Generally professionals are surprised when I teach them about the “priority” male or female in a narcissistic relationship. The priority is someone who takes precedence over the girlfriend/boyfriend or husband/wife. Not much is said about this relationship, but it is something I keyed in on after years of mentally tracking patterns I saw and then began writing about this.

The priority male/female relationship is someone that your partner is not necessarily having sex with. It is someone that they may go on vacation with (privately or with the whole family – including the partner). They may get together with this person – just the two of them – for lunch/dinner or ice cream as someone recently said to me. If they work together, they may travel together and have become very very close friends. The narcissist strives to keep this relationship – or own it – by manipulating their partner into not asking questions. “Why? Are you jealous?” or “We aren’t sleeping together,” or “I can have female friends if I want. I’d be okay if you had male friends.” This latter comment is a way to rationalize why you should just except it, as they’d be willing to accept it too. This same comment could have come up if they were cheating. Though it is highly unlikely they will admit to cheating. Their private lives they create lies about.

Why is it not “okay,” for your partner to be friends with this priority? Because the narcissist uses this relationship to detach from their partner (you) and drive a huge wedge between the two of you. The victim partner is unable to have effective communication with the narcissist (not that they would without the priority) and the intimacy is depleted because they are “intimate” with the priority. I don’t have concrete evidence of cheating yet because the people I have worked with (or even in my own past situations with NPDs) have not been able to discover this. Oddly, I really don’t feel that they are – even though they are very close (and sometimes this person could be a family member). As a client kept emphasizing recently, “He has very loose boundaries.”

One caveat. I don’t want you to mistake my saying there is never any infidelity with the narcissist. Nor that they never have sex with the priority. I have had a male client whose wife, he was sure, was having sex with multiple partners for over a decade. He could never catch her with them. She was sly, secretive, and always manipulated him into believing he was crazy, or making things up. He saw her with a guy in a few situations, but they were co-workers. He came into the house one time and the bed sheets were tussled and it smelled of sex. This is how far it can go with someone who is covert (or I believe she was actually a Borderline) and how deep gaslighting can go that you don’t believe your own eyes and ears – and in this case, nose.

Another time I worked with a couple and the woman brought up a greeting card found in her husband’s suitcase, after a work trip. It was from years prior to me seeing them. “What are you talking about,” he said. She described it and said the inscription. “I don’t remember this,” he said. I can’t remember how I handled it at the time, but I questioned how odd it was that he couldn’t remember something so tangible as a greeting card – an object. It was not he said/she said. So, now I say to you, why couldn’t he have just said “Oh, that was from Peg, she was thanking me for the help I gave her on a project we worked on together.” Because, if it was no big deal, there would be nothing to gaslight someone about. In a healthy relationship, a person would not be confused, and they would have no problems explaining.

The narcissist seems to say it is okay to have this priority and, like anything they do, they don’t see anything wrong with this – because they are never wrong. Like with the two examples above – one cheating, the other hiding something but gaslighting their partners. Since most people, who after leaving the narcissist ask, “Did he ever really love me?” (men don’t generally ask me about the woman who was a narcissist), it is even more difficult when they wonder whether he loved her (or him), i.e., the priority. This priority is given so much attention that the partner is craving and needing to grow and flourish in this relationship. It is a struggle emotionally, for them to manage whether there was love or not and who with.

Women are generally relieved when I tell them this is not okay – for the guy to make someone else a priority over them. In a healthy relationship, I explain, this would not happen. By my saying this to them, and now to you dear reader, they have been validated. Their instincts have told them this is wrong, but they have been gaslighted into believing there is something wrong with them. That their values, hopes, dreams about marriage or partnership were not respected and they should change them for the narcissist’s whims.

Again, why is it not okay to be friends with another woman or intimate with a male, while in an “exclusive” relationship? In a healthy relationship, the partner comes first and foremost in decisions, communication, sex, and love. A healthy partner will come to their girlfriend/wife before anyone else to make plans and to discuss the relationship. They will talk to each other during work trips and discuss what is happening while they are gone (on both sides). In these priority situations, the narcissist will treat them like they are the spouse/partner even though they may or may not be having sex. I keep adding the sex part because when you see them together, you would really have a hard time figuring out which is the spouse, and which is the priority. This is also why are chose the two photos from online, to give a visual of what I mean.

Do you know what I am talking about? Please, share your thoughts below. I would love to hear other examples.