Son's new girlfriend may be a fantasist - how to handle

[thedudescocktail]

Hello, please help!

I am extremely close to my 20 year old DS and he has brought a new GF home who he's been seeing for a couple of months and she comes across as a fantasist.

She has told a lot of stories about herself, her past, her current financial circumstances and so on which are frankly implausible. Many of which are terrible circumstances (eg: landlord recently doubled her rent). Others just don't add up.

For example, she claims she is both in full time education doing a BTEC and also claims she has a full time job with a 60k salary aged 19! It all just seems like utter bollocks. Not least because she never appears to go to either work or school.

She also stayed with us for only 3 days, during which 3 or 4 huge dramas occurred. She was frequently running off to the bedroom because she just had some terrible news. It all just seemed not true!

I spoke to my son, who's a bit innocent, and he agreed it all sounded far fetched (as do his friends) but he says he feels trusting of her and very close to her and that he now feels he has to end the relationship because he feels spying on her or checking up on her seems deceptive.

What should I advise him to do? It's not impossible she is telling the truth about all these things, but it does seem MASSIVELY unlikely and I can't work out the possible reasons why she would be being so dishonest but I feel genuinely concerned.

It all made me feel really anxious.

Advice?

Thats what i said!

Oh, this is a very good point...

No, because she's supposed to be off to university in two months!

Most of the time this kind of behaviour does stem from trauma of some kind. There is hardly ever a logical reason, nor obvious gain to be had from doing it. It's to get attention, be seen as "special", be excused from certain expectations and standards because of the dramas and traumas going on (e.g. the stream of tragedies she apparently experienced while staying at yours), to try and control the narrative of how she's perceived, and on and on.

I really feel for people like this, because normally it does come from such a background of suffering, hence the maladapted coping mechanism. However, it's harmful to be around, and your young son is certainly in no position to be helping her with this. I hate to say it but I am with the people who are concerned about what lies could be spun around your son. I think your instincts are spot on and I'd keep doing what you're doing - gently questioning, being honest yet non-confrontational with your son, and focus on his feelings and experience, not on her personality or traits etc.

Yep she's almost certainly amassing huge debt.

What happens when there’s an “emergency” and she needs somewhere to “temporarily” stay whilst the “university challenge is sorted”?

I somehow doubt that she will be going to university because some drama will occur. It might be a good idea to remind your son to use condoms with her even if she uses contraception herself. It’s good advice in general so there is no need to link it to her strange behaviour.

God imagine her having a gc 🙈

She'll be asking your son for money soon because there'll be some drama with her big wage, just about to be paid, yes just about to be paid but theres a delay can you lend me a couple of hundred, Im being paid in a few days

Some big drama about where she is living, can I stay for a few days, its only a few days because there was a toxic pigeon in the loft and we had to get special pigeon police to come out and look and no one is allowed to enter for 15 days unless they've had special injections, so I just need to stay for this time

Big drama about someone making an allegation about her, or her making an allegation about someone else, it will bring your son into it. The allegation might be about him. Or you

I would tread very carefully and I rarely say this but if your son is inclined to feel he cant continue the relationship, then veer him towards ending it.

He's actually a very smart young person. He will proceed with caution now regardless, as he understands there are red flags.

I think he feels sad and disappointed because he really liked her and she was providing lots of attention / affection / support when he felt quite lonely in life and he's upset that this puts a downer on it and makes it unlikely things will continue.

He says he's going to ask her some direct questions, such as "how did you do A Levels at 14" or "how come you are not at work" and he says if he feels he isn't get direct answers he will end the relationship.

He can't abide by lying, no matter if it's due to MH issues or vulnerability, he just respects himself too much to want dishonesty for any reason.

I agree with this Op. I would encourage him to break up with her. He is far too young to be dealing with someone who is so vulnerable and in constant crises. He does not need that burden at this age. She sounds like all sorts of trouble and I would not want him to be in a relationship with her.

Erm... not sure which university that would be then, I can't think there are all that many that have the new term starting in July.

You say your DS is innocent and trusting, but perhaps it has gone beyond that and he is a bit gullible, maybe?

Like others have said, she's waving enough red fags to string bunting around. My daughter (28) is like this girl - she has various PDs, actual diagnosed medically ones, including NPD. When she was at the height of crisis, her delusions of grandeur became ridiculous, very obviously lies (she's sold scripts to Paramount, which have been big budget series/movies... but they've not credited her, for example) - she also went out of her way to destroy the lives/reputations of the two people who were trying everything to get her the help that she so clearly needed. Me, and her then-best friend.

Me, she lied to the police about having abused her, in an admitted effort to have me slung in prison (whilst innocent of what she was claiming that I'd done) and her younger brother put into the Care System (which he wouldn't have been, because he would have lived with his Dad). Fortunately, I could prove that she'd been plotting that for a year or more, otherwise... yeah. Life ruined, and my son's heavily disrupted. However, the police did push through for her to be psychologically examined (again, all my fault... she didn't need it, apparently, but the police know who's lying to them and who isn't when they have all the facts and irrefutable proof laid out in front of them).

Her best friend was also a calculated thing. Said friend was planning to go to Camp America for a year and work with deaf children (she's deaf, herself). My daughter persistently contacted the organisation stating that friend was mentally unstable, abusive, shouldn't be accepted on to the programme. When the organisation said that they'd interviewed friend and she'd passed every test with flying colours, my daughter did what a previous poster warned about... and doubled down. Camp America contacted her friend and said "WTAF is going on here?!", very understandably, and daughter only stopped when her now-ex-friend had to engage a solicitor to send several cease and desist letters to my daughter. Who was outraged that she'd lost a friend, furious that she still went to America for a year - and had had the guts to stand up and say that my daughter was slandering her.

The older daughter gets, the delusions continue (but are now health focused, and I recently went NC with her for my own health reasons, so... she is officially her boyfriend's problem). But this might be why she's "bigging herself up" to your son/you - because her own parents, who probably haven't done anything that she's insinuated that they have, are at their wits end and have had enough. In my situation - and, @thedudescocktail, this is my warning to you/your son - I and her then-best-friend knew the truth and/or that she was lying. My daughter tried to destroy us, mother and best friend, because we were a threat to the delusional reality that she was projecting about herself. Her last boyfriend literally ran away from the south-east to Aberdeenshire, to get away from her lies. She now tells anyone who asks that he was abusive. My money's on him just realising what was trying to manipulate him - and, quite naturally, wanting no part in it.

Just warn your son to be extremely careful. And to call the police for a welfare check every time she says that she's tried to harm/kill herself. She is not his responsibility - but if he stays with her, his life will never be quiet or peaceful.

@contrary13 OP'S son could do with reading that. I'm so sorry that's happened to your family 💐

Jesus @contrary13 that is as bad as I have read on here. She sounds like she might be a psychopath. My brother is. They leave a wake of destruction behind where apparently they are the victim. 🙄🙄

he is autistic, definitely makes you susceptible to taking things at face value!

@contrary13 Thank you for sharing this and sorry you went through this!

I had one at university. She started there and found herself a lot younger than most of her friends (she went to school in Scotland, their school year cutoff dates are different from England and also system allowed her to skip sixth year and go straight to uni after her Highers, so she started at 16 and was in a group where everyone was at least a year older, some were 2 years older) and she started telling all these stories which got very out of hand.

There were a couple of dead exes (one of whom she resurrected), a relationship with a well known musician that no one believed had really happened, an older boyfriend who she'd cheated on with a dude in a bar who then turned out to be the first guy's son (Cosmopolitan had published a confession telling the same story at around the same time as that one).

The dates never seemed to add up, there was always some reason why her friends were never able to meet any of these dudes, she'd contradict herself (there were reasons why I now think the resurrected dead ex was some kind of test and she knew full well she'd previously claimed he was dead, but that's a long story). Some of it was silly stuff, like she said her parents let her smoke in the house and then when her dad visited, he said he didn't even know she smoked. During her first year, a friend from home visited and someone asked her about the boyfriend Liar McLiarson had supposedly been living with, and the friend said "Who's that?" In a moment of boredom I once looked up one of the dudes (who had an unusual name) on the electoral roll; he wasn't there.

To this day, I've never been sure whether there was any grain of truth in any of it that she just exaggerated, or whether she made the whole lot up. Some people who'd known her longer than me, for example, believed in the first dead ex. I didn't know her at that point; I accepted long ago that I'd never know, but I'm open to the possibility that he wasn't real either.

Google psychopath/narsasism behaviour, sounds like that. He should run whilst he can

Keep a log of her stories. Dates times and what she said. Gently but factually unravel each story with your son. A friend had a part time employee. In 2 weeks the part time employee had….
her company owned laptop stolen from her car
her dad witnessed a traffic accident where a victim was beheaded during the accident
her elderly GPs went missing in another state
her sister was in a diabetic coma in another state
she had Lyme disease
no one has that much tragedy in a 2 week period. Most of these stories were told so she didn’t have to come into work or could arrive late. She only worked 10- 2
In the end she was terminated and about 6 months later she had a benign brain tumor diagnosed and removed That actually was true.

Confronting psychopaths/NPD /BPD/ whatever is wrong with her could be a dangerous mistake. She will never admit anything. You could be in the room when she did something wrong, watching her do it, and she'll still deflect derail deny.

If confronted she'll feel threatened and pathological liars often lash out when threatened.

She's not like you. It's dangerous to judge her by your own standards.

There's no way to win or force good behaviour from a person like this. And if she'll lie TO you she'll definitely lie ABOUT you to others.

His safest bet is to extricate himself quietly with as little fuss as possible.

I suggest reading Without Conscience psychopaths among us by Dr Robert Hare. It's an older book but still excellent at explaining how dangerous these people are.

Even if not a psychopath her behaviours are worrying.

He needs protection.

Oh and often psychopaths/narcissists have NOT been abused but they'll happily lie about that too for personal benefit.

BPD might be different.

But all that's important is that you can't fix people like her, make them behave normally or understand them. You can only protect yourselves.

@thedudescocktail how's it going OP? Any more tall tales or has she been given her notice?

The brain tumour might have been responsible for the outrageous lies and fantasies. They can do strange things to a person's mind, mood swings and personality, which is very sad and not their fault.