working my day job, taking care of the kids, the house, and all of the errands that come with domesticity.

“Who’ve you been fucking when you go to shopping for hours??”

“I know you’ve been having an emotional affair with that friend from the third grade.”

“I’ve always thought there was something weird about how you hug your sister. It’s probably incest. Probably your mom, too.”

“I’ll tell the cops that you’ve been hitting me.”

“I’ll tell the cops to check for any Peeping Toms in the area because it’s probably you.”

“You should just kill yourself. You’re garbage; not even a man.”

And the newest and final straw: “I’ll tell the cops that you’ve been abusing my daughter.”

Of course, none of these things were true in the slightest, but we live in world where the allegation is more important than the actual fact. Standing at 6’1” and around 200 pounds with years of martial arts behind me, the police will arrest first and ask questions later “for safety”.

I finally admitted to myself that Anne’s connection to reality had come completely untethered and she existed now to do everything in her power to break me. There was nothing I could say, or do, to right the ship. It was time to go.

For the next three hours I laid awake staring at the ceiling and planning my next steps and movements in order to leave the house quickly, quietly, and with key items that could not be left behind. Around 07:00 AM, I got up and started my day as if it were any other, but rather than sitting down to work I cleared out my gun safe, packed up some sentimental books, a few tools, and a bag of clothes selected more or less randomly from a laundry pile. The electronics took a little more finesse because I’d allowed Anne to control most of them in her search for evidence of affairs and other nefariousness that I knew didn’t exist (a whole article in itself down the road) but by 10:00 I’d loaded my truck, said my goodbyes to our puppy, and slipped out the door.

The next couple of days were mostly a blur. I numbly settled into a little space my brother had carved out for me in a camp trailer on that first evening. I helped him unload a storage unit and some other busy work over the weekend. Anything to stay busy and not sink into my own thoughts.

A friend, to whom I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude, knew something of what had been going on and had purchased me a prepaid phone that I kept hidden for emergencies such as an abrupt split from Anne, and this I used to communicate with my attorney and others that needed to know.

I kept my regular phone off except to occasionally check for any messages from work or other key people. As I did so, two things jumped out at me. One, I had a bunch of alerts from the home security system which led to my seeing at least a half-dozen deputies had been at my house on the Friday evening after I’d left. For another, Anne had been leaving messages that started out demanding and imperious, then business-like, then pleading, telling me to just come back and that we could work this out before it became “messy”. I answered none of them, trusting my instincts and refusing to reengage or return home based on what I knew was crass manipulation.

The weekend came to a close and Monday morning I went back to working remotely like nothing had changed. I arranged things with my attorney to get a divorce going. But that peace I’d felt on Sunday was gone, replaced with a slowly rising sense of dread throughout the day. I chalked it up to anxiety over the pending divorce but it seemed bigger than that, and by late afternoon the dread was practically screaming at me. And I had no idea why.

Through the haze of that dread, I nevertheless decided to travel the hour north to pick up a package at a shipper’s office a few towns over from my home and, never one to waste a trip, run a few shopping errands while I was at it. Of course I managed to leave my phones in the truck when I went into Walmart so when I got back I discovered I had a voice mail.

Timestamp: 21 Dec 2021, 19:55

“Hi this is Deputy <X> with the Sheriff’s department. Um, I need you to give me a call back on our non-emergency number as soon as possible. Thank you, Bye.”

Now at this point something was drawing me me inexorably toward home, but intuition was screaming at me not to go anywhere close to the house. So I drove past the end of my street where I could see that there were half a dozen or more emergency vehicles in front of the house. The dread that had been building all day all coalesced into a pit in my stomach and I knew in my gut that something terrible had happened.

Confused, concerned, scared, I’d started away from the neighborhood and back toward town when I got a call from “Unknown”. Sure enough, it was the Sheriff’s deputy calling to let me know they needed to talk to me in person. I told them to meet me at my friend’s house (the same one that had gotten me the spare phone) a few miles from my own and then called ahead to update my friend on the situation.

Ten minutes after I got to my friend’s house, the deputy arrived. Not unkindly, he proceeded to let me know that my step-daughter had found Anne and called 9-1-1; when paramedics arrived she was declared unresponsive, a detestable euphemism for what I later found out was suicide by hanging.

Notification made, the deputy also insisted I stay put as a detective needed to speak with me even as I was reeling from the news. I was sitting on the tail gate of my truck, wrapped in a blanket to shield me from the December cold and shock, when the detective arrived and let me know that my step-daughter would be staying with some friends that night while Anne’s family drove down from another state to pick her up.

Also, I was under arrest for domestic abuse.

I can’t say I was completely surprised by this turn of events, despite being the one carrying the bruises, but I was catalyzed in that moment. All of the pain, anger, fear, concern, sadness, exhaustion, and more coalesced into a tight little ball of determination in my gut.

Still rocked by the events of the night, I nevertheless sat silently through the ride to the county lockup and as COVID tests were administered in the secure garage area outside the jail.

While I waited to be processed in, the arresting detective decided to pull me aside and start asking questions. Adamant but polite, I nevertheless refused to answer without an attorney present, much to his consternation and annoyance. [1]

Then, I waited. And Waited. And while I waited, I noticed the detective talking to the prison nurse. Not long after they’d finished, the nurse called me in and talked to me, too, plying me with some basic questions about my current state. I answered none too enthusiastically, but generally my tone was that I was understandably in shock, but not a danger to myself or others.

When I finally got called back to be processed into a cell, though, it became clear what was going on. I was strip searched and placed naked in a “turtle shell”, an extremely stiff cordura nylon and velcro horse blanket shaped like a massively oversized tank top that hangs down to your knees. I was then locked alone in a cold, glassed in cell rather like a fish bowl with nothing but a blanket and a sleeping pad, and left to my thoughts.

This was the cherry on top of everything - it seems that the detective didn’t like that I wouldn’t answer his questions without legal representation present, so he decided to make the process the punishment and colluded with the nurse to get me placed on suicide watch. Eventually, this would take an additional 13 hours, with “psych evals” to get out.

As bad days go, this one was epic. Upon release I couldn’t go home. Did I mention there was also a temporary restraining order keeping me away from my own house, even though nobody was there? No? Ya…

I was extremely fortunate to have a best friend and mentor who stood by me through out all of this. He’d seen Anne’s decline over the years, seen the bruises, heard the stories and phone conversations and took me into his home for Christmas and New Years to keep an eye on me and give me a quiet place to decompress safely. Never have I been so grateful. I owe him a debt of gratitude I’ll never be able to repay in this life.

Some Clarity

Looking back now with that “clarity of distance”, a few things stand out to me about the situation I found myself in on that December night. Doubts I’d told myself were inconsequential or wrong that turned out to be significant harbingers of what was to come and yet I papered over them in an effort to not rock the boat and avoid confrontation.

First and foremost, I had not been honest with myself about the concerns I’d had during our courtship, any one of which should have been a deal-breaker. Doubts based on small arguments we’d had that presaged much larger issues. Doubts from interactions I’d seen between Anne and others, including her parents, that were troubling to say the least. Doubts, because her general approach to people was often a mask, hiding her contempt for those she saw as lesser in some way (which was just about everyone) but then trash talking those same people in private. I swept those all under the proverbial rug. And then there were the things that Anne had kept well hidden or camouflaged when I was around. Until we were married, that is.

Once married, the mask came off and I began to see behaviors in the open that had previously been hidden away. I at once began to see just how dysfunctional Anne’s relationship with her mother was. All too often I had allowed myself to be used as a proxy for her mother to be yelled at or as the scapegoat when her mother justifiably called out a bad behavior. “Why didn’t you defend me over such and such?!” was a common refrain, even when we both knew she was in the wrong.

Anne considered herself an expert in any field that she decided to speak on, be it finance, employment, male psychology, and many more. If I could only count the number of times I was told my own emotions were “wrong” and they needed to be some other way that served her…

And as for the hidden and camouflaged things, her sexual history sits high on that list. She’d been very circumspect about things like her prior body count and previous partners while cultivating an image of innocence and repentance. As it turned out, her count was rather high for her age and locale, at least in part because, as she admitted in the last four months of the marriage, that she’d been a “sex worker” for some period. And yes, my language here is deliberate and context matters; we were both Mormons and living in a relatively small, strongly Mormon town.

Early on I was concerned about some of the men on her social media friends list but was told they were “just friends” so I consciously decided to trust Anne and leave it at that. It wasn’t until near the end that I learned several of those had, in fact, been past sexual partners who reached out and attempted to rekindle a relationship with her during the last four months of our marriage. Of course, she only admitted it then as a means to manipulate and control me.

Lessons Learned

So, what can we learn from all of this?

Among the many lessons to be taken here, I think the foremost is this: I OWN THE MESS I FOUND MYSELF IN. Yes, Anne was a covert narcissist and did innumerable bad things in and to our relationship. But she also gave me plenty of warning signs, both overt and covert, that I failed to pay attention to. Because I was not honest with myself, I was willing to subvert my own intuition and even what I would call divine counsel (see my intro article) to continue down a path to something I thought I wanted.

Second, over the 16 years we were married, I failed again and again to defend boundaries that should have been written in stone, all in an attempt to avoid an argument. There is nothing more important to a narcissist than breaking down your boundaries in any way they can. Do not let them.

Third, people often tell you who they truly are without really meaning to if you pay attention to what they DO, versus what they SAY. When actions and words do not agree, they’re telling you something. Believe them.

Finally, living through bad times can be the greatest learning experience of your life. No, I don’t recommend putting yourself through 16 years of hell, but if you make time in your life to contemplate the smaller lessons, very quickly larger lessons will become apparent as well, if you let them.

In the five years since this story ended, I’ve implemented these lessons in my own life. I’m particular about who I let into my life but I’ve also found great joy, tremendous peace, and love that goes beyond words. To the extent that you take these lessons into your own life, you can, too.

Be well.

-Fritz

1. Note to cops out there - don’t try to hide intentions from someone that’s been living with a covert narcissist for 16 years. We can read you and your intentions like a billboard.

Hope springs eternal, and so it is my hope to pass on some lessons for men (and women) on the risks and consequences of making poor relationship choices by way of examples from my own lived experience.

All too often I see young men entering adult life with poor templates on how relationships should work and how they should behave within their relationships, much as I did at the same age. Instead of demonstrating solid templates for relationships and behaviors, society has reinforced tolerance for the intolerable, investing time and money into bottomless pits for attention, and so many more examples, but it all serves to make this point:

We, as men, MUST know ourselves before we can truly know and understand another human.

But once we do, it makes the job of creating our own good templates, defending our boundaries and ourselves a much clearer task. To that end, I believe it’s useful to present relatable stories that illustrate some clear examples of just how badly a relationship can go if one fails to be vigilant in paying attention to concerns early on, fails to defend boundaries with a significant other, or gets duped into a relationship with the wrong person.

Where My Journey Began

I was 32 years old and three days into the honeymoon of my second marriage when I knew without a doubt that I’d made the mistake of my life.

To this day I can only approximate my new wife, Anne’s, words but, to paraphrase - “I’m just not sure I can love and stay with a man like you”.

WHAT???

I laid in bed with the sick, cold, sinking feeling of that knowledge, staring at the wall, my mind a jumble of static and intruding thoughts.

I’d only ever tried to be kind, supportive, and protective of Anne, but in that one sentence I knew in no uncertain terms that every weakness I’d ever divulged to her would be exhumed and held against me as an example of my lack of worthiness, and every mistake I ever made while with her would not only not be forgiven, but it would serve as leverage for her to use against me forever as emotional and psychological blackmail. And I could not have been more correct. What I didn’t know at the time was that my better qualities would be weaponized against me, too.

You see, I’d made the classic blunder of opening up to a covert narcissist despite my early misgivings and, while I didn’t have any notion of what that was at the time, I knew deep down that I had been duped and that one sentence was a major clue. [1] Every intimate secret I’d ever divulged, every misstep I’d shared, had been the supply that she was looking for. My gut reaction was a major indicator that I’d fallen prey to her love bombing and was now on a trajectory of pain. Little did I know.

You may well be asking now “Why did you not leave right then, Fritz?”

During the rather short [2] dating period, there had been a few occurrences that gave me pause. The single most memorable one, however, was in a moment of solitary reflection. I was sitting in the temple one day [3] in meditative prayer, and I was asking the question of whether I should marry Anne or not. Sitting there, silent, I was stunned to hear:

“It will be the hardest thing you ever do”.

And I thought “I can do that”, and went on to propose and get married. Incidentally, I took the name of this substack from that bit of revelation.

Despite the absolute gut check of my honeymoon, I stayed because, being raised in a Mormon home where duty and commitment were key facets of our upbringing, getting married was a huge commitment where a man (quite correctly) is supposed to do his duty as husband and father in protecting, caring, and providing for his family. Just jumping right back out was… inconceivable.

What’s more, my new wife had a beautiful, innocent, red-haired nine month old daughter from her previous marriage with whom I was completely enamored and who had very quickly attached to me and my son from my previous marriage. What man would abandon that?

And besides, I’m stubborn.

What followed was the hardest 16 years of my life. That’s not to say that there weren’t good times; there absolutely were. But underneath those good times there was the constant drumbeat of a covert narcissist [4] weaponizing against me the very struggle to be better, work harder, and do more to make her happy.

As rough as those years were and as dark as some of the coming subject matter is, my story is one of hope and redemption. Looking back I can see the roots of so many positive things in my life now. It was truly the refiner’s fire making me who I am today; still a flawed human, but with much greater clarity in who and what I am and the strength to stand by my boundaries and convictions. Most importantly, it has honed my capacity to love people where they are in their own journey.

I have much to be grateful for.

Going Forward

This introduction tells only the briefest story of how things got started. In the next chapter I’ll detail just how badly things ended and, as other chapters unfold, I’ll touch on clues that should have warned me off early in the dating process, places where I should have set hard and fast boundaries with absolute consequences, and examples of behavior that perhaps should have been indicators that things should end immediately. Through recollected events I’ll illustrate object lessons so that others may learn from my mistakes.

See you there.

-Fritz

1. Down the road I’ll do at least one chapter on “female covert narcissists”. They’re hard to spot unless you know the signs, and really good at hiding it until they feel safe. After that, the gloves come off.

2. Met in July, married in December. Talk about abbreviated.

3. I was raised Mormon but am more spiritual than religious these days.

4. I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to Lisa Leblanc. Her content on female covert narcissists was the key to understanding so many things that I didn’t have a name for. Give her a listen on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@LiseLeblanc