What if Your Husband is Not a Narcissist?

0:00 If I had a dollar every time I heard a woman say that they think their husband is a narcissist, I would be able to purchase an island full of emotionally available men. Today, we're going to break down some hard truths about who's really doing the manipulating, the minimizing, and the demanding when it comes to modern marriages. And if you want a strong marriage with the partner that you've got, then stick around because that's what I'm here for. Hi, if we're meeting for the first time, I'm Avietal. I am the founder of H HighFam.

0:30 I'm the mother of five and my mission here is to help you to build a strong family culture. Full disclosure, I believe that raising your family is the most meaningful project of your life. It's the most exciting adventure. But I also believe that it's countercultural, that culture is working against us, undermining our marriages and our parenting. It's introducing a lot of fragility and fragmentation. But I am here to help you create resilience and strength and satisfaction at home. If that sounds good, make sure that you're subscribed. Hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode from me. And give this video a like to feed the algorithm and to let me know that this kind of content speaks to you. If you're here because you feel like your husband might be a narcissist, you have that suspicion and you've watched some shorts on Instagram that confirm it for you and maybe you've even spoken to a therapist who might validate that feeling. And maybe you have a lot of evidence and a lot of anecdotes for the way that your husband behaves narcissistically and you're wondering what to do about it, then you've come to the right place. But I've got to give you the tough love right off the bat. I have been in your shoes and I have thousands of students from all over the world who have been in your shoes who have wondered if there's something wrong with their husband. If there's a personality disorder or some kind of psychological diagnosis that is necessary to understand his very destructive or hurtful behavior. But here was the good news that I had to discover. If he's not abusive, manipulative, a liar, or pathologically self-centered, then he's probably not a narcissist. I just don't like the way he loads the dishwasher. Here's the bad news. In our culture, we're very quick to use labels, even diagnostic labels, as complete amateurs. But recreational diagnosis is not a very good path to marital stability and longevity. So, to put all of our minds at ease, let's define what real narcissism is. A narcissist is someone with an inflated sense of self-importance, a complete lack of empathy, exploitative behavior, and a deep need for admiration. Clinical narcissistic personality disorder, NPD, is much rarer than pop culture suggests. In fact, 0.5 to 1% of the general population meet diagnostic criteria according to the DSM5. So, there are a few key distinctions that we have to make. Many people might have some narcissistic traits like selfishness or low empathy when they're stressed. But NPD, to actually have this diagnosis of a personality disorder requires persistent grandiosity, a deep need for admiration, that lack of empathy, and significant impairment in functioning or in relationships. So when women say my husband is a narcissist, statistically 99% chances are that he's not. He may be immature, avoidant, insecure, or simply misattuned, but that is not the same as being pathologically narcissistic. So unless he's lovebombing, gaslighting, triangulating, and refusing any form of accountability, he's probably just a guy. And unpleasant as it might seem and embarrassing as it is to admit it, what I found on myself was that it was often me with a narcissistic tendencies. Let me break down for you how this shows up.

3:57 I married a man, but I wanted to change everything about him. Maybe you can relate to this. So many of my students come to me saying, "Yes, I married him. Yes, I chose him, but I don't actually like him. I find his hobbies to be too childish. I find his fashion choices to be cringe. I find his schedule to be inconsiderate. I find his humor to be insufferable. I find his politics unacceptable. His parenting isn't gentle enough. His family is too loud, too noisy, too messy, something. So many of us women come into a marriage not wanting this man warts and all, but wanting a custombuilt clone with feelings, but only when it suits us. If you have a long laundry list of all the things you dislike about your partner, then maybe he's not the one with the narcissistic problem. Maybe I'm the one with the grandiosity, with the expectation of special treatment, with entitlement, with self-centeredness.

4:53 Maybe I'm the one who's always looking at something through the frame of how it reflects on me, how it makes me feel, how it inconveniences me, what it might say about me, what it signals to my friends and my family. If you relate to this idea of wanting to change a lot of things about your man, really needing him to step up and to change and to evolve, right, then you might be falling hook, line, and sinker into this very narcissistic and selfish idea that we women are being inundated with, really indoctrinated in, which is that we are the evolved ones. We are the ones who read the books and go on the retreats and do the yoga and the meditation and you know the tarot card readings or whatever it is that we do. And we're the ones who understand the astrological signs and the emotional empathy and the gentle parenting. And so we are somehow better, more evolved, superior. And this manifests in the idea that our man simply needs to change to be more like us, to copy us, to meet our standards.

5:53 Quick pause. Can I ask you something? When was the last time you really wanted your partner? Not checked the box, not just cuddled, I mean felt something. If it's been a while since butterflies and tingles or even forever, that does not mean that your marriage is broken. It just means that at the moment the desire is offline. And that's exactly what I help women rebuild inside desire lab. It's my ongoing membership that helps you to reconnect with polarity, chemistry, and attraction. No, you don't need to spend big bucks on lingerie, although you're welcome to. You need tools, mindset shifts, and reframes.

6:33 Why? Because a lot of the noise in culture out there is actually making women like you and me feel resentful or even repulsed by our husbands. I'm going to train your eyes to see those messages for what they are. To detect them, to reject them, and to replace them with the types of thinking that's going to create chemistry, spark desire, and bring back those butterflies and tingles so that you can feel the love and romance that you seek, deserve, and want. And the best part is that when desire grows, everything else in a relationship gets easier when you have great chemistry. You are going to find that fights about finances or talks about schedules or disagreements about co-parenting just shrink away. Let's put it this way. Desire does the heavy lifting. When desire is high, conflict is low. So check out Desireab at h highfam.com/desirelab or find the link somewhere around this video. If you're ready to really want your partner again, we can make that happen. See you on the inside. Let's get back to the video now. But this indoctrination of us women doesn't stop there. In fact, it also manifests in what you might call the sleigh queen movement. That is the idea that every woman should be treated like a queen, right? That you deserve love and loyalty and affection, adoration, to be cherished, to be protected, to be woripped. I know what it's like to want him to plan dates, to affirm me, to buy me flowers, to shower me with compliments, to hold me emotionally, to handle logistics, not to mention to make money, to do exactly half of all the household chores, and to be a present dad. Yes, we want a lot from our men. We expect queen treatment, but we're not willing to give him king treatment. In fact, it sounds cringy and just countercultural to even say that. Saying out loud a man should treat his wife like a queen is totally acceptable. It makes perfect sense. It's what everybody thinks. But saying that a woman should treat her man like a king, now that's controversial. Meanwhile, men so often get eye rolls when they speak. They get sarcasm when they forget something. They get told that what they're doing is just the bare minimum and no one should have to say thank you for just being a dad.

8:51 Men are very often disrespected and demeaned and told that their very being is toxic. Men get blamed for the historical sins of people who had the same genitalia or for misdemeanors of other people who happen to have the same chromosomes. It seems like almost everything a man does for his family is just the bare minimum. We women often demand unconditional love, but we give conditional respect. We want to be cherished and accepted. We want patience for our misgivings. We want understanding and empathy for our mistakes. We want our husbands to hold our goodness to light and to see us in the most charitable and generous interpretations. We want them to minimize our mistakes, our temper, and our vices and maximize all of the good qualities about us. But we so often do the opposite to them. We so often look at men through a critical eye. We maximize and inflate their mistakes. We make a big fuss over every shortcoming or misgiving. We get overly insulted and make dramas about perfectly innocuous comments. We feel like our man has to earn our softness, has to earn our attraction, has to work hard for us, even has to earn the right to not be seen as another child. We women often expect romance just because we're tired, we're overwhelmed, we're overstretched, we're overouched, we've been with our kids all day or homemaking all day. But we don't offer our husbands that same softness and love and backup and the feeling that we're in their corner no matter what. If a man scrolls on his phone during family dinner, the first thought is not, "Oh my goodness, I'm so grateful that he's working so hard for our family." The first thought is, "How dare he? Why is he on the phone at family dinner? If a man takes a nap on a Sunday afternoon, the first thought is not, "Oh, good. He must be exhausted after his late night shift." It's, "Why does he get a nap and I don't?" Often women phrase men's desire for peace and quiet and calm in the household as emotional immaturity. We accuse him of having bad communication skills or being unavailable and avoidant. And he might be all of those things, but it could also just be my own overfunctioning, controlling, and resentmentfueled monologues that he doesn't have space for. What I'm doing is not exactly emotional maturity either. The truth is that as grateful as we might be to the sister suffragettes and the feminist movement for unlocking women's rights, it also handed us a lie and a double standard. I think it's made us women feel like we're always the victim. And it's positioned men as if they're always a fixeruppper. That if you're dissatisfied, that's a diagnosis of your marriage. And if he doesn't fix himself to be exactly as you want, then that is somehow abuse. When you watch Gen Z women on TikTok, what you'll find is so many of them are overinflated with their confidence. They see themselves as the prize. They are the queen and deserve queen treatment. they are around 10 every single time. And whilst I don't love the idea of rating people based on their looks, the idea is that yes, you need to bring something to the table.

12:13 But when they're asked what they bring to the table, they say I am the table. He would be lucky to have me. I'm entitled to the best treatment possible. And it's this entitlement and this energy that tells women that they deserve everything without having to give anything in return that I think creates a kind of dislodgement in the harmony in our relationship. It's why we diagnose someone as a narcissist whenever they don't neatly fit into our standards and into our controlling ways.

12:41 The deeper truth is that most women today don't know how to be in a relationship with a man. We're constantly training our eyes to spot or even invent red flags, but not to build red-hot marriages. We're constantly told to walk away, not work through it. Instagram and Tik Tok are training us to analyze, but never to simply admire or appreciate. And then we're shocked that we're bitter and lonely and checked out. Let me save you a lot of heartache and frustration. You don't need a narcissism test. 99% of us are not married to a guy with a narcissistic personality disorder. We've just been trained to see everything he does through a critical eye. To feel entitled to more, to notice all the ways he's falling short, and to think that if he's not perfect somehow, then maybe we're just not compatible and we should walk away. We women need to stop performing emotional superiority to men and instead start cultivating real intimacy. That's what we do inside of Married You. We stop inventing diagnosis and hiding behind labels and pathizing our marriages and we instead take accountability for creating a real relationship. We rebuild attraction, respect, polarity, partnership, friendship without therapy and books and dragging him to anything. I know it can be a bit seductive to think that maybe there's just a diagnosis, a label, a reason that it sometimes feels like he doesn't see me or doesn't care about me or is selfish or immature. It can feel incredibly validating to say, "Ah, yes, the problem is squarely with him. It's how he was born. It's how he was raised.

14:22 Nature, nurture, whatever. It's not me." It's a big relief to finally find a diagnosis or a personality disorder that explains away all of the friction and the tension and the arguments that we might have. But the truth is, in the vast majority of cases, this diagnosis doesn't actually fit. And in many cases, it's not him that's behaving like a narcissist. It's us. us with our constant criticism, with our unreachable standards, with our cognitive fallacies of constantly personalizing and taking offense and being insulted, with our feminist double standards about what men should bring to the table versus women being the prize. With our complete unwillingness to take accountability for the ways that we've cocreated the bad situation we're in. with our complete unwillingness to take accountability for what we've done to jeopardize the relationship. For the ways that we've belittled him, emasculated him, patronized him, and driven him away. For the ways that we've lost our softness, our femininity, our attractiveness, our playfulness, our likeness, our kindness, and our ability to give and sacrifice for love. That hardened, expectant, and entitled energy is never going to bring about the marriage that you desire. It's never going to make him fall madly in love with you or you fall madly in love with him. It's going to drive a wedge between you that is suspicious, that is diagnostic, that is pathological, that is always analyzing the other person and sizing up their issues and their problems. Inside of Married You, I can teach you how to melt all of that away.

16:02 And the reason I can teach you that is because I've had to go through this myself. In some ways, none of us were ever taught the skills of being soft, of loving unconditionally, of creating true intimacy, of creating unconditional support, love, trust, attraction with each other. We haven't learned how to fuel desire and chemistry and polarity between the feminine and the masculine. We haven't learned how to communicate in ways that bypass defensiveness and immaturity that lower and deescalate the friction rather than increasing it and spiraling into a massive fight. But those are all learnable skills and these are things that like muscles, like trust, like a business, you can build if you invest in them. So, if you've come to the conclusion that maybe your husband doesn't suffer from a personality disorder, but he can sometimes be a bit immature or avoidant, and so can you, then make sure to check out marry-youu.com.

17:02 I know that my takes here can be a little countercultural and controversial, maybe even triggering. But if you find them helpful, then make sure to leave me your comment below with your key takeaway so that I know that you would like me to continue to create content about how to create the marriage that you want with the partner that you've got. Keep on living that high fam life and I'll see you in the next