And by shunning intimacy, he also avoids being exposed as the fraud that he is.

Because when you’re intimate with someone, intimacy is founded on true information. You can have fake intimacy. Someone can come to you and share an amazing life story with you and describe their relationship. And it’s all fake. It’s all false. Never happened. You would still have intimacy with that person, but it would be one sided intimacy.

He, by lying, knows that the intimacy is fake, wrong. You don’t.

So that’s also possible.

But the narcissist doesn’t go even for this. He shuns intimacy. He avoids it completely.

Why?

Because he has this imposter syndrome, this feeling that he’s a fraud, that he’s a house of card, a Potemkin village. Not real. Not fully real. Kind of invention, an animated cartoon character, a video game character, is a fraud.

And he’s afraid that if you get too close, he’s going to be pixelated. When you get too close to him, he suddenly dissolves and disintegrates into numerous points.

So he’s afraid of that. So he keeps, there’s a kind of an invisible firewall surrounding the narcissist.

You keep feeling that you can’t really get to him, that there’s something blocking access.

And the narcissist is a poor item. He’s an eternal adolescent, eternal child. And he’s a dysfunctional non-man because he has disrupted gender differentiation.

Because he never grew up. He never, you know, he never exceeded the mental age of four or six, where gender is not a very clear construct. So he has problems with gender. His problem with mental age, his problem with emotions, because he has adolescent, at best, adolescent emotions. Usually not even this. He’s dysfunctional. He doesn’t want his partner to know this.

So he keeps his, he keeps this invisible barrier.

It’s like the Stephen King story. You know, like you bump the dome. You bump against this invisible thing and you can’t exit. You see the narcissist behind the veil, behind the glass darkly. You see a narcissist and you want to reach out to him because many narcissists are really, really cute. They’re really lovable. And you see the child in the narcissist and you want to reach out to the child. You want to hug the child, nurture the child.

But there’s this invisible shimmering surface between you and him. And it’s a surface that the narcissist constructs and maintains assiduously for fear of being exposed.

The narcissist is a conviction that he’s not lovable as he is, that if anyone gets to see the real him, they will abandon him instantly and with shock and revulsion. He’s afraid, afraid to be truthful.

And sometimes the narcissist, the married narcissist uses his marital status as a protective shield in addition to this instinctive shield or reflexive shield.

So there’s this shield that, you know, don’t get near me. Don’t touch me. Don’t get too close. Don’t invade my territory.

And then there’s a second shield, a married. A married, it’s a protective status. And it’s an excuse to not get too committed, involved or present, even when the narcissist has a lot of fear.

The fantasy phase feels to the narcissist like a role-playing game, like a movie set. The narcissist is an actor following an unpredictable, thrilling, unfolding script. Or most narcissists, especially the anti-social ones, most narcissists are novelty-seeking. They engage in risky recklessness. And in this sense, they are very similar to psychopaths.

So the narcissist in the shirt fantasy phase is a child in a sandbox. He’s playing with animate toys, you. You’re an animated toy in a theme park adventure, a thrill. You’re a theme park attraction. You’re an attraction. Your attraction, he wants to ride you like a roller coaster.

And I’m not talking only about sex. The narcissist shuns anything remotely adult.

Many narcissists don’t drive, don’t have a driving license, many of them don’t have children, don’t pay taxes, don’t own real estate or homes, don’t buy gifts. These are things adults do. They want to grow up. They’re Peter Pan.

Peter Pan openly says in the book, I strongly strongly advise you to reread Peter Pan by Barry.

Peter Pan, the work of fiction, ostensibly, allegedlyis actually the best description ever of the inner workings of the mind of the narcissist and what he does to women who love him. Tinker loves him and Wendy loves him. See what he does to these women.

They love him in different ways. Wendy facilitates, co-ops, and colludes in the shirt fantasy. Tinker is a nonsense down to earth fairy, supposed to be ephemeral and immaterial, but she’s much more real than Wendy. She’s much more real because she knows her boundaries. She knows exactly what she wants. She wants a man.

And very early on in the book, Tinker realizes that Peter Pan is anything but not a man.

And so the narcissist lies about everything all the time, especially about himself.

But he doesn’t perceive these as lies. He perceives these as probable or plausible compensations for dissociative gaps.

And we call this confabulation. And he does this in order to avoid intimacy, to avoid commitment.

Of course, if it’s a psychopathic narcissist, sadistic narcissist or psychopath, they lie. They knowingly, adequately, intentionally, and in a planned manner lie.

And one of the main reasons for this is to withhold intimacy and to undermine any commitment.

And this is why the shirt fantasy flourishes mainly on trips and vacations.

Daily life can never amount to a shirt fantasy fully because it is demanding. It exposes the narcissist. It inexorably leads to the interstitial phase and the anti-fantasy.

So narcissists create vacation-like, holiday-like trip or traveling-like bubbles or spaces.

So if they have a relationship, they would construct it in a way that would look much more like spending time in a holiday together, a holiday destination, vacation destination. Staycation, if you wish.

But it’s critical to understand that the shirt fantasy is the partner’s safe base for the narcissist.

Narcissist sees the shirt fantasy as the reification, the embodiment, the personalification of the maternal role of a safe base.

Why?

Because it’s a fantasy. It feels safe because it is not real.

The shirt fantasy includes elements such as intermittent sex, fun, companionship, supply, adventure, easy money, easy gifts.

By the way, I identify gifts and money as love, being cared for. It’s what mothers do. They give gifts. They give money. It’s a maternal function.

But all these elements exist in a shirt fantasy, but it’s still unreal. It’s still a bit like dreaming these things.

Because it’s unreal, it’s totally safe. Because it’s safe, it allows the narcissist, gives the narcissist the energy to explore the world.

The narcissist is very alive at this stage. He feels resuscitated. He feels resurrected. Like Frankenstein. It’s like the electricity of shirt fantasy streams through his hitherto more abundant body. And he gets up, he wakes up.

Yeah, you can see the seams. You can see the different parts. It’s almost falling apart, but it’s alive. It’s a golem. It walks. It talks.

The partner’s shirt fantasy usually revolves around marriage, children, home, being an intimate couple, doing something together.

And so the shirt fantasy of the partner and the shirt fantasy of the narcissist are not the same. It is this discrepancy, this disagreement about the nature of the shirt fantasy that undoes it.

It’s the root of its undoing.

But it’s critical to understand that both parties, the narcissist and its intimate partner, both of them agree to share a fantasy.

It’s not like the partner says, this is not a fantasy. This is reality. And the narcissist is not reality. It’s a fantasy.

No. They both agree to create a fantasy, each for his or her own reasons. They both seek to evade reality. They both construct a space where they feel hopeful, where they feel fulfilled, and when they can look forward to the future.

It’s a fantastic space. They both know it.

But the partner believes that she can introduce elements into the fantasy, like children or marriage or home or doing something together or whatever, travelling. She believes she can introduce elements to the fantasy that would not undermine the fantastic nature of the shirt space.

While the narcissist disagrees, he thinks that if you introduce to the shirt fantasy pedestrian routine, average common elements like, for example, owning a home, getting married, having children, it undermines the very fantastic nature of the space.

He believes the fantasy is everything that is non-adult. This is the core disagreement with the partner.

Both of them, the partner and the narcissist agree to create a fantasy.

But the partner says, let’s create an adult fantasy. Oh, that sounds good. Let’s create an adult fantasy.

And the narcissist says, no, I want my fantasy to be childlike. It’s exactly like the little prince, Saint-Exupéry, and his book, Little Prince.

If you read this second book I advise you to read, read Peter Pan and Little Prince and you know everything you have to know about narcissists.

In that book, it’s clear that the prince has a fantasy and the aviator, the crap, the aviator whose airplane crashed in the desert, the Sahara Desert, also has a fantasy.

But they disagree about the nature of the fantasy at the beginning, in the initial dialogue.

The narcissist mislabels his shared fantasy and calls it love. But it’s not, of course, because love is founded on truth, on reality, crucial.

Real love is reality and real love is never dependence and never fantastic and never creates a merger or a union of two organisms into a single organism with two heads.

This is co-dependency, it’s not love.

So, narcissist mislabels his fantasy.

And then as tensions, because of these disagreements, as tensions accumulate within the shared fantasy, the parties move inexorably, can’t stop it, into interstitial phase one.

And in interstitial phase one, which is the third phase, grooming shared fantasy, interstitial phase one.

In interstitial phase one, they have two options. Option one is, and the first option is exit.

So now we’re talking about interstitial phase one, option one, exit.

This phase involves cheating, an aborted attempt to dump each other, or actively persisting, or cheating to modify.

Let’s talk about all these things.

The role of a partner in the interstitial phase one, in interstitial phase one, is a mother. So her role was a playmate in the shared fantasy before that admirer in the grooming. Now her role is a mother.

In this phase, interstitial phase one, women choose to either exit the shared fantasy, option one, or to persist in the shared fantasy, and to attempt to move to a committed relationship, to alter the components or the constituents of the shared fantasy, and thereby changing its character or nature.

So exit, or persist.

And this phase allows the narcissist to prepare mentally for the last phase, which is for the penultimate phase, which is anti-fantasy.

In other words, narcissist realizes that things are shakyand he begins to dick effect. He begins to disengage emotionally, withdraw his investment. He begins to grieve, and he definitely begins to seek alternatives, because whatever you say about narcissists and psychopaths, they are optimizing machines. I mean, they discard and find and replace within seconds.

So this is the interstitial phase.

Why would the partner usually seek to terminate the shared fantasy? Whenever the woman tries to exit this common territory, this psychotic space, she’s punished. She’s punished with sadistic sex, egregious abuse, verbal, psychological, financial, other, withholding, including withholding of sex, or rejection. She’s punished.

And that makes her feel very wronged. It’s unjust. Why? Why does she feel that it’s not okay to be punished if she tries to exit this space?

Well, first of all, because we are all autonomous, independent agents, and if we choose to leave, we should be allowed to. But forget that for a minute. The problem is much deeper.

You see, when the narcissist meets his women, he meets them in settings that imply that he’s looking for a serious long-term relationship. He dates women. He doesn’t go to bars, or to parties, or dating apps. That’s not how we find these women.

If you go to a bar and pick up a woman, her expectations are pretty minimal, pretty basic, and they can be fulfilled into ours. If you are in a party and you flirt with someone and you end up in bed, that’s also pretty confined. Although even there, some expectations can be disappointed. The disappointment itself would be expected.

But if you flirt with someone for six months, or you date them for weeks, it’s a signal. If you demand sexual exclusivity, it’s a signal. If you share very intimate details of your life, seek advice. It’s a signal. These are signals.

The narcissist gives all these signals and meets his women in settings and behaves in ways that clearly signal, I’m looking for a serious long-term relationship.

But then he reveals later with his behaviors in the shared fantasy that he’s interested in these women merely as playmates. He withholds. He doesn’t fully belong. He’s not fully present. He makes these women feel transparent, non-existent.

These behavior patterns make women feel very disappointed, angry, toyed with. They feel deceived, which leads them to cheat on the narcissist as a way to terminate their relationship, restore themselves emotionally, elevate their self-esteem, and hurt the narcissist in this order, by the way. It’s more about them than about the narcissist.

So this defiant act of independence ending up in bed with another man, even if it’s a one-night stand, is a defiant act, a symbolic severing of the bond, the trauma bond, the relationship. And it’s intended to restore the woman’s autonomy and self-efficacy, restore her as an agent. She’s an object. She wants to become a human being, again, an agent.

And cheating is one way, cheating, I mean, having sex with another man, is one way of doing this. It’s a signal of independence.

And that’s why in many of these cases, the women actually inform the narcissist of what had happened, or they pick up men when the narcissist is present, and they make sure the narcissist knows about it. So that there’s no way back, or to force the narcissist to dump them, or to empower themselves to make them feel so strong and restored that they will get the nerve to walk away.

It’s all about trying to sever the sick miasma that the relationship had become, because the shared fantasy is so psychotic, so detached, so unreal, that it starts as a dream, but invariably ends as a nightmare. The narcissist reifies object inconsistency. He deletes chats and emails, or is married, or is in touch with multiple women, or he triangulates.

So he is unavailable even as he claims to be available, and he plays the harps on the partner’s own abandonment anxiety.

And this leads to the dissolution, disintegration of the partner, and she counter-triangulates and cheats, very often just as a way to restore herself and to get the hell out of them.

Women reject their permanent role in the shared fantasy as mere sex slaves, or sex buddies, playmates, toys, co-fantasies. Women want more from their relationship, and they want exclusivity.

In this phase, women refuse to continue to realize the narcissist’s sexually sadistic fantasies. They revert and transition to conventional vanilla sex.

And when their demands and expectations are not met, women don’t feel that they have to meet the demands and expectations of the partner.

My demands are not met, why should I meet your demands?

And so there’s a deterioration, a deterioration in the reciprocity of the relationship, and the goodwill, I would say, the goodwill reserves, goodwill deposits dwindle.

And women sometimes deny sex or withhold sex or insist on non-satisfying conventional sex as a manipulative tactic to manipulate the narcissist, to wake him up, to get a rise out of him, for the same reason they triangulate, same reason they cheat.

Or because there is no longer a quid pro quo.

All this happens in the interstitial phase, when the woman decides to exit the relationship.

And the narcissist reacts to all these maneuvers by losing sexual interest in the woman and by experiencing sometimes occasional erectile dysfunction.

Let’s talk a bit more about cheating.