The Narcissist wanted me to be a Porn Star

I was looking through old photos on the computer this week. One of the many minor hassles that came out of disentangling my life with The Narcissist was that I needed to completely start my electronic life over again… email addresses, passwords, new computer, new iCloud accounts, new phone accounts… on and on. I had yet to merge our old iPhoto file with my current iPhoto collection and delete stuff I no longer wanted and get everything organized. So on a snow day this week I started combing through the files.

Most of the pictures were really hard to look at. The ones from the day we got married where I look so happy and innocent and full of life that there are practically sun beams shooting out of my smile… to the outing we had right before the first time I tried to leave him where the bags under my eyes and the hollow look on my face say everything. I guess more than anything I was surprised to realize that the “Sexy” photos we had throughout our life together outnumbered the normal ones… and it got me thinking back on that theme through our life, and remember how crazy it was.

My relationship with The Narcissist began in a long-distance arrangement, after we spent about 2 months together he was deployed by the military and we spent about a year shaping our relationship over the phone and on Skype. Pretty early on he began requesting sexy photos of me since he couldn’t see me in person. At that point in my life I had never taken a photo of myself even in lingerie so this was way outside of my comfort zone, but at that point I wanted to everything I could to keep him happy so I did it. I would go out and buy lingerie outfits and do my hair and makeup and stage photoshoots and send him tons of pictures. He would subtly tell me the things he liked or didn’t like and ask for different things and it evolved into a weekly effort to keep him happy.

Through this time period he was also obsessed with Playboy. He started having his magazine subscription sent to my house. He ordered me a ton of playboy clothes, lingerie, jewelry, etc. He liked me to dress and look and act overly feminine and much like the girls on the then hit show The Girls Next Door. I always felt a bit uncomfortable with it because in my mind and through my life experiences some of the trashiest women I knew wanted to be a Playboy model and proudly wore the clothing to get attention from men… but as with everything else I gave in because I wanted to make him happy.

Once his deployment was over and we were married and physically together we had plenty of ‘normal’ sex but there started to be this trend of making elaborate events out of sex. He would require me to plan special nights of going out, drinking, having sex in wild places, wearing special outfits, taking photo shoots of us having sex… on and on. It actually became really exhausting because as with everything else I could never keep up with his expectations or his standards for things .

Somewhere along the way he really started pushing me to be more voyeuristic with where we would take the photos and who we would show them to. One night we wandered around a beautiful resort hotel and he took pictures of me in secluded parts of the lobby and hallways and pool area. He would edit the photos and post the ones he liked best to my super private Facebook account in an effort to try to recruit my girlfriends to sleep with us. I was only allowed to connect with women on Facebook and I wasn’t allowed to have any friends that I knew from the past… like family, old friends, etc. I even had one acquaintance that asked me to stop posting naked pictures of myself because she felt uncomfortable seeing them pop up on her newsfeed. The Narcissist flipped out and said she was uncomfortable with her sexuality and I wasn’t allowed to be friends with her anymore after that.

The Narcissist kept “floating” the idea of me becoming a web cam sex girl to me. His sales pitch was that I was gorgeous and I could make a ton of money for us just by doing things to myself on camera. He said that I would never need to even see another man and I would just have to dress up cute and play the part of creating enough new content to keep people entertained. You can imagine my surprise as I was not even allowed to have conversations with males that were outside of The Narcissist’s close friend group. Literally we got into a fight once because I was leaving the BX and said thank you to a Marine who held open the door for me. The Narcissist accused me of being an attention whore. Yet here he was trying to convince me to post naked videos of myself masturbating online so that other men could get off to it.

I thank my lucky stars that I was able to avoid this ever really coming to fruition. I argued that I would have an extremely hard time walking around in public thinking about which men had seen me naked. I said that it could really harm my future in terms of getting a real job or being seen as a credible smart woman. He had a comeback for all of it which basically accused me of not being comfortable with my sexuality and not loving myself.

I think I provided enough resistance on that topic that then he tried to push me to submit to be a Playboy Playmate. He claimed that Playboy was the classiest publication around and that I would be revered for modeling for such a timeless magazine. He even staged a few photoshoots that he hoped would be good enough to submit for Playboy. I came back with all of the same arguments but I think in my twisted mindset at the time I had justified that if I was going to end up profiting off of my naked body I would rather do it uber airbrushed and glamorized for Playboy versus be a webcam porn star.

In the end, the thing that actually saved me from ending up naked on the internet somewhere wasn’t my own power… it was that The Narcissist could never get over his criticism of my body enough to think I was “ready” for these endeavors. He would take photos of me and pick apart my worst insecurities and say terrible things to me about how my inner thighs were too chubby or I would really need a boob job if I was ever going to get anywhere, and he would shake his head in disgust and say I wasn’t ready.

So I never ended up a web cam girl, and I never ended up in Playboy and thank freaking God. What I am left with is literally thousands of naked and semi naked and sex photos of myself… where I can see the look of pure desperation on the face of a gorgeous, too skinny,  too tan, too glittery, too glamorized looking girl who is just trying to get her husband to love her. It’s heartbreaking and was really hard for me to see.

The reality is that this, like absolutely everything else in my life was about The Narcissist and not about me. He loved the idea of how cool he would look and impressed his friends would be that he had a wife who was a webcam girl or in a Playboy magazine. He loved that he would feel elite through that somehow. He loved the idea of me making lots of money for us that he could then spend on all the stupid shit he wanted. He loved the idea of my sexy photos bringing other women into our bedroom so that he didn’t have to do any of the work and reap all the pleasures. He loved being able to use me in any way shape and form to feed his ego and elevate his status to someplace higher. He loved the things I did for his life, but he never not even once actually loved, respected or appreciated me.

So, I deleted all of the photos that had The Narcissist in them but I have kept the ones of me. One of my primary goals for this year is to learn to love myself and I feel like that needs to be true for my journey too. I wan’t to look at these pictures and love myself in them, and I want to look at myself now and love myself now. So I am going to keep them for now, tucked away, as a reminder of where I was and how far I have come to be the woman typing all of this today.

❤