10 Signs of a Wife with Narcissistic Traits

Number 4: The husband is paying for the sins of others.

So, what do I mean by this? Well, we see that in a lot of cases when people are narcissistic, they experience some sort of maltreatment when they were younger—maltreatment from a prior husband, prior boyfriend, parent, or other relative; whoever it was. In the case of the wife who has narcissistic traits, every problem the wife has becomes the husband’s fault. He is assigned all the blame. The husband, in a sense, becomes the composite of all those wrongdoers, and his actions, whether they are right or wrong, represent all the bad things that happen to the wife.

So, he represents the wrongdoers, and his actions represent all the bad occurrences. It’s like when people take their anger out on a punching bag: the punching bag never did anything to anybody, but it’s still gonna pay for all that anger. An example here could be somebody in the wife’s past who denied her material goods—they weren’t generous with her, or maybe they didn’t even meet her basic needs.

So, the way she kind of expresses this in terms of the relationship with the husband could be running up credit card debt—essentially weaponizing her spending. When she’s caught at when the credit card bill comes in, somebody has to pay it; she suggests that this makes her even with the husband. This is actually a very common way for a wife with narcissistic traits to explain away maladaptive behavior. The narrative that the wife paints has always been one where they’re both hurting each other but unequally, right? She has the worst end of the deal.

So if she gets caught with this bad behavior, she says, “Okay, for right now, this just makes us even.” And this is typically the most blame that the wife will ever accept, regardless of what point in the marriage that we’re looking at.

Number 5: There’s no true connection in the marriage.

So, the wife is emotionally distant and callous, and this is really not surprising, given the characteristics of narcissism. We can see a lot in the style of communication between two people. I’ve worked a lot with couples where one, or sometimes both, of the people are narcissistic. But, again, here I’m just talking about a situation where one person is narcissistic. It’s really fairly easy, over time, to pick up how some relationships are really cold and distant and how destructive that is to the relationship.

We see that when the wife is confronted, when she’s asked to talk about emotional topics, she dodges them; she avoids depth or—more likely—is incapable of connecting deeply, and she gets frustrated. So, she might say something like, “I don’t know what you want; we’re talking,” “I don’t know what you want me to say.” So there’s just really no room to move; there’s no room to move more deeply. The wife gets stuck in the narcissism, right? It’s a block to moving into an emotionally fulfilling and close relationship.

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