Love Life with Matthew Hussey - How to Know If You’re Dating a Narcissist | Rewind

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Narcissists walk among us . . . but what makes us stay with such people?In the beginning, sadly, many people fail to see the long-term damage a relationship with a narcissist (or narcissistically inclined person) can cause. From confidence to superficial charm or even intensity, it's easy to mistake narcissistic traits as positive ones in the beginning of a relationship. But after quickly sucking you in, they gaslight you, make you forget yourself, and cause you to start justifying all kinds of toxic behavior. All in the name of control disguised as love.If you've been in a relationship that has made you question your sanity, this episode is for you . . .---►► The Year of Love is happening next week on Tuesday, January 20. Discover the simple 4-step action plan for finding your person in 2026. Sign up for this free virtual event in 5 seconds at MHYearOfLove.com►► Matthew Hussey’s free Three Relationships newsletter isn’t just about dating—it’s about creating a life you love. Get practical advice and heartfelt wisdom delivered to your inbox every Friday. Sign up for free at TheThreeRelationships.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People so often just want to analyze, like, do you think this person is a narcissist? Why do they do this? What reason would they have they sound understanding? Eventually, it's like, it doesn't really matter. I see people get so lost in the web of trying to crack the code of someone's thoughts and mind-read. And they said this, though. But eventually, it's like, what's the actual difference to you if it doesn't manifest? in any actual different actions if they treat you like they don't care but they make all the right

noises about it it makes no difference we have to be present with the way that our life actually is not how we would like it to be and not what someone has for the 10th time promised us it will be but it's not actually showing itself to be true. We have to look at our life the way it is. And we have to check in with ourselves and our feelings and say, what is my experience of this? The person I'm with keeps telling me what my experience is or how good I have it or that I'm making too much of things

or that I'm crazy. or that they'll change. But what is my actual experience of this? And come to think of it, you know, a good barometer sometimes can be other people in your life and how they make you feel. And hopefully, you know, if you have the skill of putting good people in your life,

Some people, you know, they make awful mistakes when it comes to their relationships, right? We're all capable of that. And we also often make awful mistakes when it comes to family because family are the, you know, friends, that's saying friends are the family we choose, right? Well, family are the people we got and the people that a lot of people feel obliged. too and feel a lot of guilt around and also have a lot of very complex connections with historical connections with but even when we make mistakes in the way that we handle family or our romantic life which is an area we can uniquely make mistakes in many of us have put certain other people in our lives that are far better certain friendships or

acquaintances or people we choose to spend time with outside of those two very emotionally charged domains and one of the barometers we can use is do the other people i've chosen in my life make me feel this way i was reading dee profundis uh the letter that oscar wild wrote when in jail to bozy yeah yeah for those of you that don't know oscar wild was a well i'm sure most of you know who oscar wild was but he was a very very famous writer um academic thinker yeah raconteur famous famous in society who by all accounts was a kind of genius who ended up in a difficult relationship with a much younger man. Is it Lord, is it Lord Alfred Douglas or Lord Henry?

Yeah, Lord Alfred. Yeah, Lord Alfred. Yeah, he was known as Bozzy, but yeah, Lord Alfred. Bozzy was what Oscar Wilde called him, but essentially as the one of the crimes of the time was homosexuality, for which there wasn't a word at that point, he was thrown in jail. But when he was in jail, he wrote an impassioned letter to Boise, who he felt had spent much of their, well, all of their relationship, spending all his money, caring not for what Oscar Wilde felt or what his experience was was completely self-involved and just wanted to be seen out and about

and lunching and dining, fancy dinners and ruined wild financially and also ultimately landed him in jail. And there's a moment in this unbelievably beautifully written and impoverly, beautifully written an impassioned essay or letter that he writes to Bosi, where he talks about the other young male friends that he hung out with, for whom Wilde felt this incredible affection. And he would say, he wrote Steve, I don't know if you remember from the letter,

but he wrote about his other friend who was around the same age as Bosi, who he could go to, to lunch with and come away feeling alive and intellectually stimulated and like they'd had this really productive lunch that Wild could go away from and write and be productive. And then in his scorn to Boise, he says, when I was with you, I got nothing done. I had no creativity. I didn't, you know, he said, I wrote more in the three days I had away from you than in the months that I was with you. And he talks about how wonderful he felt in the company of his other friends.

That itself should become a kind of barometer for us. That if we know, when we're around certain friends, we come away nourished. And yet when we're around this person that apparently we have so much love for, for and this person who we cling on to because apparently they're so important to our lives, whenever we leave them, we come away depleted and anxious and questioning ourselves. And with a nauseating, griping feeling in our stomach that stays with us the rest of the day, that is the reality of the relationship. not what it could be, not what they're telling you it is, that's what it is.

And when we feel truly lost and, you know, the narcissistic tendency is to gaslight you, is to make you feel crazy for what you're feeling, for what your needs are, for the ways that you're upset with them. If you're with someone like that, it really can give you a lack of confidence in your and in your own opinions, you no longer know, who's right, who's wrong, I don't know. I thought, you know, I came to you because these things were upsetting me and I came away feeling like I'm the problem. I don't know what's going on.

I don't know where I am. It's very disorienting. But if you can find stability in other people in life who remind you, oh, this is what it is to be with someone or around someone. Who doesn't make me feel awful for feeling something? Who doesn't make me feel like I'm being difficult because I have a need? Who doesn't lie? Who does what they say they're going to do?

Who makes good on their word? Who shows a genuine interest in me? Who cares about my feelings? Instead of just caring about how highly I think of them. when I'm around someone like that, I get to return to sanity. When you get that feeling, it's extremely important that you compare that, you contrast that with what you feel around that person who makes you feel so terrible. Because in that lies a truth, that's where we can start to call home.

Now, the danger is that when you find, find yourself with someone like the person we're talking about, that person will try to separate you from that. And here's the crazy part, Steve. We will help them. We will help them separate us from all of that sanity. Now, why will we help them? Because we start to feel ashamed and silly

any time we start talking about our relationship to those people who represent sanity. Because when we talk about what we're not happy with or what's upsetting us, at first our friends will come to our aid and they'll say, that's crazy, you shouldn't be putting up with that. That's not okay.

But when we return to that person, having told our friends these things, We feel shame because I'm still putting up with this thing. But now I know that it's my fault because my friends have already told me that it's not okay. So now I'm the one staying. So now I don't want to go back to my friends and tell them all of this stuff again because that's going to make me feel more shame. So instead I either stop telling them things or I begin distancing myself from the people. who remind me of what I'm putting up with.

Yeah, we know deep down we're making excuses and we can see how they react when we make those excuses. Yes. And so rather than face the shame of what we're putting up with because the shame might force us to ask ourselves whether we should stay and we don't want to ask that because we're too afraid to leave. So rather than do that, we get closer and closer. closer to the poison in our lives.

And we separate ourselves from the sanity. We hop in the little boat with them, row away from the island of sanity, and thrust ourselves into the foamy black waves of a narcissistic relationship. And the really, really scary part about that is when we do push off from everything else, that reminds us of our sanity,

we now have nothing to compare this situation to anymore. We are just alone on that boat with that toxicity, with that poison. And we become more and more divorced from how wrong it is. And that is how people can get into a relationship over time and something gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. and the people who love you think how on earth is this person I know to be so wonderful putting up with this how has it got to this point but it's because it's been a long time since you've been exposed to any

real sanity in that area since you've been on stable ground and there are a lot of people listening to this right now who will have had the experience of returning to the world after a relationship like that and suddenly being treated normally by somebody and not knowing how to deal with it because it's been such a long time since they've been treated nice. It's been such a long time

since they've been treated with respect, since their feelings or their opinions mattered. And that's the hard part about being single again after dating a narcissist or someone with those tendencies is that you're having to relearn what it is to be comfortable with good behavior. You're having to relearn

what common human decency and respect looks like. And learning to trust that and to go with that. And that is an intensely scary and emotional experience for people. And it's why, you know, how do people go back to yet another terrible person after they just dated one? We gravitate towards what we know, not what makes us happy. We don't gravitate to what makes us happy.

We gravitate towards what we know, what we're comfortable. with. Yeah. And that's, well, one of the truths of seeking happiness is seeking happiness is often not comfortable because it means seeking the unknown. Because what's known to us is simultaneously what's making us unhappy and what's comfortable. And what we don't know is what's uncomfortable, but what has the potential to make us happy. Yeah. And in order to do that,

we have to start edging our way into what's uncomfortable in order to have a shot at real happiness. Thank you so much for listening to the episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go, make sure that you do this today. I promise you every week you are missing out by not doing what I'm about to say. I am sending a private email to a group

group of people who have registered for it every single Friday. The email is called the three relationships and every email is packed with advice on how you can improve one of the three relationships that I believe determine the quality of your life. Your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself and your relationship with life itself. It's a super valuable email. People really look forward to it. This is not the kind of email that you don't open is the kind of email you can't wait to see in your inbox every Friday. Go over to The3 Relationships.com to sign up for that email for free and I will see you in your inbox this Friday. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll see you in the next episode. Be well and love life.