I have been friends with a guy, let’s call him Mark, for almost six years. We met in school through mutual friends and over the years grew closer due to a lot of shared interests. However, it wasn’t till the last two years or so that we became close in a more one-on-one capacity. He had a difficult coming out that I was there for, and after that, we started to hang out together a lot more. We also moved to the same city post-college, which ended up with us naturally hanging out a lot since most of our friends were back home.
To describe Mark in a nutshell, he comes across as very chill/blend in type, but is pretty sociable and has a dark/sarcastic sense of humor. I’ve also always considered him to be self-centered and a bit “spoiled,” but that’s common in the area we grew up in since it was quite middle-class affluent. I’d say the same thing of myself sometimes!
As I mentioned, after moving, we started to hang out with each other pretty much every day. This is when I started really getting to know him. Aside from typical Mark-antics, I started to see stuff that kind of troubled me. Like, Mark has a really, really hard time empathizing with other people…..to the point where I don’t even know if he can. He thinks super highly of himself and doesn’t ever think about putting himself in someone else’s shoes.
He also cares a lot about what other people think, but at the same time, is hypercritical of everyone. And he absolutely cannot take any criticism. We’ve had some pretty heated fights where he’s said some really mean things in the moment because he didn’t like what I said about him. One time, Mark thought I had told a mutual friend a secret of his. I hadn’t, but instead of talking with me about it, Mark blew up my phone for an hour, telling me to “mind my own fucking business” and just all this really aggressive stuff. I could tell he was upset because this type of secret could hurt his “reputation” in our friend group if it got out, which is why he lashed out, but I hadn’t told anyone anything! It really took me aback and hurt my feelings that he just blew up on me without even hearing my side. It took MONTHS of me telling him I didn’t say anything before he just one day decided to believe me and apologized.
I don’t know…. I just feel concerned sometimes with the way Mark acts and how he treats me and other people. I know from bits and pieces of things he’s said that he had a difficult childhood, and his coming out was really traumatic for him due to the people around him at that time. I’ve mentioned therapy many times to him, as I’m in therapy and have found it so helpful. He always seems receptive at first but then will eventually boil it down to, “What can a therapist tell me that I don’t already know about myself?” or will say “You have problems and that’s why you go, but I don’t have anything like that.” When I pushed back on that, we got in a huge fight, and I haven’t brought up therapy again since. Around this time I started wondering if maybe he had some narcissistic qualities or could be a narcissist. There’s no way to know but I feel like he hits a lot of the basic symptoms of one.
Sometimes I feel so silly for continuing to be friends with him, because I feel like I’m constantly worried about him and trying to help him but get nothing in return. He can be a very impulsive person and also struggles with ADHD/anxiety/possibly other things, so there’s been a lot of times where I was the one picking him up after a binge drinking night or trying to get him home, or worried about if he’s doing okay mentally and checking up on him, listening to his struggles, trying to support him. But I don’t receive any of that back, because I…. don’t know if he really cares? Or if he’s just totally incapable of offering that support? He’s also sort of isolated himself recently from a lot of our mutual friends, either because they fought or because he’s consistently flaked and not been there for them and they got tired of it. So while that part of me that gets frustrated with him thinks, why do you keep doing this?, a bigger part of me really values our friendship and wants to be there for him while he figures himself out. I just want our friendship to be more equitable and also for him to get help, because I do think he needs it.
Any thoughts or advice would be much appreciated.
TLDR; I’m extremely close with a friend of six years but I’m starting to feel there’s issues in the friendship, and have started to feel like I put too much into it with nothing in return. I sometimes think he could be a narcissist or have narcissistic personality traits. I would like some advice on how to navigate a friendship like this.
3 comments
What do you like about him?
Don’t be friends with someone because you want to help fix them. Besides, he told you – he doesn’t have problems. He does not want your help. He wants actual friendship. So, do you like and respect him as an equal? Do you accept him as he is? If yes, great, be his friend. If no, then stop pretending to be his friend when you aren’t.
> I’ve mentioned therapy many times to him, as I’m in therapy and have found it so helpful.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but it comes across to me like you are excited to have a shiny new therapy hammer to work on your problems, which is good, but the problem is that you’re seeing every problem as another mental health nail for your new hammer to go to work on. It sounds like Mark’s problem is that he’s a drama queen, arrogant. and kind of a jerk, not that he has a mental health issue.
>I started to see stuff that kind of troubled me. Like, Mark has a really, really hard time empathizing with other people…..to the point where I don’t even know if he can. He thinks super highly of himself and doesn’t ever think about putting himself in someone else’s shoes.
>He also cares a lot about what other people think, but at the same time, is hypercritical of everyone. And he absolutely cannot take any criticism. We’ve had some pretty heated fights where he’s said some really mean things in the moment because he didn’t like what I said about him. One time, Mark thought I had told a mutual friend a secret of his. I hadn’t, but instead of talking with me about it, Mark blew up my phone for an hour, telling me to “mind my own fucking business” and just all this really aggressive stuff.
You basically want him to go to therapy because you think a large proportion of his personality sucks. Am I right?
That’s understandable, but if he’s the person you’re painting him to be, then he’s never, ever going to be open minded enough to consider going, let alone seriously consider what a therapist might have to say. And I suspect that if you ever raised any of these same issues with him (as in, you really don’t like that aspect of his personality) he wouldn’t take that well either. So what’s the point?
He sounds like he’s on a self destructive path here if he’s already alienated friends and they’ve also gotten fed up with the lack of reciprocation in the same way you have. If you told him how you felt you’re probably just going to be next on that list of excommunication…