After years of feeling stuck in a failing marriage with a narcissistic spouse, you have finally decided to call it quits and get a divorce. You both visited with attorneys, and everything appeared to be going as smoothly as possible for the first few weeks. That is until your narcissistic spouse suddenly starts coming up with unique ways to delay the divorce process.
Perhaps they are easily changing their mind about matters you previously agreed to.
Maybe they are strategically slow to respond to the lawyers and other people involved in the case.
You can’t quite prove their intentions, but you feel they’re doing it on purpose. But why? This is a difficult question to answer since everyone’s situation is different. But here are a few reasons your narcissistic spouse might be delaying the divorce.
They don’t want a divorce.
While your narcissistic spouse may have agreed to a divorce initially, that doesn’t always mean they want one. They could have felt forced to make that decision (which goes against their personality traits) and are delaying because of that alone. In other situations, they may have realized the marriage is worth fighting for and attempt to create time to patch things up with you and avoid a costly mistake.
They enjoy conflict and drama.
Even at the risk of spending more time, money, and energy on a divorce process they couldn’t care less about, a narcissistic spouse will go out of their way to unravel the easy stuff and create drama and chaos. Perhaps they want to make life harder for you. Maybe they prefer to have the spotlight on them. Either way, it’s feeding their desires.
They’re being difficult on purpose.
Yes, there is a high likelihood that your narcissistic spouse is delaying the divorce simply because the marriage has broken down so much that they want it to be as difficult as possible. They are bitter, angry, resentful, and wish to regain control of the situation. These feelings can lead to one or more vindictive acts as a way to seek payback.
They’re playing financial games.
To piggyback on the previous item, some narcissistic spouses will play games during the divorce process on purpose to delay child support payments, hide assets, avoid paying attorney costs, etc. They may even love the idea of possibly running up your attorney fees by dragging their feet for as long as possible.
It’s a chance to possibly get more from the divorce.
Your spouse may think that delaying the divorce process is recapturing control over you and creating negotiating leverage for various key sticking points in your settlement. Whether or not this tactic works out in their favor remains to be seen, but either way, they aren’t interested in moving faster than they have to until it benefits them to do so.
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