Hello, Sam Vaknin of Malignant Self-Love fame, here again. Be sure to watch my previous video about mutations in the virus and the vanity and hubris of the medical profession.
Today we will discuss dynamics between the narcissist and his partner.
The narcissist has three essential demands from his partner and companion. I call them the three S's, sex, supply, narcissistic supply, and services. If she provides any two of these three, he is pacified and he ignores her. She is like a captive, like a hostage, and he is indifferent to her emotions, needs and wishes. He takes her silent acquiescing presence in his life for granted. She is to him an inert, lifeless and objectified or even mummified fixture. I call this process snapshotting.
He takes a snapshot of her and he relates to the snapshot. The narcissist acts similarly towards a frustrating partner who provides only one or none of the three S's.
In both cases, if his needs are satisfied or if his needs are not met, he withdraws, he disinvests, he absents himself, he cuts off all meaningful communication. It's a no win situation, a lose-lose situation.
Whatever you do, you are doomed and no good deed goes unpunished by the narcissist's absence.
In both cases, the narcissist reacts with extreme abuse and rejection to any attempt to invade or control his personal space or his personal time.
To attract his attention and gain access to him, the partner needs to escalate. She needs to dramatize. She needs to render herself unpredictable. She needs to exaggerate her behaviors. She needs to become not herself.
Very often you hear partners of narcissists or spouses and so on and say, I'm shocked, I'm surprised. It's not me. I don't know. I've never done this before or I don't know why I've done this. It's not like me.
Many partners react to this apathetic negation of their being by self-trashing. For example, by drinking to oblivion and having unprotected sex with a low life stranger, by falling into bed company, self-harming with drugs or otherwise, by engaging in other reckless and self-destructive behaviors.
Narcissist pushes him to do these things with his utter apathy. The aim of all these maneuvers, self-trashing, dramatizing, escalating, exaggerating, the aim of all these maneuvers, the aim of becoming a drama queen, the aim of acquiring actually borderline traits, modal ability and dysregulated emotions.
The partner is doing all these things because she wants to communicate distress. She's telling the narcissist by ignoring and rejecting me, you're hurting me so much that I want to destroy myself. I hope the pain that I am causing you now will be sufficiently potent, sufficiently strong to pierce the veil, to make you care about me, to penetrate your formidable firewall and stupor.
Usually, only the threat of abandonment or actual loss can convey this harrowing and heartbreaking message. Overt, ostentatious, purposeful and weaponized cheating is the sole way open to the partner to get through to the neglectful and oblivious other.
And ironically, this escalated cry for help is rarely restorative. It rarely restores the relationship.
Of course, if the other party cheats ostentatiously inconspicuously, it's not very conducive to the continuation of the relationship on good terms or any terms. Such behavior often is irrevocably terminal and destructive. It dooms the relationship.
But what to do? There's nothing else to do. Half measures like, for example, triangulation are useless. The narcissist doesn't even notice. He's so immersed in himself. He's so occupied with impressing others. He's so full of himself that he doesn't even notice triangulation.
The only way to attract his attention, to get to him, get through to him, to wake him up. The only way is an all out egregious in your face infidelity. It's the only efficacious wake up call.
But of course, it's also a last hurrah.
And this leads to, because there's a rising narcissism and a marked avalanche of narcissistic partners, this leads to certain societal or society wide developments.
Scholars like Cleckley and Cartman have noted even 80 years ago that misandry and misogyny, men hating and women, women hating, misandry and misogyny, coupled with a profound and abiding fear of intimacy, result in psychopathic antisocial behaviors in adulthood. Such people form intimate relationships that are anything but intimate.
So I repeat, this growing misandry hatred of men, this growing misogyny, hatred of women, and people are infected. It's exactly like the COVID-19 virus.
By now, I would say that majority of population is actually infected.
And so it's very difficult for people who hate the other sex to form intimate relationships with the other sex.
What they do create, what they do engender, is relationships that are intimate only by name. These relationships are impersonal, they're disempathic, they're transient, they're objectified, emotionless, non-committal, defiant, defensive, entitled, and founded on destructive envious competition, on deceit, on contumacious recklessness. Both parties are loathe to share anything or to disclose vulnerabilities because the setting is adversarial, more like a courtroom than a relationship. The prosecution doesn't share or expose vulnerabilities to the defense team.
It is small wonder that as our civilization becomes more and more narcissistic, both men and women adopt and emulate grandiose psychopathic men as role models, gurus, and guiding lights.
But in a feat of reverse mental engineering, this paradigm change also entails a surge in intergender conflict and hatred.
What am I saying? Misogyny today and misandry are off the charts.
I have never, and I'm not as young as I look, I have never seen hatred of men and hatred of women so prevalent.
The genders get together nowadays, either to have casual meaningless sex or to tear each other down triumphantly and abusively via rejection, withholding, hurtful, extreme misconduct, betrayals, you name it. It's a jungle out there in more than one sense.
You can't expect to find an intimate partner. Your relationships deteriorate and degenerate into business partnerships or room mating.
Any attempt to establish a relationship that is more profound and more deep usually ends up in tremendous heartbreak.
Indeed, the number of breakups in the past 40 years has grown five times.
Relationships are not surviving. Divorces have stabilized, plateaued at an all-time high. Cheating has gone up three times among women.
The situation is so bad that many people are choosing simply to stay alone, to remain single in the fullest sense of the word. Single in the sense that they live alone at home and almost never see a member of the opposite sex, except maybe once or twice a year for an occasional romp in the hay.
Is this going to change? I don't think so.
I think external pressures like the pandemic and the economic upheaval is going to follow are going to actually radicalize and antagonize the genders.
Today, women compete with men on scarce resources.
This was not the case when the Spanish flu hit humanity. This was not the case in the 1950s after the Second World War.
But today, the growth in the Western world, at least, ceased and it's been stagnant for well over 30 years.
And yet the number of people competing for the same resources has doubled because women have entered the workforce, have entered professions, monopolized some of these professions, and women are playing traditionally male roles.
Women have also adopted male behaviors and male traits and are becoming indistinguishable psychodynamically for men.
So it's like the number of men has doubled. Only one kind, their genitalia are different, but the number of men has doubled.
It's exactly the same effect, like mass immigration.
Imagine that your country is opening up and the population doubles. There will be fierce competition for jobs and resources, including emotional resources.
Because you see, genders provide each other with an emotional setup that is exclusive. In other words, what a woman can give to a man, another man cannot give to a man.
I'm talking about heterosexual men.
And when a woman emulates a man, she no longer can provide these highly idiosyncratic emotions that a woman in a more traditional gender role can provide.
Same goes for a man, by the way. Men are becoming more and more traditionally feminine.
So as the whole world becomes uni-gender, there is enormous emotional deprivation and it's only growing.
And we know from psychology that the reaction to such a traumatic tectonic shift, the reaction to constant emotional withholding and deprivation is by developing and displaying narcissistic and psychopathic defenses.
We are becoming more and more narcissistic and more and more psychopathic because everyone else is becoming more and more narcissistic and psychopathic.
And we have no one else to turn to.
A few days ago, a study was published. People were asked, is there a single person in your life with whom you will not hesitate to share your deepest secrets?
The answer in the 1980s was, yes, I do have such people, five of them actually.
A few days ago, the study was repeated. The number dropped from five to zero. People in this pretty large study didn't have a single person to confide in, a single person to share with, a single person to trust.
That is the world we're living. The virus in its economic aftermath, self-inflicted wounds, they're not going to make things better.
Except expect a bumpy ride for humanity as a species and for yourselves as individuals.