my partner is a narcissist — 1 explainer, sort of

my partner, in the abstract sense, since i do not currently have one, is a thought experiment i have been running for about four years on the assumption that i will eventually need to. i would like to be ready. ready is the goal.

which is to say: i have spent more time preparing for a partner i don’t have than most people spend on the partner they do. this is the kind of preparation that gets made fun of, fairly, and yet here we are.

i’m writing this from my desk at 2:47pm on a wednesday, with carla in some kind of all-hands on the third floor and the rest of the morning loosely available, and the search bar on my browser still showing the phrase a person types when they are not, technically, asking a question. they are filing a complaint. the search bar is where complaints go now. it used to be a priest. before that, a bartender. progress moves the venue, not the impulse.

my partner is a narcissist, the disclaimer about who is speaking

i should say up front that i am not the right person for this. i am, technically, the wrong person. i have not had a partner in long enough that the apartment has stopped expecting one. the second pillow is decorative. the second mug is a coaster, depending on the week. there used to be someone here, briefly, the one who eventually left for the guy with the volvo, and i refer to her now only as the ex, which is what people do when they are still a little annoyed and don’t want to give the other person the dignity of a name.

so when i say my partner is a narcissist, i am quoting other people. specifically, i am quoting the search bar of approximately everyone i know, which has at some point typed that exact phrase and hit enter and then immediately closed the laptop. this is also a form of asking. it counts. i counted it.

the broader situation, the one this whole cluster sits inside, is what gets called gaslighting and other things my ex insists did not happen, and i’d send you there first if you want the full chapter. this post is the appendix. the appendix to a chapter i did not write, about a relationship i am not in, with a partner who, on a technicality, also is not.

the apartment where the draft happened over reheated coffee

most of my best opinions about other people’s relationships happen back at my place, on a sunday afternoon, with a cup of coffee that has been microwaved twice. the seventh microwave i have killed, the current one, replaced the previous one, which had a small fire in it, and that one is a story for a different post. the current microwave does not spin the plate, which i consider an upgrade. coffee comes out hot in the middle and lukewarm at the edges. fine.

i bring up the apartment because it matters that the apartment is quiet. the apartment does not have a partner in it. the apartment has a third yoga mat under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving, and a voicemail box that is full and has been for eight months, and an unopened mail pile that grows on its own. the apartment has opinions because the apartment is not arguing with anyone. that is the whole trick.

when i pass through the coffee shop on my way to the office, the barista who knows the order — americano, oat, no sleeve, the small one not the medium — sometimes asks how i am, and the honest answer is “alone in a way that’s working out, mostly,” but the polite answer is “good, thanks, you?” and i give the polite one. the barista is not asking for a thesis. the barista is asking for a tip.

tom would have a clinical reading, i have a partner reading

tom, who you have met if you have read anything else here, would handle this exact topic differently. tom owns a house. i rent. tom has a wife and two kids and a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. i have the third yoga mat. tom would read a book about narcissism in partners, finish it, underline things, and then bring up the term at a dinner party in a way that made it sound like he had always known the term. i would read three paragraphs of the same book on a phone in a coffee shop while waiting for the americano, lose the tab, find it three months later in the 47 tabs, and then make a point about it from the desk on a wednesday morning while writing this.

same book. different relationship to the book. that’s the entire difference between tom and me, summarized for the appendix.

tom, i am fairly sure, would say “my partner is occasionally narcissistic in the following 3 ways,” which is the response of a man who has a marriage that works and the bandwidth to be specific about it. i would say “my partner is a narcissist,” and i would say it about a person who had simply asked me to put the dishes away. there is a difference between an observation and a verdict. tom does observations. i do verdicts.

this is, by the way, why none of you should take relationship advice from me. take it from a man with a volvo and a 401k-equivalent. take it from someone who has done the reading. i am the appendix. tom is the chapter.

signs 1 to 5, the partner-grade ones

the internet has, in my reckoning, somewhere between 9 and 200 lists of “signs your partner is a narcissist,” and they all overlap by about 80%, which suggests either that the diagnosis is robust or that everyone on the internet read the same article on a tuesday. i am not the one to say which. but here are the 5 that i, as a non-partner, have seen most often in the partners of people who have told me, over a beer, that their partner is a narcissist.

1. the partner makes every conversation a referendum on the partner. you mention you had a hard day. the partner had a harder one, in detail, retroactively. you mention a book. the partner read it first, except they didn’t, because the book came out last week and the partner has been busy. this is, you might recognize, also just being a little tired and self-absorbed. the line between tired and clinical is one of the things this whole cluster is about, and is why the characteristics that get in the working file abuse are worth reading slowly, with a coffee, on the desk, not on the phone.

2. the partner cannot be wrong about a small thing. not “won’t admit.” cannot. the gear is missing. you point out that the receipt says they ordered the chicken, not the fish, and the partner explains that the receipt is technically wrong and the restaurant has a known issue with the printer. there is no printer. the printer is a metaphor the partner just invented to win a discussion about a $14 entrée.

3. the partner narrates your feelings to you. “you’re being defensive.” “you’re upset.” “you’re spiraling.” these are sentences said by people who would prefer to skip the part where you describe the feeling yourself, because that part is slow, and the partner has things to do, none of which they will name.

4. the partner has 1 ex who was crazy. exactly 1. the others were fine. the 1 was crazy. the crazy ex did exactly the things the partner is currently being accused of, and the partner brings this up early, as a vaccine. you are not supposed to notice the vaccine. you are supposed to feel grateful that the partner has warned you about a kind of person you are now becoming.

5. the partner has a public face that is, in fact, a different person. at the dinner, with the friends, with the coworkers, the partner is generous and warm and quick to laugh. at home, with you, the partner is the person who explained the printer. there are two operating systems. you know this because you live with the second one. the first one is for company. and a mention here, which i think is fair: a pension is a faith-based retirement system, but a partner with two operating systems is a faith-based relationship, which is similar math. you are betting on the version of the person you cannot, structurally, audit.

none of these, on their own, are diagnostic. all 5, together, in escalation, over months, while the apartment quietly fills with versions of yourself you do not recognize — that’s the part that gets people to the search bar. the fork on the counter. the spaghetti in the bowl. you get it.

verdict, the partner is a noun and the narcissist is a verb

here is what i think, after the morning, after the coffee, after carla coming back briefly from the third floor to drop a folder on the desk and leave again without speaking, which i interpret as approval.

“my partner is a narcissist” is two grammatical objects pretending to be a sentence. partner is a noun. it has a body, an apartment, a side of the bed, a coffee preference. narcissist is being used as a verb dressed as a noun. it is something the partner is currently doing — or, more often, something the partner did three weeks ago that you are still in the middle of digesting. it describes a behavior, a pattern, a Tuesday.

treating the verb like a noun is the move that gets us into trouble. the noun is permanent. the verb is a phase. the partner is not a category. the partner is a person who, on wednesday, behaved in a way that made you type this exact phrase into a search bar at 11pm. tuesday is not a diagnosis. tuesday is a thursday. the question is what wednesday looks like.

the canonical pop culture version of the noun version of this verb is, of course, the 1944 film Gaslight, where the husband does the thing on purpose, with intent, with a script, in a house with adjustable lamps. that is the noun. that man is a narcissist. the rest of us are mostly verbs.

i am not saying don’t use the phrase. i’m saying notice when you use it. the day you use it, write down what happened. write down what the partner did. write down what you did. write down whether you were the partner, briefly, in someone else’s evening. you might be. i’ve been. that’s why i’m not in a partnership right now. i did some verbing, in 2019, that i would, in retrospect, describe in a very clinical way if i were the other person.

that’s the appendix. that’s the topic, sort of. read the chapter for the actual chapter. read this for the marginalia.

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