 I'm Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. We can divide the spouses, mates, and intimate partners of narcissists into two categories. Those who persist, insist, try to maintain their relationship, preserve it, enhance it, and create intimacy. And those who, upon discovering the true face of the narcissist, withdraw, detach, and if they are married to the narcissist, divorce him. On the face of it, there is no typical partner or mate who binds with the narcissist. They come in all shapes and sizes. The initial phases of attraction, infatuation, and falling in love are pretty normal. The narcissist puts his best face on, and the other party is blinded by budding love. The natural selection process occurs only much later, as the relationship develops, and is put to the test, and as the narcissist's tires of maintaining the facade let the mask sleeps, discovers, and covers his true face. Living with a narcissist can be exhilarating, but it is always onerous and often harrowing. Surviving a relationship with a narcissist, maintaining a relationship, preserving it, insisting on remaining with the narcissist indicates, therefore, the parameters of the personality of the victim, of the partner, of the spouse. The partner, the spouse and the mate of a narcissist who insists on remaining in the relationship and preserving it, is molded by it into the typical narcissistic mate, spouse, or partner. First and foremost, the narcissist's partner or spouse must have a deficient or a distorted grasp of herself and of reality. Otherwise, she or he is bound to abandon the narcissist she early on. The cognitive distortion is likely to consist of belittling and demeaning herself, while aggrandizing and adoring the narcissist. The partner is thus placing herself in the position of the eternal victim. Undeserving, punishable, scapegoat. Sometimes, it is very important to the partner to appear moral, sacrificial, and victimized. At other times, she is not even aware of this predicament. The narcissist is perceived by her to be a person in position to demand these sacrifices from her, because he is superior in many ways, intellectually, emotionally, morally, professionally, or financially. The status of professional victim sits well with the partner's tendency to punish herself this way. She feels comfortable in abusive situations. She has, in other words, a masochistic streak. The tormented life with the narcissist is just what she is after, and, to her mind, just what she deserves. In this respect, the partner is the mirror image of the narcissist, by maintaining a symbolic relationship with him, by being totally dependent upon her source of masochistic supply, which a narcissist most reliably constitutes and most amply provides. The partner espouses, enhances certain traits and encourages certain behaviors, which are at the very core of abusive narcissism. The narcissist is never whole without an adoring, submissive, available, self-denigrating, self-deprecating partner. His very sense of superiority, omnipotence, omniscience, indeed, is false self, depend on it. His sadistic super ego switches its attentions from himself, from the narcissist, in whom it provokes suicidal ideation, to the partner, thus finally obtaining an alternative source of sadistic satisfaction. So we have a sadist and a masochist in a diet. It is through self-denial that the partner survives. She denies her wishes, hopes, dreams, aspirations, sexual, psychological, and material needs, choices, preferences, values, and much else besides. She perceives her needs as threatening because they might engender the wrath of the narcissist's godlike supreme figure. The narcissist is rendered in such a spouse's eyes even more superior. Through and because of this self-denial, self-denial undertaken to facilitate and is the life of a great man, is more palatable, and by the way, more socially acceptable. The greater the man, in other words, the narcissist, the easier it is for the partner to ignore her own self, to dwindle, to degenerate, to turn into an appendix of the narcissist, an extension of him, and finally to become nothing but an extension to merge with the narcissist to the point of oblivion and of merely deep memories of herself. The two, the narcissist and his spouse, collaborate in this dance macabre. The narcissist is formed by his partner in as much as he forms her. Submission breeds superiority. Masochism breeds sadism. The relationships are characterized by emergentism. Role's are allocated almost from the very start, and any deviation from the prescribed roles meets with an aggressive, even violent reaction. The predominant state of the partner's mind is utter confusion. Even the most basic relationships, with husband, children, or parents, remain bafflingly obscured by the giant shadow cast by the intensive interaction with the narcissist. A suspension of judgment is part and parcel of a suspension of individuality, which is both a prerequisite to and a result of living with the narcissist. The partner no longer knows what is true and right, what is wrong and forbidden, who should she associate with, and who should she avoid. The narcissist recreates for the partner and in the partner the sort of emotional ambience that led to his own formation in the first place. Capriciousness, fickleness, arbitrariness, emotional and physical or sexual abandonment, and finally abuse and violence. The world becomes hostile and ominous, and the partner has only one thing left to cling to, and that is a stable rock of the narcissist. And cling she does. If there is anything which can safely be said about those who emotionally team up with narcissists is that they are overtly and overly dependent. They are known in psychological jargon as co-dependence. The partner doesn't know what to do, and this is only too natural in the mayhem that is a relationship with the narcissist. But the typical partner also does not know what she wants, and to a large extent who she is and what she wants to become. These unanswered questions hamper the partner's ability to go to reality. Their primordial scene is that she fell in love with an image, not with a real person. It is the voiding of the image that is mourned when the relationship ends. The breakup of a relationship with a narcissist is therefore very emotionally charged for such victims. It is the culmination of a long chain of humiliations, subjugation, self-delusion and self-deceit. It is the rebellion of the functioning and healthy parts of the partner's personality against the tyranny of the narcissist and his collaboration with the pathological parts, psychological parts, in the victim. The partner is likely to have totally misread, totally misinterpreted the whole interaction. I hesitate to call it a relationship, so I stick to the word interaction. This lack of proper interface with reality might be erroneously labeled pathological, but it is actually a form of self-denial. Why is it that the partner seeks to prolong her pain? What is the source and purpose of this masochistic streak? Upon the breakup of the relationship, the partner, but not the narcissist who usually refuses to provide closure, engages, the partner engages in torturous and drawn-out post-mortem soul-searching. I discuss this issue of Dansma Cabre, the pathology in a decor and underline the relationship, in a video titled Dansma Cabre of the narcissist and his partner. Stay tuned and be sure to watch it.