narcissistic behaviour in relationships explained — 1 brief investigation

behaviour in relationships, with the british spelling, is somehow the version of this question that does not make me wince when i type it. i have a theory about that. the theory is that the extra u makes it feel like a different person’s problem.

i am writing this from the desk because the desk is, unlike the apartment, a room where the spelling is decided by a corporate style guide and i do not have to. carla is upstairs in the training session on the third floor. i have, by an estimate i am not going to defend, the rest of the morning. that is the budget. that is what we are working with.

this is the longtail wing of a larger piece about gaslighting and how the everyday version of it actually operates, narrowed to the relational subset, narrowed again to the particular flavour that arrives spelled with a u. for readers in london, sydney, edinburgh, dublin, auckland — yes. this one is for you. for everyone else: bear with me, the spelling is doing real work.

1. narcissistic behaviour in relationships, the disclaimer

i am not a clinician. i looked it up once, the way a person looks things up at 2am with a phone at 23% battery, and the manual they reference on the shows i watch was not on the first page of results. so the disclaimer goes first: what i am calling narcissistic behaviour in relationships here is the version that lives in apartments, not in any literature i am fairly sure exists somewhere serious.

the spelling matters more than i expected. the american spelling, “behavior”, reads to me like an entry in a worksheet a school counsellor once printed. the british spelling, “behaviour”, reads like a sentence from a novel where nobody is going to be okay by the end. i think the british spelling is more honest about what we are describing. the extra u is doing the work of an entire warning label.

the closest cinematic version of any of this is still the 1944 film “Gaslight”, in which a husband moves the picture frames and tells his wife she is imagining it, which, by the standards of an actual london apartment in 1944, is theatrical. the modern relational version is quieter. nobody monologues. somebody simply says, calmly, “i never said that,” while the kettle boils.

third disclaimer: i was, in the version of this story that lives in my own life, also a participant. i am not pretending i was a saint with a clipboard. i was a man with a phone and a memory and, on at least four separate tuesdays, a wrong recollection of my own. the data set includes me. i am, by my own admission, contaminated.

2. the atm where the certified letter showed up first

the atm on the corner of my street is the wrong atm. it charges a fee. it is the atm i use anyway, because the right atm is two blocks further and the right atm is, by my own irrational classification, a place i go when i am being good. i was not being good last tuesday. i went to the wrong atm.

the screen flashed the usual warnings, the usual fee notices, the usual please-take-your-card, and then, as i was leaving, the man behind me asked if i had dropped this. he held out an envelope. it was a certified letter. it was not mine. it was, however, addressed to me. somehow. at the atm. i do not know how. the chain of custody on this object should be, structurally, impossible.

i opened it later, at the desk, with the unopened mail pile on the chair next to me providing moral support. the letter was about a thing i had been told, three years ago, repeatedly, never happened. the letter said it had happened. the letter had a date. the letter had a signature. the letter was, technically, the receipt for a tuesday i had been instructed not to remember.

i did not call anyone. i did not write anyone. i put the letter in the drawer of certified letters, which is the second drawer down on the left, and which currently contains, by an audit i am about to make up, eleven envelopes. the drawer is not a memorial. the drawer is, mechanically, an archive of paper proof that tuesdays do, in fact, happen.

3. the chatgpt summary, briefly, with my footnotes

i asked ChatGPT to summarise the relational pattern in fewer than a hundred words because the contact form on this site is, technically, a chatgpt screen and i wanted to see what it would do with the same prompt. the summary came back in textbook syntax. i am not going to paste it in full because that would defeat the point of having a personality. i will, however, footnote it.

the summary said the pattern centres on chronic memory destabilisation in a partner. i would footnote that with: yes, but also receipts. the receipts are the part the summary leaves out. you cannot run the pattern indefinitely against a person who keeps receipts, because the receipts are, in court, dated.

the summary said it includes credit-taking and blame-shifting on a bilateral basis. i would footnote that with: yes, but also brunch. the brunch is the venue where the bilateral score is announced, in front of mutual friends, in casual phrasing, with the partner in question framed as the long-suffering witness. brunch is the courtroom. brunch is the part that goes on your wall.

the summary said the pattern responds best to professional intervention. i would footnote that with: yes, and also the third yoga mat. the third yoga mat lives, at this moment, beneath the couch in a posture i can only describe as resigned, and it is, by my own classification, what professional intervention looks like for me — which is to say, an item bought with the intention of being used. it has not been used. that is also data.

4. behaviours 1 to 5, the relationship-grade ones

here is where, in a more responsible piece, i would list these calmly. i will try.

1. the rewrite. a thing was said on friday. you remember it. you remember the kettle was on. by wednesday morning the thing was, somehow, never said, and the question is now whether you are tired or whether you have a problem. this is the daily one.

2. the credit ledger. the good ideas in the relationship are introduced as their idea, retroactively, from a date you cannot verify. the bad ones are introduced as your idea, also retroactively, with the same untraceable date. the ledger is balanced. the ledger is balanced wrong.

3. the audience tax. the behaviour softens in front of strangers. it warms in front of your friends. it disappears entirely in front of theirs. the diagnostic isn’t the pattern itself, it is the dimmer switch that runs it.

4. the pre-emptive accusation. a thing they are about to do is, the day before, attributed to you as a thing they suspect you might do. when you don’t, the suspicion is filed as evidence they “knew.” when they do it themselves, it is, retroactively, your fault for putting the idea in the air.

5. the small unequal apology. when you are upset, the apology is conditional. “i am sorry you feel that way.” when they are upset, the apology you owe is unconditional, dated, in writing, and will be quoted later, possibly at the brunch from item 3.

none of these is dramatic alone. each is, on its own, a slightly annoying tuesday. the diagnostic is the volume. it is, i am told, fully possible to live with one of these for years. five at the same time, on the same tuesday, in the same kitchen, is the bit that turns a relationship into a slow archaeological dig with a kettle.

a brief detour, because it is on my mind: the spelling problem is not unique to this topic. when i wrote about karl pilkington’s tour of foreign cuisines, i had to choose between “traveller” and “traveler” four separate times. that show is broadcast in two countries that cannot agree on whether the t at the end of the word “trapped” should be doubled. the experience of being an idiot abroad, in spelling terms, is the experience of being told, gently, that you have arrived with the wrong vowel.

5. verdict, the behaviour is plural, the relationships are individual

here is the verdict. the behaviour, in the british spelling, is plural — a set, a habit, a register. the relationships are individual. you cannot run a generic playbook against a single named person and expect the playbook to be useful at the kitchen table on a wednesday. the playbook is for spotting the pattern. the wednesday is for deciding what to do about it. those are two different jobs and they are, in my experience, performed by two different parts of the same head.

the relational version is, i think, also the most fixable, because it requires a witness, and witnesses are people, and people can leave. nobody leaves a microwave. that is why the seventh microwave, in my own kitchen, is still in active service, and the relationship that produced the certified letter currently in the drawer is, technically, not.

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