How to get over a breakup with a narcissistic ex girlfriend? How to cope with realizing that you never meant a lot to your ex-girlfriend and that you were merely one of her replaceable boyfriends? You basically only were the next guy on the list of men to run through and throw away like trash…. It’s a really difficult breakup experience… There’s no real scientific evidence about this, but I’m sure this is one of the most hurtful breakups a man can endure, so let’s talk about it.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriend. Usually, my posts about breakups are about, let’s just say, healthy breakups, or breakups based on a healthy relationship. And with a healthy relationship, I am not implying that everything in the relationship was rainbows and butterflies. Obviously, most of the time, a breakup only happens when the relationship is broken or even quite messed up.

Relationships can get quite messy, and naturally, many breakups do happen because the relationship became worse and worse. The communication slowly broke down, the emotional connection disappeared despite living together, you became strangers in the same house, or you had very little sex, or both of you were easily irritated and there was a lot of nagging, and so on.

But none of these bad things of a relationship necessarily imply that the relationship was extremely toxic or unhealthy. Sometimes, relationships just don’t work out and go from great, to good, to bad, to terrible, to heartwrenchingly painful. Sometimes two people just aren’t compatible in their personality traits, and at other times, couples may still lack the communication skills to make each other happy. Sometimes, good people hurt each other. I have hurt many people in my life, sometimes intentionally, and at other times, completely oblivious because what seemed normal to me may have been hurtful to somebody else.

But, there are exceptions. No relationship is perfect. It’s understandable why many of them fail, especially when you look back at them a year or two years later. But most of the time you could say that your ex-girlfriend was kind-hearted, and she was mostly making your life better, not worse. Her purpose was to give you more love, happiness, joy, and so on. Just as you did for her. You never planned on hurting each other. Because loving is something we do for somebody else, not for ourselves.

But there are individuals, both men and women, who don’t get into relationships to give. They only want to receive. Such is the nature of a narcissistic ex-girlfriend. If you never really knew about narcissistic behavior patterns, you may have never realized how your ex-girlfriend’s love was always dependent on you providing for her in love, attention, gifts, favors, and so on.

Of course, we all want to receive and give love to our partner, but the key principle of true love is that we are willing to give to our partner even when he or she doesn’t make us happy. Because it’s in the bad moments that we have to choose to love each other and renew the pact that we made for each other to protect each other. But when you dated a narcissistic ex, none of this holds true. The moment that you didn’t give her what she desired, you became a problem to discard, rather than a problem to solve.

Good couples try to resolve their problems. They may fail and break up, but when they fail, it hurts them a lot. I am sure you are hurting a lot right now and you cannot believe that the relationship with your ex-girlfriend is over. But more importantly, perhaps you cannot imagine that to her, the relationship was just a blip on her life’s timeline. When you have a breakup with a narcissistic ex-girlfriend, it hurts deeply because she moves on immediately, and most of the time, she even had your replacement lined up even before the relationship ended. Yes, that’s right. To her, you were replaceable. 

But of course, to normal, healthy individuals, our previous partners aren’t replaceable. Not like objects, anyway. Of course, any ex-partner can be replaced in the sense that someday, we will find another person that we love as deeply as our previous partner. Perhaps, we will even love our new girlfriend far more than the previous one. But nobody breaks up with a partner with feelings of excitement. Even women who have been unhappy with a man for a while, and break up, may find a new guy relatively soon after a breakup, but they are still hurting and miss their ex-boyfriend, and the new guy may only be a delusional attempt at filling the void from the previous relationship. 

So when you have been in a relationship with a woman, and she replaced you, mistreated you, and perhaps even keeps on mistreating you after the breakup, then you have to gain some much-needed distance from your ex-girlfriend and see her for who she is. If she is messaging you frequently to keep you hooked on the relationship in an attempt for you to not move on to another woman, or even just so you don’t feel happy on your own, then it’s a clear sign that she is only using you for attention. Just as within the relationship, she needs to re-fuel her ego.

If an ex-girlfriend never cared about you, because you were only a tool to be used to make her feel happy, it can destroy your self-worth and you may question how you could ever love a woman again after you have been used and underappreciated in such extreme ways, but it’s important to remind yourself that a highly narcissistic ex-girlfriend is not the norm. 

Every human has narcissistic tendencies, and I suggest you avoid narcissistic women as much as possible, but dating a highly narcissistic woman is extremely rare if you keep your defenses up. It’s generally very easy to spot a toxic and narcissistic woman even just by looking at her social media profiles and by observing how much she glorifies herself on social media. 

After a breakup with a narcissistic woman, men are often extremely hurt, because the average Joe doesn’t operate on a narcissistic behavior spectrum of cycling through girlfriends at all. In fact, we usually tend to extremely value any woman that we date because to us, getting the affection of a woman is usually quite rare. Let’s be real: Unless you have massively developed yourself, have a stable or even well-paying job, keep on hitting the gym and look very attractive, dating will be difficult. For most men, going out with women isn’t even that easy. So for us, relationships are special. And even for some men, simply just going on a few dates is a special occasion. Relationships don’t come easy to us, and as a result, we deeply value when a relationship with a woman that we love comes along.

The realization that this love and appreciation was mostly one-sided can be too much to handle for a lot of guys. Some guys never recover from this and as a result they become bitter and think every woman acts this way. Other guys may just feel lonely, heartbroken and betrayed for extreme lengths of time. This is what I want to prevent from happening to you. The difficulty of a breakup with a narcissistic woman is that the gap between emotional investments among both partners is… Well, not even sure if you could call it a gap. These two emotional levels of investment nearly operate on two different realities.

You valued your ex like someone that you could see yourself growing old with, have kids with, you were ready to marry her, and do whatever it takes to build a great future together. But to her… She didn’t care much when things didn’t seem to work out. To her, you were just a temporary pastime. Like a contractual job that was meant to only last for a short while, and then as soon as it was done, she was ready to go to the next work job right away.

That’s a crazy difference in emotional investment. And when you realize that you had completely different needs in the relationship, for example, you craved deep, meaningful and permanent love, while she only craved short-term pleasure, attention and favors to benefit from the relationship, it can become tempting to try and make sense of that behavior. You try to figure out how there would be such a big gap in expectations, and you try to tell yourself that she did love you deep down and her extremely quick withdrawals from you were simply a defense mechanism. Or perhaps you have another unrealistic explanation to justify to yourself why she’s moving on like it’s nothing, or why she could just use you without any remorse.

The hardest part about a breakup with a narcissist ex is trying to relate how you feel about her with how she may feel about you. You will find all kinds of justifications for why she acted the way she did. Perhaps it was your fault. Maybe you made too many mistakes, or maybe you treated her poorly and she’s right for abandoning you as if it was nothing. Maybe her constant criticisms were warranted because you didn’t do X, Y, and Z in the relationship?

Of course, there can be ways how you fell short in the relationship, but it is very often the case that whether you would have done things slightly differently, you would have likely still had to face the reality that eventually you wouldn’t have been good enough for her. Narcissistic exes are professionals at not giving their exes closure, which then allows them to keep on coming back to you and lure you back in with the false hope that you may find closure by talking to her. But you’ll always only end up disappointed every time that you keep on talking to your ex-girlfriend again, and most of the time, any “closure” you’ll get from her will be extremely vague, perhaps a promise to resolve your issues in the future, etc…

The only thing that you can do to get over a breakup with a narcissistic girlfriend is to let go and stop trying to make sense of where things went wrong. Yes, of course, you should reflect on what you did wrong, but also what she did wrong, but ruminating and playing everything through in your head tends to achieve nothing with such an ex-girlfriend of yours. The more you try to put all the pieces together, the more confused you will end up feeling because some part of the puzzle always seems to be missing. 

I know that this sounds like one of the worst breakup advice to give. Everybody always wants to gain closure, or find the perfect hack or trick on how to move on, gain peace after the breakup, etc… But with a narcissistic ex girlfriend, there are no special solutions. The only real solution to heal from a relationship with a narc ex is to gain as much distance as you possibly can.  This is the purpose of the no contact rule… And this is of course, what my book is about, or well, it’s about HOW it is supposed to be used… You should go no contact, to move on from your ex-girlfriend… And initially, this was SPECIFICALLY invented for breakups with narcissistic exes, although nowadays, it’s often used to re-attract an ex-girlfriend. But of course, the only real way to use it, ESPECIALLY with a narcissistic ex, is to cut off all contact, and never talk to her ever again.

Because once you do so, you will eventually realize that there are many women out there who will give you far more happiness, commitment, fairness and light-heartedness than she did. And instead of always only being the one who gives with almost never getting anything of equal value in return, you will also receive back from your new girlfriend on equal terms… and if you’re with a truly great, warm-hearted woman, she may even reciprocate your love with even more love. 

Relationships have to be two-way streets, and there are great women out there who will give you exactly what you desire and deserve. When you treat her well, she will treat you well. When you don’t treat her well, she won’t use it as an excuse to abuse you, but instead she will tell you how she feels and you’ll solve your relationship problems.

So find distance from your ex-girlfriend. Don’t try to endlessly gain closure or find the perfect closure from this relationship. No contact with a narcissistic ex-girlfriend is the best way to start a new, better and happier life. And, to plug my book, I talk about the concept of no contact in my book quite extensively, and I explain in very scientific ways the best approach to get over an ex-girlfriend…  So if this post helped you, then I’m sure my book is going to be a very insightful read for you as well to feel better, especially if you’ve been struggling for quite some time with the breakup. I hope that you will gain the insights and epiphanies that your ex-girlfriend was not a good woman, and that there is a better woman out there for you. So, today’s a new day, and a new opportunity for you to find positivity, and the courage and maybe even excitement to let go of your ex-girlfriend who didn’t appreciate you as much as she should have.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.