male narcissist traits — 1 explainer, sort of

male narcissist traits is what a friend of mine, mike, said he could list while drunk. mike could not. mike got to two and ordered another beer. i wrote down the two. the two were correct. i am building from there.

that conversation happened on a wednesday. i’m writing this from my desk, with a paper coffee cup that has stopped being warm and a tab open to a supermarket receipt that is, by some calculation, longer than my last apartment lease. carla is upstairs in a training session with the consultants — the one where everyone takes notes and nobody asks the obvious question. i have, in practical terms, until she comes back down with that polite, neutral face she uses when something has been a waste of time but the slides were nice.

so let’s do this honestly. you searched for male narcissist traits, and you got me, a man at a desk, with eight red envelopes leaning at home and a microwave that, in my private accounting, is the seventh of its line. i’m not a clinician. i’m a person with a folder on his phone called “evidence” and a friend named mike who can identify two of the traits while sober and zero of them while celebrating. between us, we have an explainer. it is one. it is sort of one. it will do.

writing from the desk on company time, as is the canon of this operation. carla is one floor up. the consultants are presenting. i have, charitably, the rest of the morning before anyone notices my screen is not the screen they pay me to look at.

before we get into the items, here is the geography. the topic, for me, started in the cereal aisle of the supermarket on a sunday. i was holding a box and a man was, with the patient voice of a saint, explaining to a woman next to him why the box she had picked was, technically, the wrong box. the box was fine. the box was, in fact, exactly what she had asked for. but he had, in the seven seconds since she’d put it in the cart, located a reason it was wrong, and was now delivering the reason as if it were weather. that man was the entire post in one frame. that man was the lecture. i went home and started a list.

if you want the broader subject the items below sit inside, that’s my long post on what gaslighting actually is when the patient voice keeps showing up. that’s the umbrella. the items here are the rain.

1. male narcissist traits, the working list

here, then, is the working list. i call it working because nothing is final and i am, on a wednesday morning, mostly a man with footnotes. the items are not in any clinical order. they are in the order i wrote them down, which is the order they happened to me. for what that is worth.

i’d like, briefly, to disclose: this list is short. lists about male narcissist traits on the internet tend to run twelve, fifteen, twenty items. those lists are written, i suspect, by people who are paid by the item. mine is eight. mine is eight because eight is what i was able to honestly verify against my own memory and against mike’s, in two beers, on a wednesday, sitting on the same two stools we always sit on. the rest of the lists are, for me, hearsay.

EIGHT IS. ENOUGH. EIGHT IS. PLENTY.

i recognize the irony, by the way, of a man writing a list of male narcissist traits while exhibiting the trait of confidently writing a list. i am, on this point, prepared to be the topic of someone else’s post. fair is fair.

2. the supermarket aisle where this draft started

back to the cereal aisle. the man with the patient voice. i watched him for, in retrospect, a strange amount of time. i pretended to compare two boxes of granola. i compared neither. i was watching the tone. the tone was the entire performance.

the woman, after a minute, put the box back. she did not put back the box because the box was wrong. she put back the box because putting back the box was, in that moment, cheaper than the conversation that would happen if she didn’t. that’s the part i had to write down. that’s the part most internet lists miss. the trait isn’t the lecture. the trait is the discount it produces in the other person’s behavior. the discount is what tells you it’s working.

i went home from the supermarket with two things i didn’t need and one thing i did. that’s also a pattern. it is, however, a different post.

3. items 1 to 4, the unopened-mail ones

the first four items i’d list, if mike were sober and i were honest, are the ones i think of as the unopened-mail traits. they are the ones a man carries with him without ever opening — the personality version of letters that have arrived and been put in a drawer, untouched, for months. the contents are real. the contents are not, however, processed. the man walks around carrying envelopes he has decided not to read.

1. the calm denial. he says, with kindness in his voice, that the thing you remember did not happen. he does not raise his voice. raising his voice would, in his model, cost him the round. the round is not lost.
2. the slight smile when corrected. you bring evidence. he reads the evidence. the smile arrives. the smile says you sweet, troubled person, who has misunderstood again. the smile is the thesis.
3. the explanation of your own field back to you. you do a thing for a living. he has, for nine seconds, read about the thing. he tells you about your thing in the voice of a person who, in his head, has just promoted himself to your manager.
4. the helpful edit of last week. last week happened. you were there. on wednesday, last week is, gently, a different week. the edits are kind. the edits are also load-bearing. without the edits, the rest of the structure goes.

those are the four. they are the four that, in my private taxonomy, sit unopened in the personality, like the certified envelopes in my apartment that i have decided to deal with on a future thursday. the future thursday has not arrived. it is, however, on the calendar.

4. items 5 to 8, the certified-letter ones

the second four items are different. these are what i call the certified-letter traits. they are the ones that, by the time you notice them, have already been signed for. they cost more, downstream, than the unopened ones. they are also the ones that, if you ignore them, go to the next stage of escalation, by which i mean a quieter, more legal version of themselves.

5. the missing room temperature. a person comes home. the room is, by four degrees, colder than it was the previous evening. the person doesn’t say why. the person doesn’t have to. you, the other adult in the room, are now responsible for finding the four degrees and replacing them with warmth. you do this without being asked. that is, in itself, the trait.
6. the future life, casually announced. at some point, on a wednesday, he describes the life he’s owed. it includes a car with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. it does not, you’ll notice, include you in any specified seat. you are, by the description, in a waiting room, holding a magazine, until the future life is ready to begin.
7. the empathy that arrives one beat late. you say a difficult thing. there is a pause. then, on a delay, an appropriate-shaped sentence arrives. the pause is the data. the pause is the part where, in another model, the response would have been a feeling. in his model, the pause is the part where the response is constructed.
8. the immunity to apology. he can apologize. he sometimes does. but the apology, in the rerun, has a small footnote: that you, also, were partly responsible for the thing he is apologizing for. the footnote is the structural beam. take out the footnote, the apology collapses.

those are the eight. four unopened, four certified. one drawer, two stacks. that’s the working list. that’s the dossier in plain language, and i submit it as such.

if you want the related read on what makes a person, in general, a toxic meaning of the word in everyday speech versus the word in clinical use, that’s the cousin post. it sits in a different aisle of the supermarket, but the same store.

5. closing pulpit, the traits are inherited, the diagnosis is borrowed

here’s where i, very briefly, get earnest, and then i’ll walk it back, because earnest is a posture i can hold for about ninety seconds before it starts to itch.

the eight items above are not, in my private opinion, invented by the men who do them. they are inherited. they are absorbed. a boy watches an older man do the calm denial on a sunday afternoon, and the calm denial enters the boy’s toolbox, and twenty years later, in a cereal aisle, the calm denial comes out, polished. the trait is real. the inheritance is also real. one does not, in my reading, cancel the other.

so when we list the male narcissist traits, we are not, in any meaningful sense, diagnosing a unique man. we are describing a recurring shape that gets passed down, like a wedding ring or a bad knee. the shape is the same shape. the man is, often, a kind man, in other rooms, on other days. the shape, however, persists. the shape is the topic.

i have, plainly-keeping of my own life, been on the receiving end of about six of the eight. i don’t include myself in the list of perfect men. i include myself in the list of people who, on a sunday, with the right pressure, can produce a couple of these items in his own kitchen and only realize it on the walk home. i’m not above the dossier. i am, in fact, in it.

i looked up, on a thursday, what serious people say about this. one of the cleaner pop-cultural illustrations, for what it’s worth, is the long quiet montage in american psycho on imdb, the one where the camera holds on the apartment and the music is doing more work than the dialogue. that scene is, in my reading, the ninth trait i didn’t list, which is the inability to be alone with the room. i didn’t include it because it didn’t fit my eight. but it’s there.

this is also a topic that travels poorly. you’ll find that the conversation goes one way at home and a different way when an idiot tries to have it abroad, because abroad has its own taxonomies, its own patient voices, its own cereal aisles. the shape is the same. the cereal is different. that’s the part i find both reassuring and exhausting.

by way of evidence that i am, on a tuesday, still capable of an unrelated opinion: a hot dog IS a sandwich. fight me. that’s not in the dossier. that’s just the truth, sitting in a different drawer, also unopened, also fine.

verdict — eight items, one drawer, one supermarket

carla just came back. she has the polite face. the consultants did, as predicted, present slides. she has, in her hand, a printout of something nobody is going to read this week. i minimized this. she said nothing. that’s a good sign or a very bad sign. those are the two options.