Bride who dated ‘narcissist’ out of pique gets annulment

A woman’s decision to date a friend’s ex-boyfriend simply out of pique ended with a marriage annulment for her and the man she married, whom she described as a  “financial and emotional miser” and – according to a psychologist – was afflicted by narcissistic personality disorder, who enjoyed spending more time with his friends and gadgets.

The family court annulled the marriage of the couple who tied the knot in 2010 after a five-year relationship, and then separated after only two years of marriage.

The wife claimed she only started seeing the defendant to “get even with a friend of hers” who had started going out with her ex-boyfriend. So she dated her own friend’s ex-boyfriend.

The husband-to-be moved into her family home at his insistence, and the initial infatuation soon began to die down, with the woman noting the man was highly averse to compromise.

“He was mollycoddled as a child and always wanted things his way. He didn’t know the meaning of compromise, of discussion,” the woman said, while she lacked the strength to resist his single-mindedness. “He would decide everything and I would reluctantly accept every situation and everything he told me”.

Even sex suffered after only a few months of their being together, the woman said. At one point he told her that she was “more of a sister to him”.

In spite of his paying more attention to his mates, she stuck by him. “I was his floor-cloth. I admit the warning signs were all there but I was incapable of getting out of the situation.”

Despite her gut feeling, she soldiered on with organising their wedding, after her husband suggested that they get married. And the feeling never abated – not even on their wedding day. “If I could have found the courage, I would have got up and left the Church,” she told the court.

In his affidavit, the husband denied his wife’s arguments, explaining that he was employed in shift work, often at night, and that this had contributed to the lack of contact between the parties.

He said his wife was a hairdresser who worked from home, forcing him to rest at his parents’ home due to the presence of her clients in the matrimonial home. He also cited the woman’s fitness regime, which involved her rising and going to bed early, as a factor in the relationship’s decline as this lessened the time the two could spend together.

He added that he only learnt after the marriage that she had had a two-year relationship with a woman, and that she had started taking the contraceptive pill. “I tried to understand her but she would always come up with something new and I could never make her happy,” he said.

Psychologist Mariella Blackman testified that in their first meetings of couples’ counselling, the woman would tremble violently. “In 20 years of practising family therapy, this woman demonstrated the most severe anxiety [I had ever encountered]”.

She told the court that the husband was “an individualist who only thinks for himself” and that he suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder.

“This was present before the marriage. With this disorder, he could not be in a mental and sufficiently clear cognitive position to understand what he was undertaking and what marital duties were.”