I Enabled Delusional Thinking — Until I Realized a Friendship Pattern

Delilah and her on-and-off boyfriend Justin had recently moved to our bustling metropolis, and she dumped him not long afterwards, because he didn’t want a baby and she — at 31 — was ready and chomping at the bit to reproduce.

She dumped Justin and put their apartment up on Craigslist and, in true Delilah fashion, fell instantly for the man who showed up to see the place. He got the apartment — and her.

Weeks later, she told us she was pregnant. She was certain it was the new guy’s child. Another friend and I quietly did the math on our own and we each came to the same conclusion: this baby was probably her ex’s. We approached her, but she said she knew conclusively that the baby belonged to her new guy.

Then, the baby was born — a near replica of her ex. The illusion shattered, and she admitted the truth instantly. I felt relief. She was facing reality.

Or so I thought.

I didn’t yet realize this was only the first crack in a much larger cycle.

From Swipe to Soulmate in Three Hours

The fallout was brutal. The man who believed he was this newborn baby’s father was crushed. He’d even flown in family from Brazil for the birth of his supposed first child. And the biological father? An emotionally vacant alcoholic bartender, he wanted nothing to do with his own son, despite living just a couple miles down the road.

When it became clear that Justin was not going to pay or spend time with his baby son, Delilah moved on with her life. She started her own business, successfully branding and producing a dried jackfruit snack that earned accolades from the likes of Robert Downey Jr. after their mutual investor shared a bag with him.

She also began dating again when her son was about six months old and baby daddy still wasn’t coming around, despite “actually being a great guy with awesome manners,” according to her.

I remember her first date post-baby well. She had dropped her baby son off at my place while she went to meet a dude she just matched with on a dating app (Bumble, I think).

I casually logged into Facebook almost three hours later, and saw that Delilah had become Facebook official with the guy she was on her way to meet just a few short hours ago.

She showed up an hour later —incandescent and claiming he was “the one.” She knew because they’d had the same dream about something, but she couldn’t tell me what because it was a secret between them.

I was stunned. How could she be so sure, so fast? Especially with a baby at stake?

But this was Delilah: every romance was an all-consuming destiny. And at the time, I told myself it was just her quirky way of loving. In reality, it was idealization — a defense mechanism that transforms a stranger into a soulmate overnight, protecting against fear and loneliness with fantasy.

Her never-ending ability to fantasize, to me, seemed like strength. And maybe it was, albeit a self-destructive kind.

A Perfect Life, Cracking at the Seams

Within a few months, Delilah discovered by way of a mutual friend that her boyfriend was being discussed very negatively on a women’s local dating feedback Facebook page. Specifically, he was being accused of screwing many different women, usually BDSM-style, sometimes crying when he couldn’t get off.

This was her chance to get out with her son. Instead, however, she got pregnant by him. A girl.

They got married not long after and eventually had their second biological child together. A boy. With three kids in total, his handsome corporate attorney salary, and big old country house with a white picket fence, they seemed to really have it all.

At the time, I called their existence my ‘dream life.’

Now, I call it ‘my worst nightmare.’

Over time, he took control of her finances, monitored her messages and phone calls, and gradually cut her off from meaningful outside contact. Meanwhile, he continued to cheat compulsively, seducing and bedding countless women, some of whom later told her that he had physically harmed them as well (BDSM-gone-awry stuff).

She would later reveal to me that he was diagnosed with both Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Sex Addiction with sadistic compulsions, though she didn’t know this info yet.

A New Soulmate Every Week

A couple years later, Delilah filed for divorce and they both moved — separately — to Boise, Idaho where the standard of living is considerably cheaper.

It was at this time that Delilah, who had increasingly cut off contact with us at behest of her controlling husband, reappeared fully in our lives via our Whatsapp thread. With full access to her phone and social media again, she came back full-force, messaging us daily with the details of her newly single and working-mom-of-three life.

And, of course, she (once again) quickly began dating again.

A few months into living on her own with the kids part-time, she began dating in earnest again. First was a longtime friend, and she was certain he was the one until they had sex and she realized he wasn’t. She rejected him and began dating locally via dating apps, dating many men in quick succession and falling momentarily for each of them.

I stopped keeping count after a while. More like, I couldn’t keep up with the swift succession of idealized lovebombing and sudden discard.

One time she dumped her soulmate of the week because he didn’t give her enough attention after his student died suddenly. Marla and I whispered to each other in disbelief: Did she really expect him to romance her while grieving a child’s death?

When we began to question her choices, the seeming cycle, the chaos, the love-bombing, she told us that we didn’t understand her and its because we were so deeply lacking in self-love and self-worth of our own. She added that she couldn’t relate to us anymore because of it — that our supposed deficiency actually worried her.

By this point, I had already been deep in the troughs of denial for months, brushing off Marla’s insistent pleas that this pattern was extraordinarily abnormal. Deep down, I knew she was right, but I didn’t want to face it. Maybe it was because I admired Delilah so much — admired how she managed single motherhood of three small kids (three!), while simultaneously juggling her business and teaching, all in the aftermath of surviving a marriage to a man with NPD.

That admiration kept me clinging to the hope that her choices made sense in some way I couldn’t see. I kept trying so hard to see the very best in her, although looking back, my view of her could never quite match up to her own supposed view of herself: a near-perfect being.

This is the thing: I know that nobody is perfect, least of all her with her messy trail of relationship fuckups, but she was perfectly pretty, perfectly intelligent, perfectly charming, perfectly successful.

A Character in Her Story

At this point, I realized my concern wasn’t just about her choices. It was about the children — especially her oldest son, whom by the tender age of six had already cycled through four different father figures (fake baby daddy; real baby daddy; NPD dad; now a weirdo junkie dad she’d already introduced to her kids.)

I couldn’t help but think about what that does to a child’s attachment system, how instability becomes a template for love, how the sense of self begins to fracture when nothing in one’s environment holds steady.

So when she related to us that she had introduced the latest in a long succession of lovers to her kids as their new dad, I admittedly lost my cool. I exploded, I admit it.

Looking back, I see that the rejection had actually started months before, when Marla first objected to Delilah’s narrative, pointing out brazen red-flags as well as Delilah’s prior promise to wait before bringing another man around her kids. That’s when the devaluation began, with Delilah making it a point to tell us again and again how hard it was for her to relate to people like us.

Trauma in Disguise

Here’s the hardest truth: she wasn’t faking it. She believed every piece of her own story. That sincerity is what made her illusions so seductive. But believing doesn’t make them less harmful.

Her children still absorb the instability. Her friends still carry the burden of playing along. And anyone who dares to question her script is cut out without hesitation.

And me? I wasn’t just her audience. I was repeating my own pattern — tolerating distortion, explaining away cruelty, idealizing those who hurt me, and calling it love. Her repetition compulsion played out in romance; mine played out in every kind of relationship.

The Hardest Lesson

What I finally learned was this: compassion doesn’t require collusion. You can see someone’s trauma-driven defenses clearly — denial, projection, idealization — and still choose not to step into them.

For me, that meant admitting that my constant immersion in Delilah’s drama wasn’t just about concern. It was about longing. She lived with a daring intensity I envied. Following her story was like tasting that life vicariously.

But real growth comes from recognizing my own repetition compulsion — and choosing not to repeat it. You see, Delilah is not the first person I believed in too much, despite rampant red flags. I guess I’m a sucker for charisma. I guess if I can believe in somebody else, I’m not forced to believe in myself so much, because that shit is hard.

I guess that’s the lesson Delilah left me with: when someone else’s curated reality collides with yours, you have a choice. Keep orbiting their story, because it comforts you in some way, or protect the integrity of your own mind.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.