Most people don’t usually stay friends with their exes. How can you move forward and start something new while clinging to the past?
It often doesn’t make sense.
However, narcissists can’t help but keep all their exes on deck – like an aspiring cult leader. You may have noticed during your relationship that at least one of their exes was always just a phone call or text away.
Remaining Facebook friends with a respected ex is normal, especially after a long-term relationship. However, narcissists need to maintain a certain level of intimacy with their exes – for multiple reasons.
Here’s why narcissists stay friends with their exes, the dark motives behind these “friendships,” and what you can do to break free from the sadistic cycle.
Can narcissists be friends with their exes?
Yes. Narcissists can and always have remained friends with their exes. However, narcissists interpret the term “friend” differently than normal people.
Normal people see a potential friend as someone they connect with based on shared interests, values, life experiences, and hobbies.
For a narcissist, a friend is someone they use either for opportunities, sex, resources, validation, or attention.
Most narcissists are often sadistic psychopaths. Not only do they need a certain kind of attention to maintain their shallow identity, but they can also feel remorse when they hurt people and feel joy as they watch people suffer – especially if they are responsible for someone’s suffering.
This is a dangerous combination of traits, often found in cult leaders. This is why many people feel forced to remain friends with their narcissistic ex as a survival tactic, even at the cost of a decline in their sense of self-worth.
Why are narcissists obsessed with getting out?
Simply put, a narcissist becomes obsessed with their ex when they refuse to remain “friends.”
The narcissist may be very open about this obsession, dragging as many people into it as possible. These narcissists always seem to know the details of their ex’s life and play off the obsession as innocent gossip or concern for their ex’s well-being.
In this case, the ex-partner will always be portrayed negatively as a tactic to discredit him and distort his character.
Of course, the narcissist will lie and say that their personality distortion comes from a place of empathy: they are not obsessively pursuing their ex to ruin his or her life. They are only concerned about the health and mental well-being of their ex.
The thing is, obsessing over your ex’s safety and health is not normal in any way, shape or form. If someone shows an obsessive “concern” for their ex’s well-being, this is a major red flag that they are a narcissist with ulterior motives.
8 Mysterious Reasons Why Narcissists Stay Friends With Their Ex-Partners
- Collecting information and digging for dirt
Sharing details of your life with your ex — like where you work or the city you live in — may seem innocent enough. Why shouldn’t we catch up and bury the hatchet?
Unfortunately, for narcissists, innocuous statements about your hobbies, workplace, and living situation are valuable information.
For example, a narcissist might track down your yoga teacher and start dating him. They may also let someone at your work know that you’re “telling everyone” that you’re not being treated fairly.
- Multi-level jealousy
It is a common misconception that a narcissist only gets jealous when you start dating someone new. The truth is that a narcissist is always jealous.
If you don’t leave him for someone new, the narcissist will feel jealous of your strength and confidence once you break up with him.
The narcissist needs to weigh his opinion of you, long after you’ve broken up. This is why narcissists often do everything in their power to remain “friends” with their ex-partners.
- Continuous access to resources
Narcissists are extremely needy and dependent. Your narcissistic partner may have a strange relationship with his mother or father, for example, that mainstream society may find shocking.
The narcissist needs to keep an army of mothers or fathers on deck to provide them with resources such as sex, housing, job opportunities, and validation.
Your drama is not a problem for the narcissist. This is also a valuable resource for them to exploit. If able, the narcissist may offer you shelter, a nice meal, or even just a friendly shoulder to cry on in his efforts to:
- Talk about themselves
- Exploit your emotions
- Create a trauma bond
- Manipulating you on the road
- Continuous supply of interest and entertainment
Narcissists need constant attention to validate their entire existence. Negative, positive, neutral – it doesn’t matter. All attention is good attention and a source of entertainment for the narcissist.
Staying friends with an ex is an excellent way to get someone’s attention because as an ex, the narcissist believes he knows all your triggers and vulnerabilities.
This is why your ex’s behavior may suddenly change 180 degrees once you break up. Since you are no longer providing them with a constant source of positive attention, they must do and say things to take away the negative attention from you.
In addition, anything you say to the narcissist turns into entertainment when he shares details of your life with his circle of ex-friends.
- Coordinated gas attacks
The narcissist spends a lot of time recruiting, training, and deploying his flying monkeys against anyone who acts out of line.
But this kind of gaslighting isn’t always done to mess with your interpretation of reality.
The narcissist expects you to know that you are on fire. They want you to feel flattered that they talked about you with their ex-boyfriends. They want you to defend yourself against gaslighting because this will prove that you value their opinion.
- Maintain a (superficial) superiority complex.
Narcissists display a childish level of insecurity. They constantly compare themselves to others.
The narcissist must find unique ways to feel superior to others. This often involves remaining friends with their ex-partners and taking joy out of their ex-partner’s suffering – the hallmark of sadism.
Why? The narcissist can continue to gather information about their ex to sabotage job opportunities, future relationships, and everything their ex cares about.
- Constant source of distractions
As someone with no true identity or sense of self-worth, the narcissist needs a constant source of distraction to avoid facing themselves in the mirror.
Narcissists are never interested in truly improving themselves.
By remaining friends with their ex-partners, narcissists maintain an endless stream of drama, problems, and things to complain about. This is perfect for narcissists because it means they no longer have time to focus on themselves.
- Sabotaging relationship prospects
No one wants to start a relationship with someone who still gives their ex their attention regularly.
By staying as friends, the narcissist is trying to ensure that you will never start a relationship with a decent person. They hope that you will only attract superficial partners who will use you. If they start to doubt that you have found someone, they will start discrediting that person in front of you in the hopes that you will end things quickly.
This is a good thing for narcissists, because as their “friend,” you may complain to them about your new partner, providing them with attention, valuable information, and validation that they are the best you ever have.
