narcissist behavior in men — 1 thorough investigation

behavior in men of this kind, restricted by gender for the purposes of this article, is what mike at the bar accused me of researching while drinking too quickly last spring. i was not drinking too quickly. i was researching. those are different.

it is a thursday, 4:47pm, and carla is in an annual planning meeting on the third floor with the slide deck nobody asked for. i have, give or take, the rest of the lunch hour and a portion of the afternoon nobody is going to audit. tom called twice this morning. i did not pick up. that detail will become relevant in roughly four hundred words.

i’m typing this from the desk, because the desk is where the work happens, and also because the work, today, is this. a thorough catalog of behaviors a certain kind of man performs in a certain kind of room while a certain kind of gaslighting goes on in the background like a fridge nobody’s unplugged.

narcissist behavior in men, the disclaimer

i am not a doctor. i am not a therapist. i am a guy at a desk with a notebook and a draft, and the draft is what we call evidence around here. let’s be clear about what this post is and is not. it is a personal field log. it is one investigation. it is not the manual the shows i watch reference, and i’m not going to pretend i’ve read that manual cover to cover, because i have not.

what i have done is watched men do this in real rooms — bars, supermarkets, the IKEA returns counter, the parking lot of the doctor’s office at 9:14am — and noted, to be specific, the small repeating moves. one man told me, last april, that i had imagined a conversation we had in front of a witness. the witness was tom. tom was the witness. tom remembers the conversation. that man, the one who edits the past in real time, is a recurring caller in this kind of investigation.

i am gendering this on purpose because the brief is gendered, not because women cannot also do the thing. they can. they do. there’s a separate post building somewhere about a different room. this one is the men.

the supermarket where the algorithm pinged the productivity bro again

tuesday, 4:47pm, the supermarket. one item on the list. one. (i wrote it on my hand. hand-milk. infallible.) i ended up in the dairy aisle next to a man on his phone explaining, loudly, to a woman who could not defend herself because she was not there, that what she remembered did not happen. he said this three times, increasing volume each time, while picking up a yogurt and putting it back down like the yogurt was the third witness.

i pretended to read the back of an oat carton i could not afford. i was not reading. i was logging. behavior, observed: the public re-edit of a private memory, performed at full volume in a room of strangers, so that any stranger who happened to glance over would catalog him as the calm one and her as the unreliable one. that is one of the moves. the productivity bro version of the same move shows up online — tweets explaining that you misread his tweet, threaded, with bullet points, posted at 6am his time. always 6am. these men love a 6am tweet.

the algorithm, which does not know me but is convinced it does, pushed me three of those threads on the train home. i had not asked. i had clicked once, in 2023, on a thing about standing desks, and the algorithm has, by the count i keep running, been trying to sell me a rebranded life since then. the algorithm is, in this small way, also a kind of narcissist. it cannot accept that i did not want what it offered.

i bought, instead of the milk: a frying pan, a six-pack of those tiny pickles, a magazine in a language i do not speak, and the seventh microwave i have killed’s replacement. seven. the seventh. the man at the appliance counter said “again?” with what i would describe, to be specific, as fondness. he and i are in a relationship now. it is the most stable one in this post.

tom called and i pretended the carts had wifi issues

tom is uni-into-the-suburbs tom. wife, two kids, a volvo, a lawn he edges on saturdays for a reason he cannot articulate. tom has been, for the entire run of this newsletter, a recurring caller i do not pick up for. not out of malice. out of pacing. tom’s life has the kind of velocity that, if i answered every ring, would re-narrate mine in a way i do not currently have the bandwidth to disagree with.

tom called at 2:54pm. i was in the parking lot wrestling a cart with one stuck wheel. i looked at the screen. i let it ring. i told myself, in the specific dialect of self-deception this post is interested in, that i was being respectful of his lunch. tom’s lunch. like tom calls me at lunch to be respectful of mine. this is, noted, the inverse of narcissist behavior in men — it is the small, daily, idiot behavior of pretending the dodge is a courtesy. i am putting it in the post because honest investigations include the investigator.

tom left a voicemail. it sat in the queue with the other eight months of voicemails. the voicemail box is, as a venue, full. i’d describe the inbox in similar terms but the email gets handled by the algorithm and the algorithm has opinions.

behaviors 1 to 5, the men-grade ones

here is the part where i list. lists are how the internet metabolizes a topic, and i’m trying to be useful, despite myself.

1. the re-script. the conversation he just had with you is, ten minutes later, a different conversation. words you did not say are now words you said. the witness, if there was one, is suddenly “remembering it wrong.” the witness, in my case, was tom. tom was sober. tom does not remember it wrong. tom remembers the volvo’s tire pressure from 2019 — tom is a memory institution.

2. the room-arranger. at any group dinner, he picks the seat at the head, and if there is no head he invents one. all chairs are bar stools eventually, in his hands, because he turns whatever he sits on into a small stage. this is HT16, by the way, surfacing here for reasons the editorial board (me) considers thematic.

3. the pre-emptive grievance. before you can complain about anything he did, he complains about a thing you did six weeks ago that, on review, you did not do. it is a verbal blocking move. it works on the unprepared. tom is unprepared. tom is, in fact, a saint, which is its own problem.

4. the audience-flip. in private, you are the most important person. in public, with three other people watching, you are the third-funniest one at the table and he is making sure everyone knows. this is the move that, the first dozen times, you will think is teasing. it is not teasing. teasing has a wink. this has a tally.

5. the “i was joking.” the receipt of every cruelty he has ever delivered. it lives in his pocket like a small laminated card he produces on demand. for a deeper read on what this kind of receipt-management has in common with the broader category of a person who tells lies for a living, see the cluster’s other room — yes, “liar” is the technical word for it, and yes, the overlap is large.

verdict, the behavior is durable, the men are men

a small honest finding, after all of this. the behavior is durable. men do it; they have done it; they will do it. the room re-arranges around them not because they are tall, or important, or right, but because the room is tired and they are loud, and tired rooms negotiate with loud men by giving them the seat at the head and the last word and the version of the past that flatters them.

a separate finding: i don’t fix this. i’m not someone who fixes this. i am, frankly, an observer with a corner table with a beer that is now warm and writes it down later, at the desk, in the rest of the lunch hour, while carla is in an annual planning meeting. that’s the tier i operate at. it is, honestly, the most useful thing i can offer — the catalog. someone else, with credentials, can do the manual. i am the foot soldier of the catalog. and you can write that down.

i remain unconvinced that any single one of these men knows he is doing any of this. (i remain partially convinced that some of them know exactly, but the point of the bit is plausible deniability — see receipt #5.) i do not remain convinced about much else today. except this: the third yoga mat is still under the couch. i checked sunday. it has not moved. it does not, as far as i can tell, have opinions. the third yoga mat is, at minimum, not a narcissist. i’d take a roomful of yoga mats over a single Stefan, if Stefan got the wrong vest.