My Regrets. My learning. Hope.

I married a narcissist who had led a double life seeing another man behind my back for years. One day he just discarded me. That was five years ago and now I want to share what I learned along the way. 

Lwanda and I in happier times.
San Francisco, April 2017.

Today it's nearly 5 years since my life was completely changed. Turned upside down. It was in the summer of 2015 I met Lwanda. You can read the whole story in my post "Help! I married a narcissist!". The short story is that I met what I thought was a wonderful young black guy, we got together and had what I thought was a wonderful relationship which led to us marrying. I really wanted to be with him for the rest of my life. Sadly he did not and had already secured someone else behind my back and had a relationship in parallel with him for several years. I gradually found out about all of this but to this day I have not had any explanation whatsoever. I was essentially discarded, by a guy who was clearly somewhere on the narcisstic spectrum and had no empathy or consideration for anyone else. It's called Narcisstic Personality Disorder (NPD). It all ended in the most horrible way, with me divorcing him (having had his current partner force him to divorce me) and having had to endure years of emotional torment and pain. 

Now, years later at least I have some perspective. I now understand how people feel after being discarded. I feel envious of those who have just had a "normal" break-up where most things are explained and understood and you just go your separate ways. I was denied that. Denied the opportunity to understand, and there was no warning - one day he just stopped communicating with me. Later I learned I am not the only one who has had something like this happening to me. 

It was when I was feeling so low about everything that I started this blog, just to get an outlet. I had to describe how I felt and over time I thought it would also be good to share my experiences for the benefit of anyone else who found themselves in the same situation. 

Of course if you had told me 5 years ago I would meet someone I really liked, that I would start a relationship, eventually marry, and be the happiest I have ever been - I would not have believed you. Yet, it happened. And then it ended. I had no answers when it ended. It was so raw and it was learning to live with the unresolved that was so difficult for me. Someone I cared about so much and was so in love with was suddenly not there anymore. I felt like there was such a strong bond between us and that just made it harder. It was the sudden withdrawal that gave me so much pain. Couple that with grief following what is essentially a loss, not having any answers, and blaming yourself for the failure of it all and you really start to question your whole life existence. You go through so much grief and feel frustration, anger, disbelief, sadness and finally acceptance.

Abandoned. Discarded.
Many of us have had a relationship or marriage end. Far fewer have had it end abruptly without an explanation or any reason. You end up with so many questions and no answers. Being abandoned and discarded is different from a normal break-up. I would liken it more to someone having had their child go missing on them, or a loved one suddenly passing away. This is why:

• You are left in a total state of shock
• You have not been able to find any closure.
• You have no answers. 
• You ask yourself if you did something wrong. "Is there something wrong with me? Did I say something wrong? Do something wrong?" 
• You never got a chance to close that chapter of your life and just move on
• You end up with anxiety attacks and PTSD
• The huge change going from a relationship that you thought was good, to nothingness is so hard to process
• You probably still love the other person very much and that just makes it all so much worse. Maybe you are crying at night, trying to comprehend it all and always thinking of that person.
• It feels like what you thought you had has been torn away from you. Maybe you also feel like something has been ripped out of you.
• The other person likely lied to you a lot and had no empathy or guilt about leaving you. That is hard to come to terms with.

            Watch my video here on the 9 things you can do to recover from a situation where your             partner has discarded or abandoned you without explanation.

Painful

For me, it was so painful. It slowly dawned on me that the whole relationship may have been fake. That what you thought you had, you did not actually have and he was just manipulating you to think he loved you. Not capable of feeling love himself he just mimiced loving behaviour. 

If you read through my blog from the first post you will be able to see my whole journey up until now. From the day I met Lwanda until the day I went on Grindr in a desperate attempt to get him to talk to me, to the time I realised I am codependent. Throughout much of it I have been in a constant state of feeling upset and anxious but my feelings and thoughts have changed for the better over time. 

Recovery
Recovery from being discarded/abandoned is a journey. A slow, painful journey. I had no idea recovering would take years. Many years. And I did not know the pace of recovery would be this slow. I read online it can take up to 18 months to "unlove" someone. That probably applies if you have had some closure. In my case I had none. Hence, I expect recovery to take 3-4 years. Maybe even 5? It's an uncomfortable thought. When will I be "whole" again? When will I feel more or less like I felt before I met this guy five years ago? Back then, before all this happened, I was not happy. I was unhappy because I did not have anyone to love. But I was just that - unhappy yet still liked my life and got on with it.

In the beginning I thought all I had to do was somehow "unlove" Lwanda. I blogged about that here. Employ some mental exercises and he would be gone from my mind forever, I naively thought. Turns out...it's not that simple. You can't unlove someone. Your love for someone will dissipate over time but you can't flick a switch. It seems the more love you had for the other person and the deeper your relationship felt the harder it is to get over. I really loved Lwanda so much, he was the absolute love of my life and emotionally gave me something no one else has been able to. Despite now knowing he probably feigned his emotions for me it felt very real for me and the emotional scars I have after this will always be there. The wound will heal but the scars will always be with me.

How do you do it? How do you cope?
Through complete coincidence I met a new friend who had also been through a relationship with a psycopath with clear narcissistic tendencies. My friend Laura met what she thought was a lovely guy - she was love bombed and felt so great until the whole thing came to an abrupt end one day. "How do you do it?" she asked one day, me sensing from her question she was not doing particularly well herself and wondering what to do. The short answer is there is no magic formula for a quick recovery. There is just all these things that you don't want to hear when you are curled up in the fetal position on the floor full of indescribable pain.  That it will take months and years to recover. That time will heal. That there is no quick fix, but there is hope. 

After it truly dawned on me that it was all over, which must have been around the time when I realised he had discarded me and gone to live with another man I knew nothing about I had to try and recover and move on with my life. What I learned was:

• Find distractions in your life. Just go and do things. Don't just sit at home. Get out and about. Make a list of things you could do, maybe things you always wanted to do but never got around to? Join a tai chi class, baking class, go fishing, go on walks and day trips with your friends, meet up with other people on meetup.com, your local church etc. Just go and do something, somewhere. That is all it takes. Constantly distract yourself. Don't sit at home and just mope. It won't get you anywhere.
• Accept you may need therapy. Reach out and find a good therapist. 
• Try reading self help books
• It may help to meet up with other people who have experienced the same. They will immediately understand what you are going through. Look for support groups in your area.
• Don't bother with dating. My friends told me to use dating as a distraction. It was a disaster. I just wasn't ready. My dates immediately sensed I was "broken". Dating damaged goods is not attractive. You need to repair yourself before you go on a date.
• Don't fall into the trap of accepting causal sex/one night stands as a substitute for a new relationship. 
• Try and plan things in the future so you always have something to look forward to. A trip abroad, dinner with a friend, a concert.

What would I have done differently?
Naturally after a trauma hits you like it did to me you are left with so many thoughts about what you should have done. You can't go back but at least you have to try and learn from your experience and review your own behaviour so that next time you meet someone you don't fall into the same trap, and repeat the same pattern.

Gift giving can backfire. I gave him a nice portable speaker - little did I know that a few minutes
later this photo was on Instagram, with him claiming he had just purchased it for himself.

Gift giving - he should want to be with you for you!
I wish I had realised before that in any relationship the other person should want to be with you for you. Not your money or what they can get out of it at the time. Being conservative with your generosity may weed out the people who want to be with you for the wrong reasons. I wish I had not been the victim of Lwanda's subtle manipulation and lies. I wish I had not been so blinded by love and somehow translated that love into a willingness and wish to be generous to him. I bought him so many things. I thought showering him with gifts would somehow express my love for him. Now I know better. They were not extravagant gifts as such - a laptop, clothes, shoes - practical presents that he did genuinely

I gave him the money to buy a car only to
discover he tries to pass it off on Twitter as
something he has himself worked hard for.

need. But excessive gift-giving is part of co-dependent behaviour and not healthy. I also bought him a car. I did have spare cash at the time. And I loved him so much and then we would have a car to use whenever I was with him in South Africa, I told myself. So I gave him the money. After the divorce, he kept the car. And one day I saw on Twitter he tried to pass off the car as something he had worked so hard for. Of course he had not, I was the one who hard worked hard for it. It hurt to see. Why it hurt so much I don't really know. It just did. 

Trust
It's a scary thought when you realise the person you trusted the most, that you thought you knew everything about, turns out to be a different person with secrets, lies and a parallel life. Was I too naive and good-hearted to trust him implicitly? At what point do you really trust someone? There needs to be trust in a relationship but does it need to be absolute? Should you trust someone implicitly? I suspect I will after this always have issues completely trusting someone else. At the same time I also want to trust whoever I meet in the future. In hindsight I was too trusting. Unlike some of my friends I don't have a built-in bullshit detector. Wish I had. I wish I had called him out on everything that seemed strange or did not make sense, but at the same time he was extremely adept at lying and manipulating. His lies were elaborate, plausible and very hard to detect. 

So, should I have asked to see his phone? If I had all his secrets would have been exposed. I would have seen his Grindr app, his chat history with his other man, and likely a lot of things about me I would not like. Conversations with his family. Still, it's very intrusive. I could argue that if he had nothing to hide he would let me take a look. On the other hand some people say this borders on controlling behaviour. You can't win. 

Should I have questioned everything he said in my mind? Madly in love and so happy you have finally find someone who wants to be with you don't just question everything someone says. Add to that 100k+ messages exchanged on whatsapp, long sensual and intimate sessions, and you feel like you really really know them and have a distinct bond with them. There should not be any need for distrust. I trusted him with my life since we had unprotected sex - yet I had no idea he was seeing another man for years behind my back and also having sex with him. It could have gone very wrong. I know my story is not unique. I have read countless stories of women who discover their husband had another woman on the side, some even having multiple wives and like in my case, neither woman knew about each other.

I still struggle with flashbacks of our time together. Episodes pop into my head and I wonder "did he lie at that time as well or was it genuine?". Clearly if you have been with someone who is adept at lies you can never separate the truth from the lies, you simply do not know what he lied

about. On the first day back in SA for me, a week before our wedding, I booked a room for one night for us in a hotel near the Gateway mall. Things seemed normal. We have so much to do before the wedding. My family is due to arrive, we need to pick out wedding rings, buy a suit, sort things out at the venue...and only one week to do it. We have a busy day and go back to the hotel. I lie down on the hotel bed my feet killing me after all the mall walking. Lwanda sits crouched tapping on his phone. "I don't know what to do now he says", explaining that his mom is desperate because she wants to stay with her boyfriend and there is no one to look after his 16-year-old sister. He had always been very protective of his sister, probably overly protective but that is probably how it goes if you are the older brother. "My mom is asking why am I not at our house" he continues. "I was meant to look after my sister and now my mom is mad at me" he continues. I instantly feel guilty. "Don't mind me I can be alone tonight", I reply. "Are you absolutely sure?" he asks and I reassure him that he should go look after his sister so she is not alone. He taps away on his phone, presumably talking to his family, and gets up to leave. I give him a huge sloppy goodbye kiss and get back on my bed thinking about the days ahead.

Fast forward a few years. The memory hits me. This time though I am not so sure if any of it was true. I try and think back. Knowing he lied about so much...and then it hits me that maybe he was seeing his other man, Theo, that night. Maybe Theo had just landed from his flight from Joburg and was now wondering where Lwanda was and when he would be coming. I recall Theo telling me he went down to Durban during that wedding week, why I don't know, perhaps it was just because it was his regular bi-monthly trip from Joburg to see Lwanda which he had by now gotten used to. Perhaps at that very moment Lwandas two parallel lives collided with both his men wanting him at the same time...I will never know. Knowing is not that important either. What is important is how he behaved and how I believed every word he told me. Instead, I should have thought how odd it was that he would just go off like that, to "babysit" his now 16 year sister who could perfectly well look after herself. After all, he should have been ecstatic to see me again and very excited about our forthcoming wedding. 

How can I trust again?
In hindsight I should have looked at the relation between his behaviour and his words. His words were golden to me and however he behaved I subconsciously disregarded or did not put two and two together. His behaviour was actually what I should have observed and listened to, not his words or even lack of words. Actions really speak louder than words. Check out this website for more on that subject.

My other learning is that you have to use your friends. 
Your friends can be your lie detector. What you can't see because you are so in love they can see. Trust the instincts of your friends and value their insights. Let them observe and interact with your partner-to-be. Hopefully, if they think something is wrong they will be your good friend and tell you. 

Distance
Maintaining a relationship over distance is hard, but feasible. Building a relationship over distance I now realise is unrealistic. Can you travel and see each other regularly? Of course. Can you chat over whatsapp, video call? Yep. But to truly build a long lasting relationship you have to be with the other person for an extended period of time. That is just not possible when you live and work 6000Kms apart. Lwanda and I never had the opportunity to live together for more than a month. In hindsight that is not enough continuous time to truly get to know what that person is like to live with and be with on a daily basis. As my experience shows, it is possible for the other person to live a double life when you live so far apart and can only see each other every 2-3 months. That left plenty of room for him to be with other men and eventually be with another boyfriend and spend much time with him. Clearly he was happy as long as I was kept at a distance and he could plan his time with me when I came to visit, then go back to his other man. It seems the big distance prevented us from meeting and being together in the context of our daily lives. Instead we met in holidays and although I spent some weeks working out of SA we still "holidayed" together athern than "lived" together. 

Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Should you have a degree in psychology before you enter into a relationship with someone? I ask myself that now. I joke with my friends that I should start sending any potential suitors on Grindr and other apps a psychological questionnaire before I agree to meet them. Obviously though we can't all be psychologists! Still, if I had more insight into my own codependency and how narcissism manifests itself in another person then I could have avoided my whole ordeal. I could have done what I do now, focusing on self love and getting to a place where I am so aware of my codependency and my attachment issues that I would be ready to build a secure, healthy relationship.

Five years ago I had no idea about any of this. I wish I had picked up on all the red flags. They were all there. I just did not see them. I think inside the universe of my mind I could just not imagine another person being so different. I had complete trust in him. I thought whatever he said, like he loved me, was true. He spent years getting me to a point where I felt truly free and comfortable with him. I could walk around naked without any feelings of body issues. I had never been able to do that with anyone before. Once, when I was in the pool naked, he looked a bit oddly at me. I asked if anything was wrong. He said he just "admired perfection" as I was there swimming naked in the sunny pool. I believed him. I believed everything he told me. Didn't question any of it. 

You did not come into this world codependent. Or a narcissist. You were damaged at an early age.
The irony of all this is that what happened to me became a catalyst for a better and deeper understanding of myself. How was I meant to know I was codependent? [You can read more here in: Help! I'm Co-Dependent!] I did not know. Had I not somehow ended up in a relationship with the most toxic combination possible - narcissism and codependency - I would have just carried on like before. In fact had things panned out differently and Lwanda was still with me I would have just unknowingly continued on my codependent path. That would have been even worse. At least now I am in a space where I feel I have learned enough about myself that I can bring with me into my next relationship and never commit the same mistakes again, and never repeat my codependent behaviour.

I learned that we are all a product of our early lives and in trying to understand narcissistic behaviour I learnt that traumatic events in ones early life can affect you in so many ways. I wasn't born codependent. No one is. Lwanda wasn't born with his issues. We were both a product of our childhood and teenage years. My therapist tells me the source of my codependency is my fear of abandonment. Why I developed this I don't exactly know. I just know that the fear of being abandoned affected every moment of my relationship. I avoided conflict at all costs, because I was so afraid he would leave me. I thought we had a great relationship because we never argued. Obviously we never did because I shied away from conflict and never confronted anything he said or did. Even after I thought he had come to stay with me forever and he left after 10 days, I never displayed any anger and every time we talked on the phone afterwards I was afraid to the point of shaking that I would say something wrong that would make him hang up on me. Perhaps we had a few disagreements but they were never arguments. It wasn't a healthy relationship in that respect. The dynamics were all wrong. Me trying to cling on and he trying to get the most out of it before he quickly lost interest and in his mind, moved on. 

I think it was the dynamics of my parents' marriage that made me into the co-dependent I am today. Their marriage was really over before I was born yet they somehow decided to stay together for my sake. Bad mistake. I obviously picked up on this, even though I was very young, and their constant fighting and arguments must have led to a deep-rooted fear of abandonment. My mum was also bipolar and her bipolar antics probably didn't help matters and just fed into the whole instability of our family. If I wanted I could have five years or therapy and somehow pinpoint exactly what made me this way but it won't be helpful. What is helpful is acknowledging what you are and then taking steps to improve and get out of the co-dependent pattern.

"There is a reason this person is the way they are" I was told many times. So therefore my perspective on how I was treated and what Lwanda did to me has changed. Recently I learned that with every person displaying these characteristics there is an underlying trauma or a prolonged situation that affected that person. I don't know exactly what this was in Lwanda's case but I do know the death of his dad when he was still in his teens must have affected him deeply. Must have been traumatic. Then I also got the impression his mum could also be a narcissist. And growing up with a narcissist parent can apparently make yourself become narcisstic. It certainly would leave deep marks in your psyche at least. Perhaps there was also some other trauma I never got to learn about. A traumatic experience so bad that he never told me about it, even though we seemed to talk about all our innermost thoughts. It doesn't excuse what he did or how he behaved. But it has made me more compassionate now that I know there is a reason and background to his behaviour that was no fault of his own. 

Still, I did not see any of it. I could not fathom that someone could be so different in their ways of thinking and being from me. That someone could be so devoid of empathy. Calculating and lying. In my naive little world none of that even existed. There were some subtle and less subtle signs. 

He took selfies of himself.

I took selfies of us.

Take selfies. When we were together and took photos with our phones none of his photos was of us. He took photos of himself. I took photos of us.  Least of all, I could not imagine that person would be the person I had selected to be my partner for the rest of my life. Today, I hope I am able to spot the warning signs early. To just block them out of my life before they do any damage. 

My reading has also made me conclude that sadly there is no effective treatment for a narcissist. Whereas codependency can be treated there is little hope for the narcissists. In fact I feel sorry for anyone getting involved with a narcissist. I feel sorry for Lwanda's current partner and any future partners. The relationship won't last. And if he continues to attach to codependent, older men then those men will in the end all be left feeling exhausted, empty and betrayed. Like me.

Was it all wasted? 
I had to ask myself this question. I could have done without the experience. Yet I had the best 2.5 years of my life. I really did. I experienced love so profound and deep and was so happy. Especially when we cuddled and when I felt his naked body next to mine everything that was bad in the world just evaporated in front of me. Today I realise that most of that was simple biology and brain chemistry, where a hormone called oxytocin is produced with cuddling and body contact. It is highly addictive, and the addiction is probably fueled by my abandonment issues. There is a reason support groups like "Sex and love addicts anonymous" exist, I suppose. I am clearly not the only one who craves an oxitocyn high.

South Africa. Such natural beauty everywhere.
Northern Cape, February 2019.

I got a lot out of my time with Lwanda. I learned about new things, like cars. And to a degree, football. I became part of his universe. We explored South Africa, a beautiful and wonderous country that I will always miss. I felt like I really got under the skin of South Africans and started to understand the complexities of their society and culture. 
I made some new friends. I learned lots about myself. I planned a wedding and even though I now know that my ex husband just went along with it no one can take away from me that I actually had a great wedding that I will never forget. I have come past the embarrassment I felt and now think that I gave my friends and my family a great wedding and a fantastic experience, since none of them had ever been to SA before and they stayed with us for a week. 

Beautifully decorated dining table at our wedding in Durban, at the Collisheen Estate. Despite everything I got the wedding I had always hoped for and no one can take that away from me.

If you think it all sounds a bit Muriel's Wedding you may be partially right. I really wanted to find someone and when I unexpectedly did, wanted to marry him. It's a basic need we all have, to experience a partnership and twosomeness. Just being together as a couple is probably a very basic latent need we all have. 

I did enjoy my time with him so much and the naive, irrational part of my brain still hopes he will just turn up one day and apologise for his behaviour and the romantic film would just continue rolling. Obviously the rational part of my brain tells me that will never happen. And even if it did, I could never be with another narcissist. 

I also feel that I am now better equipped to function well in a new relationship and make it a healthy, balanced one. All the emotional hardship has made me come out of it at the other end being a changed person but also a wiser person who is now more self-aware and able to judge what might be good for me in the future. 

Hope
So is there hope, if you have been discarded by a narcissist? If you have been with someone and it abruptly ended, and you are in pain? Yes, there is. Lots of hope. You can overcome it. You will need help. From your friends, from professionals. But in time you will start to heal. You will start to feel better. It just takes a lot longer than you might expect.