Meanwhile in New York: Woman Runs 285 Miles in Wedding Dress to Raise Awareness For Narcissism, That’s Some Irony You Can’t Outrun

If you’ve ever been in a toxic relationship with a narcissist, your first instinct was likely to run as fast as you could away from that person. Fitting, then, that a New York woman is embarking on an almost 300-mile trot across the state to raise awareness about narcissistic domestic abuse.

Her name is Vanessa Reiser and she’s hitting the road on May 17. She’ll jog from Oswego to Manhattan by May 29. The way the mileage works out at around 23 miles daily, she’ll be running a little more than the equivalent of 10 marathons – and she’ll do it all in a wedding dress.

“Narcissists generally will use the wedding or an engagement as a form of control and manipulation. They entangle you. And so, [the dress] is a representation of how they do that,” she told People TV.

It will come as no surprise that Reiser has personal experience with narcissistic domestic abuse, which she described as “an insidious form of domestic violence.” She was once engaged to a diagnosed narcissist sociopath with a history of abuse. (What will surprise you is that Reiser is a clinical therapist, yet didn’t immediately recognize the cardinal signs of her partner’s diagnosis.)

“He left me in Cape Cod and then I had to rent a car to get home,” she said. “He padlocked me out of the house. A few months later, I left him and he spit on me, called me a bunch of really awful names, told me that my dead father was a loser — my father died when I was 18 — and then he bleached all my clothing.”

He also spread rumors that she was abusing him in an attempt to get her ousted from the board of the Domestic Violence Center. These are all forms of a narcissistic abuser’s trademark moves, which involve confusion, control, and manipulation.

“There was a lot of pain,” Reiser said of the relationship and subsequent breakup. “It was really awful.”

While we sympathize with anyone who falls in love with a narcissistic, even if there’s no blatant abuse involved, you have to wonder if the act of trotting 285 miles in a wedding dress – and the inevitable press that will accompany that journey – is a tad narcissistic in and of itself. Now that’s some irony you can’t outrun.

Cover Photo: Olga Shevtsova / EyeEm (Getty Images)

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