I am Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

There is nothing the narcissist hates more than being told, I love you. This simple sentence evokes in him almost primordial reactions. It provokes the narcissist into uncontrollable rage.

But why is that?

Well, there are three reasons.

First of all, the narcissist hates women virulently and vehemently. A misogynist, he identifies being loved with being possessed, encroached upon, shackled, transformed, reduced, exploited, weakened, engulfed, digested and excreted.

To the narcissist, love is an all-consuming, dangerous pursuit.

Secondly, being loved means being known, being intimate. The narcissist likes to think of himself that he is so unique and deep that he can never be truly known or fathomed. The narcissist believes that he is above mere human understanding and empathy, that he is one of a kind through eugenics.

To say to the narcissist, I love you, means to negate this feeling. It means to try to drag him to the lowest common denominator. It means to threaten his sense of uniqueness.

After all, the narcissist says to himself, everyone is capable of loving and everyone, even the basest and lowest human beings, fall in love. It is such an average pedestrian emotion.

So unlike the narcissist, the narcissist, to the narcissist, the loving is an animalistic and pathological behavior, and the same goes for sex.

Thirdly, the narcissist knows deep inside that he is a con artist, a fraud, an elaborate hoax, a script, that he is hollow and truly non-existent. He can’t help but ask himself, who would fall in love with me? The person who claims to love the narcissist is either lying because what is there to love in the narcissist? Or she is a self-deceiving, clinging and immature co-dependent.

The narcissist cannot tolerate the thought that he has chosen for a spouse or a mate, a liar, or a co-dependent idiot. Indirectly, her declaration of love is a devastating critique of the narcissist’s own powers of judgment.

The narcissist hates love, however and wherever it’s manifested. We’ll take one example. When the narcissist’s spouse demonstrates her love to their children, the narcissist wishes them all ill. He is so cosologically envious of his spouse that he wishes she had never existed.

Being a tad paranoid, the narcissist also nurtures the growing conviction that she is showing love to her children demonstrably and on purpose just to remind him how miserable he is, how deficient, how deprived and discriminated against.

The narcissist regards his spouse’s interaction with their children to be a provocation and assault on his emotional welfare and balance.

Seething with envy, boiling rage and violent thoughts, these form the flammable concoction in the narcissist’s mind. He reacts this way wherever and whenever he sees people happy and in love.

Many people naively believe that they can cure the narcissist by engulfing him with love and shrouding him with acceptance and consuming him with compassion and empathy.

And that is not so. The only time a transformative healing process occurs is when the narcissist experiences a severe narcissistic injury, a life crisis. Nothing short of that can move or change the narcissist. Definitely not love.