dating a narcissist — 1 investigation

dating, as a verb, requires you to occasionally be in a room with another person without your phone. i tried this last year. the result was instructive. the result is the basis of about forty-three percent of what follows.

the other fifty-seven percent is older, costlier, and lives in a folder on the same phone i was supposed to leave in another room. so the maths, as a man at a bar named mike once observed (he had a beard, he seemed sure), do not add up. they rarely do. i’m working on it. i’m not really working on it.

it is 12:38pm on a tuesday. carla is in the vendor walkthrough on the third floor and i have, optimistically, ninety minutes before someone notices i am not in any meeting at all. that is enough time to ruin a topic carefully. ninety minutes, used wisely, is a small relationship. ninety minutes, used like this, is a draft.

writing this from the desk, as ever. the q3 is happening above me, in another room, with people who own chairs that recline. i have a chair that does not recline. that’s a different post.

before we go further, the disclaimer: i am not a doctor, a therapist, or anyone you should listen to. the longer post on gaslighting is for the person who already knows the partner. this one is for the person who is still in the first six weeks, mid-text-back, wondering if “intense” is the right word or if there is a better one. there is. it’s “calibrated”. but we’ll get to that.

dating a narcissist, the disclaimer

here is the part where i admit i have, on multiple occasions, been the confused one in the room. i have apologised on a tuesday for a thing i said on the wednesday before, which she called “the wednesday tone”, and i, in my own apartment, with my own dishwasher humming behind me, agreed that yes, my tone, on a wednesday, had been a problem. it had not. but i was so tired by then that being wrong was, frankly, the cheaper option. i write this so you understand i am not above this. i am inside it.

so when i say dating a narcissist is something you spot late, i mean i spotted it late. months late. mom spotted it on a sunday, because mothers know, it is their power, it cannot be defeated. dave spotted it on the same day from a different angle. i’ll get to that. it took me longer because i was the one being charmed, and being charmed feels lovely, and lovely is an extremely strong sedative.

the thing about dating a narcissist is that it does not, at first, feel like dating a narcissist. it feels like being seen. it feels like, finally, the algorithm has done one (1) good thing for you. someone is interested. someone remembers a small detail. someone says, on the second date, that they “don’t usually do this”, which is a phrase i now believe should trigger the same internal alarm as a smoke detector at three in the morning. but i didn’t have an alarm. i had a fork and an empty kitchen and a microwave i should not have been operating, given the seven previous incidents.

this post is the early-warning version. not the autopsy. the autopsy is filed elsewhere and lives, inexplicably, in a green folder.

the apartment where dave and mom called separately on the same day

i remember the day because two phones rang in the kitchen in the same hour, which never happens. dave first. dave with the slightly rehearsed voice he uses when his wife has told him to ask me something. “so. how’s it going. with the. you know.” dave does not say names. dave does not need to. dave was, by my running tally, the third person that month who had said the sentence “are you okay” with one too many pauses in it.

then mom. mom on the sunday call, except it was thursday, which is, in our family, an emergency channel. mom didn’t ask if it was going well. mom said: “i had a dream.” mom is not a person who has dreams. mom is a person who has feelings she launders through dreams when she does not want to say a difficult sentence directly. the dream involved me on a beach. mom hates the beach. so do i. (beach vacations are punishment with sand. on this we agree. always.) the dream meant: come home for a weekend. the dream meant: something is wrong.

i told dave i was fine. i told mom i was fine. i told the third yoga mat under the couch i was fine. the third yoga mat does not respond. the third yoga mat is, in this scene, the only honest object in the room.

that night i did the dm i regretted. i won’t tell you who to. i’ll tell you what i wrote. i wrote: “i think i need to see what other people do on a tuesday. just to compare.” i sent it. i closed the app. i opened the app to delete it. it had been read. that is a separate small grief and i am still carrying it around like a receipt i forgot to throw out.

the doctor said interesting at the wrong moment, briefly

i went to the doctor that month for a different reason. an unrelated reason. a reason that had nothing to do with the apartment or the partner or the phone. the doctor — a doctor, a man with a job — asked me how i was sleeping. i said, in the way you say it when you are trying to sound casual at the doctor, “oh, you know.” the doctor said “interesting.” the doctor said it once. the doctor moved on. but he wrote a thing on the form. i didn’t see what he wrote. i saw him write it.

i had, at that point, been told approximately eighty-seven times in three months that i was misremembering small events. small events i had photographed. small events i had screenshots of. the screenshots were the symptom. the screenshots were the receipt-keeping behaviour of a man who knew, in some buried way, that the room was unsafe to be wrong in.

the doctor’s interesting stayed with me longer than it should have. it stayed because it was the first time, in months, that anyone in any room had sounded slightly worried about me without telling me i was overreacting. the bar for concern, by then, had become very low. the bar was on the floor. i tripped on the bar.

signs 1 to 5, the dodged-call grade

here are the five signs i would, if i had been honest with myself in week three, have written down on a post-it. i did not write them down. i wrote a different list, of nicer things, on a different post-it. that post-it is gone. the kinder list always goes first.

1. the early-week intensity that feels chosen, not natural. dates pre-planned to a degree that is, on reflection, disquieting. “i thought you’d like this place.” they had, in fact, looked it up. that’s not a flaw. it is, however, data.
2. the friend filter goes weird. you find yourself softening, before you introduce them to anyone, what your friends are like. you say “dave is a lot, but”. you don’t usually say “but”. the “but” is the sign.
3. the apology drift. you are apologising for things three weeks in that, in week one, you would not have apologised for. the bar slid. you didn’t move it. they didn’t move it visibly. but it slid.
4. the phone dodged at the wrong moment. not theirs. yours. you start, around week four, ducking calls from people who knew you before you met them. dave, mom, the_man_who_calls (different problem, related symptom). the voicemail starts to fill. mine has been full for eight months for unrelated reasons. completely unrelated. moving on.
5. the score on hot takes. you bring up something stupid like water is the most overrated drink and they don’t argue. they smile. they say “that’s so you.” a person who actually knows you would have said “you’re an idiot.” the smile is calibrated. the smile is the tone. the tone is everything.

five out of five and you have, statistically, the situation. four out of five, you have a problem. three out of five, you have a tuesday. anything below that, you have, possibly, a regular relationship that is just not working, which is fine, which happens, which is in some ways the saddest version because it is, at least, normal.

i’d paint that line over the bed in every apartment in every city, if landlords allowed paint. calmness is a tone. kindness is a behavior. they are different things. one is a setting on a dial. the other is a habit. only one can be faked indefinitely.

verdict, the dating is a verb, the narcissist is the noun

here is what i think, having thought about this for an unhealthy amount of time, mostly between 2am and the seventh microwave warming a coffee that did not need warming.

writing this from the desk still. i have, ten minutes left. carla is on her way back, statistically. let me close.

so the verdict, such as it is: if the first six weeks feel like being chosen, slow it down. if you are apologising for tones you did not have, slow it down. if dave and mom both call on the same day, do not, as i did, pick neither. pick one. pick mom. mom is right more often than is comfortable. that is, also, a separate post.

and if you are reading this in week three and recognising yourself: you are not crazy. you are inside a room where the lights are being adjusted by someone with a hand on the switch. the switch is not your problem. the room is.

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