Wow

I just left my husband today. I never suspected for a moment he was a narcissist until today. It was a long, draining day.

I thought I had a loving, loyal, wonderful husband. Yes he started abusing me after we got married, but he was still this sweet, wonderful guy, wasn't he? I could not decide which person was the real person.

Flash forward through eight years of this. In the morning, I asked him if it was okay if I visit my mother for around a week. At first he was fine and he just wanted to know why and so I told him (I needed space to clear my head, sort out my feelings, to take a step back from our life and look at it from a more objective viewpoint) and he kept grilling me because apparently my explanation was not satisfactory to him. I couldn't think of any other way to explain it. Eventually he agreed that if I needed time, I could have as much as I wanted. And I said that is very loving and I appreciate it. But then he decided that instead of taking me to my mom's house he would take a nap instead. He tried ignoring me, storming around, coming back up to bed to try to be sweet and acting like things were normal, yelling, ignoring, At one point he went to get me when I went out for a walk to talk on the phone with my mom...

He got me to go back into the house and I grabbed my bags to start packing them to the car and he goes into alert mode. First he does subtle things... takes off his sandals, indicating he is not willing to go out to the car to take me home. Then when I do not stop, he asks me "What are you doing?" As though it weren't obvious. "Putting my things in the car, so I can go to my mom's tonight." That was when he started pushing me around, shoved me onto the couch and would not allow me to leave. He kept insisting that we needed to talk about it, even though I had talked about it for hours earlier to no avail. So he yells at me about how I can't leave, then he tells me if I want to go get up and go then. So I get up and go.

The whole time I was on the phone with my mom, who is appalled at his behavior. I leave the house after he grabs me by the wrist and tells me to get out. After I am walking away from the house, talking on the phone with my mom, trying to make sense of what happened I hear a loud sound of glass breaking. I found out later that this was him punching the window with his fist. Several moments later, as I am walking across the street and away from my house, he comes out at the house and he looks furious. He keeps going with "we need to talk" "get back in the house" rhetoric until he sees that I am not buying it. He starts using his arms to push me toward the house. Then he grabbed the symbol of my love, trust, and devotion and tried to use it to drag me into the house against my will.

At some point the police and the neighbors saw this and he is in jail now.

It was strange, when they told me he could not come back,I felt safe.

On the drive home, my mother had a wonderful surprise for me. My loving, faithful, kind, sweet husband, who had only been with me, the person I thought was the love of my life, the person I was married to for eight years had been putting out ads for sex on Craigslist. During a time when I was most hurt and vulnerable, and out of our home, he was soliciting for sex from random strangers.

My mother also pointed out that he seems to have done things in the past that were detrimental to my growth as a person. When I would try to take a step forward in my life (school, work, drivers license), he would actively discourage me.

I don't know how I could have been so blind.