How to avoid Dating a Narcissist

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Tell them a minor problem from your life.
Make one up if you need to.

See if they

a) micromanage your problem and tell you how to fix it
b) totally ignore you or fail to listen
c) trivialise it by saying it's not a big deal
d) railroad overtop of you by telling you their problem
e) forget to follow up on it the next time you talk
f) talk about it endlessly on future dates, as a sign of one-dimensional thinking
g) dox your info to others like you're a trophy that they won
h) ask for way more personal information than is appropriate (love-bombing)

If any of the above, be forewarned that they don't have much empathy.
If they start to characterise you by that one issue they aren't seeing the whole you.

Also beware of love-bombers who think you walk on water just for existing.

Always have your personal firewall on.
It's not just about keeping creeps OUT of your life.
It's important to keep your info IN, so it can't be exploited against you.

I misread this, so I am going to change it up but how to avoid dating a narcissist.

Watch for early red flags:

1. Watch out for people who instantly want to jump into a relationship with you.
2. A grandiose narcissist will be overly self-confident whereas a vulnerable narcissist will often talk about they have been hurt.
3. They will love bomb you with things like flowers
4. Notice how they treat others
5. Have as little contact with these people as possible
6. Don't react respond by remaining calm.
Example:
"I hear you but we can agree to disagree. While you may feel a certain way about me that's your opinion. I get to have my own opinion about me."

Though we never dated, I had a crush on a covert narcissist who took me for a ride His traits

1. He never admitted his mistakes
2. He was the victim who couldn't land his dream job because he was too autistic to pass a job interview.
3. He would love bomb me one minute and then act like I did something wrong by ignoring me which I now know what a form of gaslighting.
4. He also had this grandiose idea that because he was a" Genius," the world owed him the same recognition as Dr. Grandin. When in reality, he didn't lift a finger. In fact, the guy was a bum.

Thinking back on both my father and my ex-wife, Narcissists will . . .

. . . blame all their misfortunes and mistakes on you.

. . . claim to be right, even after being proven wrong.

. . . create situations in which their behavior or lack of judgement can be blamed on you.

. . . denigrate you publicly and privately.

. . . expect you to be at their beck and call.

. . . hold you solely responsible for their drinking, drug abuse, smoking, and generally self-destructive behavior.

. . . never miss chances to slander you.

. . . refer to their poor communications skills, inability to compromise, and rage-filled rants as "emotional expression".

. . . remind you of all your past mistakes, even ones you have never made.

. . . routinely make commitments to you that they have no intention of keeping.

. . . value you for your wealth, your property, and your willingness to give it all to them.

I've been accused of having a sense of entitlement due to being disabled & having special needs others don't understand. It seems to be extremely common for disableds or any struggling person needing or wanting assistance to be accused of having a sense of entitlement Social Security & other various government programs designed to help the poor & disableds are often referred to in certain groups as entitlement programs. I believe that people who throw the word Entitlement around are projecting & are probably much more narcissistic than the people who are getting accused.

I perform Love-bombing due in part to being extremely affectionate & protective of my romantic partners & also being needy & clingy with romantic partners. I'm kinda the opposite way with everyone else thou including my own family. I tend to love romantic partners to be the same way with me. I love my romantic partners more than anything, I care aLOT about them & want the best for them even if it is not with me. I never thought of love-bombing as a sign of narcissism before. I guess it could be a red flag but I believe it's important to look at the whole person & the exact details of our relationship. People are extremely complex & nobody is either all good 100% of the time nor all bad 100% of the time. Perhaps our Aspie black & white thinking can get in the way of us seeing the whole picture & we can not see the forest for the trees.


This seems to be common for those of us on the spectrum due to us being misjudged & misunderstood by others. We may share a lot of personal info early on but we are not trying to create a false sense of intimacy. We do it because we are trying to experience intimacy. We want to have someone we can be our real true selves with instead of feeling forced to mask or be alone.


I'm glad you posted this There can sometimes be a bit(or a lot) of overlaping behaviors between us Aspies & Narcissists. It is possible for some Aspies to become narcissists due to lots of bad experiences with others in their lives. They become very callous & believe that most everybody will take advantage of others if they can get ahead. The Aspies believe that they need to look out for themselves & nobody else because nobody else will ever look out for them. I believe that only happens to a small percent of Aspies thou. Lots of us really do love & care about our romantic partners or other people in our lives & we feel genuinely bad when we know they are having a hard time. We tend to have problems reading others & we don't always know what is appropriate & inappropriate behavior. Our actions & behaviors often get misinterpreted because others can not read our minds nor our feelings/hearts


C seems to be very common with NTs. NTs tend to give me & others figurative pats on the back & tell us some meaningless cliches to make us feel better & other NTs tend to appreciate that BS. Perhaps me & you see things differently & think differently about this than them due to us being on the spectrum

If I was your date I would probably do A because I was wanting to help. A seems to be a common approach for us Aspie guys or maybe guys in general but NT women tend to interpret that negatively & us guys are majorly confused about how we screwed-up when we were genuinely wanting to help.

I'm not sure if I would do D. I do talk about my problems a bit but I try to use my experiences as a way of relating & connecting with others who have problems. It might help some feel better to know someone else understands or they might see something helpful/useful from my experience. I like people who are the same way. I think it's important to consider the source for any advice I get.


I rushed into relationships because I was extremely lonely.

Narcissists will make every situation about them. If you need to be heard or support about a specific personal struggle, they will claim to have an even worse version of the problem, so your appeal for a listening ear will turn into a support session for them. They’ll even make stuff up to keep themselves front and center.

Sometimes they can reign in this behavior in the beginning of a relationship, though. It depends.

I've never been with a narcissistic guy, because I've never said "Yes" to a romantic relationship. Purely platonic acquaintances, mostly work related. I made that clear from the beginning. But unfortunately a lot of guys with big Egos couldn't accept my "No" and started treating me like we are already married in the bad way. It was horrible! I was feeling like in a trap and no clue how to came out again, because I got no support or help from other people. They just trivialized my problem by saying it's not a big deal. Maybe they thought it was a game. Anyway, they were more on the side of the narcissistic guys. These NT's with their relationship BS! That hurts me much more than ignoring my worries.

So I've never been a romantic relationship in my life (I'm pretty untouchable), but nevertheless feel emotionally abused by these stupid guys.

Damn, how could this happen? How I can protect myself about men with such a big Ego, who just wanna catch me, in order I should spend the rest of my life in they duties, just because they feel good with this and don't care about my depressions I will get in this cage? How I can avoid these situations, when I already said "NO!! !" from the beginning?

Similar, I tend to not notice the game they want to play at first, so I fail to play it. Usually once I clue in I refuse to play it. As time goes on I tend to start noticing the gaps in those sorts of peoples defence mechanisms so if they try to be cruel, I can almost always be worse (especially because most of what I'll observe about them publicly will be hard to defend against because I'm not lying, I'm just impolite for saying it out loud).

If they're not cruel to me I have no need to become vindictive.

I haven’t read the previous replies. I just want to add that Borderline Personality Disorder is a good one to avoid. Supposedly it is a cousin disorder to narcisists. I will post a link to an interesting video later when I find it. Basically narcisists need someone to tell them they are great. BPDs need someone to regulate there emotions and are needy. I imagine BPDs having the ability to entrap good natured or naive people more in a relationship than narcisists.

Last edited by JimJohn on 08 Oct 2022, 12:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I imagine Border Personality Disorder females entrap males. Narcistic Personality Disorder males entrap females. If you think about it, females want the top dog or the dog who thinks he is tops. Males don’t mind a dog that needs him as much and acts like it needs them and loves them so much.

I read the previous posts now. They are all great. Here is the video I found interesting about the origin of narcisism inside people's development that prompted my off the wall comments, sorry.
https://youtu.be/ZM13rJpigjM

I tend to be attracted to women with BPD. My current girlfriend is probably on boarder of having BPD or at least seems that way cuz of her other various issues. I had a mental breakdown when my 1st relationship ended & my psychiatrist & then the person who accessed me for Aspergers both gave me the BPD label with various other things. My 1st girlfriend had some issues with drugs & alcohol when we got together but she was trying to quit. She fell back into old habits after a while & had some BAD problems right after we broke up. I feel very guilty as a result & it developed into neuroticism for a while. A misguided attempt to atone for that guilt causes me to be extremely protective of my romantic partners & women I'm close to. I'm alot more stable being with someone who's unstable & also clingy & needy than I was when I was single or than when I was with someone who was stable & needed more space & alone time. I like being able to use my bad experiences as a way of relating & connecting & being able to be supportive of someone. Being the unstable one makes me feel like I'm a major problem which causes me to be more unstable. I highly doubt I would get the BPD label nowadays.

I assume you you tend to be attracted to BPD and not NPD. I imagine when a woman is upset with a man with BPD she calls it NPD. It is like gender biases make BPD out to be feminine and NPD to be masculine or negative. I make light of the labels in essence by sheer writing what I wrote. BPD is feminine. NPD is masculine. As far the video goes, I doubt there is a direct correlation between being ignored and NPD. They can look at family history and see that.

100% This. You have to protect yourself these days, some psychotherapists are saying 1 in 5 people have full blown NPD. 1 in 5 is absolutely crazy.

Glad to see everyone else finally catching up on narcs though, I've been warning people about them since 2015 and it always just bloody fell on deaf ears. I guess now since social media "influencers" are picking up on it that it's now finally coming into the light and becoming more popular.

Not that I like Facebook but there are some very decent NPD abuse survivor groups on there that are extremely helpful if anyone needs them.

It's best to learn as much basic psychology as possible regarding this, they are everywhere. Government, healthcare, childcare, everything. I find it quite scary to be honest, living in a society full of crazy egomaniacs who will do anything to ruin your life. Sigh.

Everybody is crazy if you get right down to it. There are crazy people attracted to the people with NPD until one day they are not. It is probably tolerated until it gets too close to home and bites someone.

I think the problem of narcissism has been a stradily growing problem that really accelerrated when individualism and the concept of greed being a benign and even 'good' factor in public life.

I don't think online dating has much to offer as from what I have experienced it seems as though it is a hotbed for narcissistic people. It may be possible that non-narcissistic people mirror the behaviour of narcissists because it is quite natural that humans can mirror the behaviour of others in both negative and positive contexts.

I think another red flag that I don't think has been mentioned is that narcissistic people have a stronger tendency to ignore boundaries and often tempt people to cross boundaries you have set purely to derive a sense of power that they have gotten what they want out of you. I would strongly advise people to stay away from people who do this, particularly if you find that you have repeatedly told them that you don't want to do a certain thing and they continue to ask, giving the impression that you are talking to a brick wall.

The other issue that has been mentioned is love-bombing. I think this can manifest in ways like people who you have only just met calling you stuff like "babe" and sending lots of kisses after they have send a message to you. They also come across as unnaturally exuberant all the time and they don't like to hear anything "negative", specifically in relation to talking about your feelings of discomfort. This I think is due to their aversion to emotional intimacy and emotional shallowness. you'll also find they almost constantly look down on others in a very bitter sort of way, always relating it back to themselves.

For example, I recently met someone on a dating website who did these sorts of things: continually complaining about how his friends live with his parents but he lives alone therefore it is harder for himself and they have it easier and so on. He asked uncomfortable sexual questions despite saying that I wasn't comfortable with talking about that. He also was asking if I would have a relationship with him even though this was our first conversation! Very bizarre. Big red flag there! Basically, if are asking for a relationship right away and generally asking uncomfortable questions even though you have told them not to, it's best to stay away as it offers a window on what to expect further own the road. I also get suspicious when someone is asking what my type is because if I list "my type" (treating a potential partner as a product in a store) they may try to artificially emulate all the things they have heard that attract me to a potential partner as a means of drawing me in.

I do think there is also a growing unhealthy cultural mood of wanting instant gratification. It's not necessarily a new cultural mood but it has steadily gotten worse and worse over the decades. Noone I have encountered on online dating sites appears to be patient and stick with trying to form of a relationship. They seem to want to have instant chemistry with someone which ironically I think would make them more vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes. I think a part of me blames the entertainment industry for selling unrealistic expectations exemplified in various tv shows. Nothing new there but I still think is a big factor in all of the self-indulgent crap one encounters.

Hello Wrong Planeteers,

Hop on to the Aspie Discovery Red Diamond rover! The rover has decrypted a useful article for how autistic people get ensnared in a narcissist's tentacles!! !!

It's a must read

https://kristenhovet.medium.com/do-auti ... 00d795e8c4

Feel free to comment below and keep an eye on the Red Diamond logo for more posts.