Coping with Feelings of Jealousy: When a Narcissist Cheats

Once upon a time you felt like Cinderella. Your Prince Charming made you feel special and so happy, that is until of course, you found out about Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and that trampy blonde Smurf down the street.

It seemed like one minute, you were both consumed and in the midst of a love for the ages, and now he stands you up, ignores your calls and texts and you’re starting to feel like you’re annoying him.

You’ve become an emotional basket case. You’re obsessed and you can’t get him out of your mind. You’re cyber stalking him for any tidbits of information and all you see is her. His new target.

There’s a few flirty comments, back and forth, on his Facebook wall, a few likes on some of her pictures. It’s just ambiguous enough to be innocent, certainly not enough hard evidence that he’s cheating, but that sickening feeling in your gut tells you otherwise.

When you finally get to confront him, he blows it off and spins it, so that you come off as jealous and  needy.  But soon after, he grows more and more distant. He doesn’t have the stones to tell you what is really going on, but your imagination has already filled in the blanks.

His new target thinks she has just met her soul mate, she’s getting all of his attention and feels like she’s  won. You’re an emotional disaster and your Narcissist is in ecstasy.   All you keep thinking about is how good it was. How once you were the recipient of all his attention, how he would come to you for love, support and comfort and now, he’s directed his attention elsewhere and he’s getting love and comfort from someone else.

Then you start to drive yourself mad with questions like: What did I do? Why her and not me?  Is she better than me? Is she prettier? Is he in love with her?

What did you do? Nothing. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent this.  What you did was trust someone that wasn’t deserving of your trust. You were tricked into falling in love with someone that seeks power and control by manipulating other people’s vulnerabilities and when you are in love, you’re vulnerable, so he made sure you fell – hard.

Why her and not you?  Because she’s shiny and new. They like the challenge and the thrill of the chase. He has already won you, the chase is over. He doesn’t want a comfortable relationship. He doesn’t want closeness and intimacy and if he stays with you, that’s how normal relationships progress.

Is she better? Is she prettier? Who cares. You can drive yourself nuts comparing yourself to someone else. It won’t change anything. it will just make you feel worse. Our battered egos always want to lead us to a place where we feel not good enough. None of this is really about her, besides you do have one advantage over this woman – she has no idea what’s coming – you do.  You should feel sorry for her. It’s a mistake to engage her at all. I’ll bet the farm that he has made up a mountain of stories about just how crazy and out of control you are – just like he told you the same stories about the one you replaced.

Is he in love with her? No. Narcissists create the illusion of love.  Every emotion they feel is short lived and superficial.  She will lose her shine soon enough, and just like you, she will be devalued and discarded.

Understand that what a Narcissist wants most is to be wanted and desired by many.  This is why you will always find them surrounded by a group of admirers.  They create the pretense that they are important, sought after and popular, by collecting friends, ex’s and potential targets. The more women they have, the happier they are and if there are women fighting over him, it’s double the pleasure.

It’s normal to feel jealous when someone you cared about has so unceremoniously tossed you aside for someone else. Our hearts are aching for justice and it feels like a crime has been committed. The fact that we were so easily replaced and forgotten makes us feel like we’ve just been emotionally raped, but you have to look at the source and understand that no one is exempt from his brand of cruelty.

The wound feels that much greater, because for a short time, he made you feel incredibly special, like you were desired above all others. Any time you come down off of a high it’s a shock to your nervous system and you need to wean yourself off of the drug. You very likely worked harder than you ever have to make this relationship work and this is why it is so hard to get over them.

Whenever someone acts like they don’t care about you – believe them. If they act like they’re not afraid to lose you, it’s because they’re not. There will always be someone to take you place, because a Narcissist isn’t hindered by morality, attachment bonds or real feelings.

When you give up your heart and your power to someone who is incapable of caring about you, the only outcome will be pain. Remember that a Narcissist feeds off of attention, drama and jealousy. They love to create it and be in the center of it. Don’t spend your energy trying to convince someone that they should care about you. That’s like trying to convince a fish it should fly and it robs you of your dignity.

In my experience with my last Narcissist, the woman before me and the two women after me, were fed the same bullshit soup and are still trying to recover from the ordeal today. So don’t waste your energy on jealousy. Know that there is always going to be a new target. Even if you succeeded and he came back, you would always be looking over your shoulder and you should be. Don’t envy his new woman, because in a short while, she too will be curled up in the fetal position, reading blogs to help her figure out what happened and what the hell she did wrong.

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