boyfriend a narcissist — 1 investigation

a boyfriend who fits this description is, in the experience of about four people i love and one i am still on the fence about, the kind of boyfriend who calls himself a feminist and then asks why dinner is late. there is a tell. the tell is the second sentence.

i am writing this from the desk at 9:18, the door propped open with the foolscap pad i never use, because carla is on the third floor in the annual planning meeting and the rest of the morning is mine if i can stop fidgeting with the search bar. the search bar is what brought me here. someone, somewhere, typed boyfriend a narcissist into google with no preposition between them, the way you’d type a panic into a vending machine, and the algorithm sent it to me. i don’t know why. i looked it up myself once, for a friend, and now the internet thinks i am the help desk for relationships built on quicksand.

i’m not. i am the help desk for being wrong about almost everything in a way that turns out to be useful. that’s adjacent. it counts.

boyfriend a narcissist, the disclaimer about syntax

let me be clear about what i am not doing. i am not a doctor. i am not a man with letters after his name. i am a man with a microwave count of seven and a third yoga mat that has been under the couch since 2023 and a phone that buzzed twice at the atm last week and got dodged twice by me, which, by the count i keep running, makes it the eleventh dodge of the spring. i am qualified to notice things. that is a different qualification.

so when i tell you that boyfriend a narcissist is a perfectly reasonable thing to type into a search bar even though it is missing a verb, i mean that the missing verb is the point. the verb you skipped is the verb you are afraid to commit to. is. was. might be. you didn’t write is because is is a sentence you have to live inside afterward. the search bar lets you stand on the porch.

i find this very Frasier-shaped, in a way. a man on a radio show, calmly explaining to a caller that the thing she is describing is, in fact, a thing, and could she please consider naming it. the difference is that he had an actual degree. i have a search engine and a desk and approximately four people i love who have all said the same sentence to me at different points, which is its own kind of degree, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists somewhere.

before any of the signs, before any of the lists, the disclaimer is this: if you are searching for the word, you already have most of the answer. the search is the second sentence. the first sentence was last tuesday, in the kitchen, when he explained why a thing you remembered did not happen the way you remembered it. and you, sensibly, did not argue. you came here. that’s the syntax. that’s the investigation. for the bigger conversation about how the word for that whole pattern works, i sent it upstream to the main gaslighting investigation, because the boyfriend variety is a specific case of a wider problem and the wider problem is where most of the vocabulary lives.

the ikea aisle where the draft happened

i wrote the first version of this on the back of an ikea catalog, which is not a metaphor. it was an actual ikea catalog, in the actual marketplace section near the candles, and the draft happened because the woman in front of me was on the phone explaining to someone, calmly, that no, she had not said that, and that he must be remembering it differently, and that she would be home in twenty minutes, and that yes, she had picked up the meatballs, and that no, she was not upset, and that yes, she was sure.

five sentences. one of them was true. you could tell which.

i did not say anything. i am not the man who walks up to a stranger in an ikea aisle and offers a verdict. i am the man who buys a candle he does not need so he can stay in the aisle three more minutes and confirm a hypothesis. the candle is on my desk now, unlit, doing the work a candle does when it is just sitting there reminding you that you stood in an aisle once and watched a stranger lose an argument she was already winning.

ikea is the right place for this kind of draft. it is built for people who are about to make a decision they are not totally sure about. that is the entire model. you walk through the rooms, you sit on the couches you cannot afford, you write down a number that means something only to ikea, and at the end you eat meatballs and decide whether to commit. the difference between an ikea trip and a bad relationship is that ikea will let you leave with just the meatballs.

tom would have a tidy version, i have this one

my friend tom, who owns a house and a volvo and a wife and two children and a pension that he understands, would write this differently. tom would have a numbered list, and the numbers would be in serif font, and there would be a small graph somewhere in the middle that someone would have made for him in a spreadsheet that auto-updates. tom does this. i have seen him. tom rents a calm life and pays the rent on time. i, by contrast, own this version, which is a draft on the back of a catalog and a list i made in the kitchen at home and seven microwaves of evidence that i am not the man you call when you want a clean answer.

i mention tom because tom is the control. tom has not had to type boyfriend a narcissist into a search bar, partly because he is not a boyfriend anymore and partly because tom, as a baseline matter, does not produce the kind of confusion that sends people to search bars. that’s a quality. i don’t have it. you may not either. the people who type boyfriend a narcissist are not the people who cause the search. the people who cause the search would never type it. they would type am i a good boyfriend and then close the laptop when the answer came back too long.

which brings me to the difference between a normal idiot and a more elaborate one. a normal idiot, of which i am the leading example, will admit the thing once you point it out. he may not fix it. he may, in fact, write a 1,300-word post about how the fork was just being a fork. but he admits it. an elaborate idiot, the kind that earns the search bar, never admits anything. he reframes. he relocates. he reminds you that the actual problem is your tone. there is no overlap between these two categories. one of them is a general-purpose moron, the kind you tease at the bar. a moron is a category most of us are in part-time. the other is a specific thing the search bar does not have a verb for, which is why the verb is missing.

signs 1 to 5, the boyfriend-grade ones

i am not going to give you a hundred. there are a hundred. you can find a hundred anywhere. i am going to give you five, because five is what fits in a head when you are standing in an ikea aisle pretending to read the candle label.

one. he will tell a story about himself in the third person and you will be in it as a supporting character. you will not be named. you will be “she”. he will be “i”. the names are the data. names are a kind of receipt and he does not give receipts.

two. he will be very generous with strangers and very precise with you. the waiter gets twenty percent without thinking. you get a calculation. (i hold, separately, that tipping should be a flat 12%, which is a hot take i am willing to defend at the bar, but the point here is the asymmetry, not the percent. asymmetry is the symptom. the percent is just where i happen to live.)

three. he will remember the things that flatter him with high-resolution clarity and the things that don’t with a kind of gentle fog. the fog is curated. the fog is the work. the fog took effort.

four. he will dodge a phone call with theatrical timing. the phone will buzz at the atm and he will look at it with a small, sad face and put it back in the pocket and tell you it’s nothing, it’s work, it’s a guy from work, it’s nothing. (i do this myself, to my own embarrassment, but i do it about a man who calls about money i owe, and i am up front about being a coward. the boyfriend-grade dodge is dressed as nobility.)

five. the apology, when it arrives, is a paragraph about him. it begins “i”. it ends “i”. the middle is the weather. you are mentioned in the dependent clause. you should not have to read three sentences to find yourself.

that’s the five. you can stack twenty more on top of these and they will all be variations of the same shape: a boyfriend who is the protagonist of a story you thought you were also in.

verdict, the syntax is broken, the relationship usually too

the verdict is not a verdict. i am not a man who issues those. the verdict is that the search you typed, with its missing verb, is the most honest sentence in the whole exchange. you knew the verb. you didn’t write it. the not-writing is the answer.

so write it down. not here, not on a search bar, somewhere with paper and a friend. write the verb. is. or isn’t. and then go from there. the syntax fixes itself once you commit to the verb. the relationship, in my limited but expensive experience, sometimes does not.

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