What Nobody Tells You About Dating a Narcissist (But Taylor Swift Did).

Nathalie Qassir

6 hours ago

5 min read

Everyone goes through pain differently, but there are some experiences that become eerily similar among people who have fallen in love with a narcissist. Different faces, relationships, stories, and somehow you hear the same sentences. Taylor Swift’s Patient Zero feels like one of those sentences made into a song, and watching Dakota Johnson move through the highs, the confusion, the fights, the fear and eventually the physical weight of it, there is an uncomfortable familiarity to it all.

A quick disclaimer: NPD is a real mental health condition, not a label for every shitty ex. First things first: you do not need to question why you fell in love with them or what you did wrong. You loved someone. You loved the wrong someone. It’s okay. Maybe eventually it is worth paying a visit to your inner self, your inner child, the version of you who learned what relationships should feel like. But before you can understand why you stayed, you have to survive leaving.

There is a particularly cruel thing that happens when you love someone like this: you start grieving the relationship while you are still in it. And one of the stages of grief is bargaining, so you bargain with someone who is standing right in front of you. You ask again, explain again, soften your delivery, write the paragraph, delete it, rewrite it. Maybe this time they’ll understand.

If you have to ask someone for the same basic thing over and over again, their answer is already no. Except you rarely get a clean no. You get just enough tenderness and affection to keep you there. There’s your dose of toxins. The euphoria comes back, maybe you finally got through to them, and then it wears off. Time for another one.

Patient Zero gets that so right. The video is like a “you’re not alone” note to someone who has lived it. And if you’re not crushing on Dakota Johnson right now, what are you even doing? Here’s what we watch happen:

There’s the love bombing, testing, crossing of boundaries, projection, condescension and complete twisting of the plot. You approach them because you are hurt, and somehow their reaction to your hurt becomes the most important topic in the room. Minutes later, you’re defending your tone, comforting them or apologising. You started the conversation bleeding and somehow ended it apologising for getting blood on the floor.

Sometimes you’re actually sorry, maybe for yourself more than for them; sometimes you’re not, but somehow it translates into shame. Maybe I exaggerated. Maybe I could’ve let it go. Why didn’t I just shut up?

The fights feel endless. They’re not, by the way. You just have to end them. Not win them, not find the magical sentence that finally makes them understand. You are trying to repair the relationship while they may be trying to preserve a dynamic that serves them.

Disrespect can happen directly in front of you, and somehow you are talked out of what you know. And good luck getting one fucking truth out of them. The story changes, a detail moves, something you know happened suddenly didn’t happen like that, until you don’t know what you’re arguing about anymore. There is never one reality long enough for you to stand on. If you’re confused, you’re fine.

And this is where the pain starts leaking into everything else, spiralling so damn hard that one relationship begins changing the way you understand the entire world. The pain is enormous but impossible to locate, so your mind starts finding more tangible things to worry about, because someone I love is slowly teaching me not to trust my own perceptions much harder to hold.

Not knowing whether you are loved or not sucks. Allowing yourself to live off breadcrumbs that you convince yourself are a full meal? It sucks.

Then there’s the person everybody else sees, the grandiose, charming, magnetic version, the one Taylor describes as seeming to shine so bright. It’s part of the show, their show.

And they will show you their humanity too. They will break down, probably more than once, and suddenly the person who could make you feel so small is crumbling in front of you. Of course you want to hold them. Fix them. Their breakdown can make you forget your own for just long enough to stay.

Has anyone ever watched a narcissist truly admit to anything? They are masters at finding ways to blame everyone but themselves, because looking inward would mean confronting the crazy pile of shit waiting there and, let’s face it, nobody wants to do that.

So you spend years trying to explain, believing that if they could only see it, everything would change. Do not make your freedom dependent on that moment.

Eventually, even your body responds, and Dakota’s breakdown might be one of the hardest parts to watch. Finding the nearest wall because suddenly standing feels impossible, leaning into it and slowly falling to the floor almost faster than the tears can fall down your face.

You can’t breathe, you can’t move, you can’t stay still either. There is nowhere to put yourself because you are done. Completely fucking done.

There is something devastating about reaching that point because of someone and still wanting that same person to come find you on the floor and make it stop. You run to the wound for medicine.

Dizzy? Nauseous? Drained? Welcome to the club. Taylor puts her hand on Dakota’s back, and that tiny gesture says so much. It’s so psychosomatic. That mystery illness? It isn’t such a mystery.

Then comes repair, or the lack of it. I’m a firm believer that if someone breaks something, they kind of have to fix it, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you are left picking up pieces of something you didn’t break, and I’m sorry, that fucking sucks. And you may have to leave more than once. You might break the cycle, miss them, let them back in, break it again.

They have a strange way of finding you when they need you, which is ironic considering they’re convinced you’re obsessed with them. You’re the one who wants them, chases them, can’t let go. They could live without you just fine.

Until you actually let go, they have to experience your absence instead of just threatening you with theirs. The fucked-up thing is that some part of you may still feel relieved when they do. There you are. There’s your dose again.

Afterwards, you may be bored out of your fucking mind, but that boredom is the absence of hell.

You will grieve the person they occasionally were, the person they promised to become, the person you kept catching glimpses of. Somewhere in all that grief, something strange happens: you start coming back.

The person you spent so long trying to get them to love starts becoming someone you know how to love yourself. You stop waiting for the final conversation. And please don’t let any of this scare you away from love. Love has a funny way of bringing us back to life. So, Patient Zeros, tell us: when did the spell break?