Narcissistic Personality Disorder

The Only Two Reasons Narcissists Cheat

"It was like he didn't even know me at all."

My partner and I had been in therapy for months: after 4 and a half years of cheating, he’d finally agreed to get help with me, as he refused to allow me to leave him.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Every time I tried to leave, I was met with lovebombs: flowers and gifts would arrive at my door. When that didn’t work, he showed up at my work or at my gym or at a friend’s house, and HE RAGED AND THREATENED.

I loved him deeply, and my BPD ensured I was so wounded and self loathing, that I believed it when he said the reason he cheated was because of me.

I’d gained too much weight, he said.

I wasn’t an attentive enough girlfriend, he said.

I focused too much on my friends and loved ones and my studies and not on him, he said.

So, I got therapy.

My therapists kept telling me to leave him, that he was mentally unwell and abusive. One of them even said I needed to watch out before I end up like Nicole Brown Simpson, O.J. Simpson’s murdered wife. (Indeed, the relationship ended in a restraining order).

But I listened to my partner and got new therapists.

Eventually, as I was absolutely desperate to leave after discovering yet another girl, he agreed to come to therapy too. It seemed to be going well, except one thing REALLY bothered me.

When the therapist asked him what he loved about me, he replied, “Obviously, she’s beautiful.”

The therapist pressed him further, “What about beyond her appearance?”

My partner froze. His face looked panicked. It contorted as he grasped for something to say, then continued to say nothing.

I was wide-eyed in shock: I’d rattled off a long list of what I loved about him, and he couldn’t think of a single solitary thing he loved about me.

It was like he didn’t even know me at all.

But we weren’t fighting, and we’d always had a very active sex life. In all the years we dated, we didn’t go a single day of seeing each other without having sex, often more than once a day.

I wondered how he even had the energy to cheat on me. I was exhausted by our sex life.

But one fateful day, my intuition was going haywire, and I logged onto Craigslist. I knew my partner’s password for Netflix, and I thought he’d likely use the same one for Craigslist, so I tried it.

IT WORKED.

And my intuition proved true: he’d been hiring paid escorts online — and they weren’t all women…

When he’d cheated on me with people who weren’t escorts, I’d reach out to them to figure out what was happening, only for more than one of them to respond with, “Are you the crazy ex he talks about? He said you’d do this.”

These things always caused such huge cognitive dissonance: he was your classic covert narcissist. Everyone loved him as much as I did. And, aside from the cheating, we NEVER fought. He NEVER actually said a bad word to me. He never told ME he felt I was crazy: he told me that I was perfect and the woman of his dreams.

But his actions said otherwise, and when I’d discover them, he’d blame me.

He wasn’t my only cheating narcissist partner, and some of the partners did withhold sex from me as they began their affairs, making me feel undesirable. I did everything to try to become the seductress they needed to bring our sex life back: I had tons of lingerie, loads of makeup, and I engaged in disordered eating and starvation. I even got wigs so my partners could feel like they were cheating on me. I spent a lot of money on gifts for them and worked hard to be a lovable, forgiving girlfriend.

Nothing worked.

Why?

Because it was never about me to begin with.

You can be beautiful, smart, successful, generous, loyal, and loving, and narcissists would even cheat on Beyonce or Kim Kardashian (and they have…publicly.)

There are only two reasons narcissists compulsively cheat:

1. Boredom

This has nothing to do with you. There’s nothing you could do to make yourself NOT boring to them.

The problem is that they have low emotional intelligence: emotionally, they’re only developed to the age of young children, so they experience chronic boredom all the time.

To combat their boredom, they need toys to play with.

But they always want NEW toys, and they never want to share their OLD toys. Though they tire of playing with their toys pretty quickly.

Narcissists don’t emotionally attach, so they experience people like objects they own. And they don’t imagine their objects have feelings — kids can’t conceptualize the feelings of others, because emotional empathy develops in high school years.

The way that supply functions to a narcissist is also like a DRUG HIGH.

New supply gets them very high — new supply allows them to believe in their fantasy self of grandiose perfection and relieve all their shame.

However, just like a drug, your ability to get them high wears off quickly as they develop a tolerance to you. So they’ll constantly be chasing that high elsewhere.

They need new drugs, and better drugs, to get that same high effect that they first had with you (or anyone else).

And if you treat a narcissist really loving and trigger an emotional response from them, they’ll react to it in a phobic manner, because love was very dangerous for them in childhood being the golden child to a narcissist parent who eventually emotionally or physically discarded them.

So, if you do trigger love in them, their response is going to be abuse: they’ll either discard you suddenly or do something really awful to traumatize you.

That’s how they protect themselves from love ever traumatizing them again as it did in childhood.

They’re like puppies raised in abuse: they snarl, growl, and BITE in fear, even if unwarranted.

2. Insecurity

It always seems hard to believe, because narcissists seem like the most confident people. But their confidence is all built on a false self.

It’s like building a home on a bed of quicksand.

Beneath the false self, they HATE themselves in every way. That’s why they need the false self to exist.

In order to prop up the fantasy of grandiosity, they need OTHERS TO BELIEVE IN IT.

It’s not real, so the only way it can FEEL like it exists is if others buy in to the fantasy of their mask.

Since the false self is made PURELY OF EGO, it requires endless outside validation to exist and to be satiated. There’s never enough validation to soothe them. They’re deeply sensitive to being seen as having any flaw whatsoever. Therefore, their need for validation is bottomless.

One person could never be enough.

And a major way that narcissists get validation is through sex.

This is why many of them are sex addicts.

And they’ll have sex with ANYONE. It doesn’t matter their weight, intelligence, appearance, social status, age…it often doesn’t matter their gender or sexuality either (especially for sociopaths).

They just need people to sexually worship them, so they can believe in their own sexual prowess and attractiveness.

Sex, which is viewed as love and/or intimacy to an emotionally intelligent person is viewed as POWER to a narcissist.

This is also why people with NPD or ASPD are sometimes rapists: they lack empathy and a conscience, and they’re extraordinarily selfish. They often will rape those who they feel threaten their grandiosity in some way or who have rejected them, or they believe would reject them.

Though, they also simply target very vulnerable people to rape when in need of supply — like children, the elderly, or the mentally handicapped.

Rape gives them a hit of power. It’s a drug high for them. It allows them to feel better than someone else and in control of their pain, which alleviates their own pain through sadism.

And then, since they are narcissists and they can’t take accountability, they will tell themselves that the person they raped deserved it. If they are caught, they’ll still maintain it’s the victim’s fault.

(Victim blamers are the easiest way to identify narcissists and rapists, and yes, some of them are women. One of my rapists was molested by his own mom as a child).

How can you prevent a narcissist cheating on you?

Learn to identify narcissism in people
Don’t date narcissists
If you do accidentally date a narcissist who cheats on you, you MUST walk away after the first time

As sick as it is, narcissists don’t think that second chances are your empathy and generosity and love: they think you’ve just co-signed that the abuse wasn’t that bad.

If it was, then you’d have left — this is what they tell themselves, even if they threatened or manipulated you to stay. So, even though they promise to never do it again, when you take them back, they see it as permission to do this in your relationship regularly.

The old cliche is, “Once a cheater, always a cheater.”

I never wanted to believe this. I wanted to believe people could grow and change. I work very hard on my own growth throughout life.

However, that cliche is a mostly true one: people who cheat likely didn’t have love or empathy for you to begin with, and they’re operating from some dark unhealed traumas.

Narcissists don’t love themselves and they’re only children in adult bodies, so they simply aren’t capable of loving you in an adult way with mutual respect and empathy. It’s not how they’re wired.

But if you’re staying with a cheater, you clearly don’t love yourself either.

So, that needs to be your first order of business before trying to get into a committed loving relationship again.

LOVE YOURSELF.

KNOW WHAT YOU DESERVE.

AND PROTECT YOUR HEART FROM PREDATORS.

Pro-tip: The first sign that a narcissist is cheating is that they often accuse YOU of cheating. This is pathological projection of shame. They'll always accuse supply of what they're guilty of. And when they are caught for their lies, they'll accuse supply of causing their behavior.

You can always tell what a narcissist is guilty of by what they accuse of others.

YOU are the one you’ve been waiting for your whole life to come and rescue you.

Once upon a time, this advice would’ve sounded so sad and lame to me: I wanted my own love story like the movies promised!

But I have my own love story now, and it’s to me, and it’s been the greatest love story of my life.

If I ever share this love with another, he’ll have to have his own self love story too — and then….I think we’ll be capable of something truly miraculous and beautiful.

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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.