narcissist partner signs — 1 fairly sure investigation

partner signs is the most plausibly deniable phrasing of this entire question. partner could mean almost anyone, partner could mean a roommate, partner could mean a co-author of a paper. it does not mean those things here. we both know what it actually means. let us not pretend further.

It is 4:21pm on a thursday. carla is in a vendor walkthrough on the third floor and the rest of my morning is, technically, mine. i am at the desk. there is coffee. there is a bank app i have not opened since march. there is also, on a separate browser tab, the search bar that brought you to me, with the words narcissist partner signs in it, blinking, waiting.

I am, before we begin, not a doctor. i am a man with a desk and an opinion and what i’d call a fairly sure feeling about the topic, which is the level of authority i bring to most things in my life, and so far it has worked out okay, depending on how generous you are with the word okay.

narcissist partner signs, the disclaimer

This is, properly, a long-tail definitional in the gaslighting cluster. it sits one level down from the pillar. you can read up at the pillar if you want the full architecture; what i’m doing here is the smaller, more specific question, which is what does it actually look like when the person across from you is, quietly, the wrong shape.

i have to be careful. i looked it up earlier in a way i’m not going to describe (it involved ChatGPT, a second opinion i did not pay for, and a window i closed quickly when i thought i heard footsteps). the manual that the people on the shows i watch reference has things to say about this. i am not going to quote it. i’m going to do the bar version, which is what you came here for.

the disclaimer has three parts. one, i have no clinical training. two, i was, at some point, the partner in question to someone else, which is a sentence i don’t enjoy typing but it would be dishonest not to. three, naming the signs does not fix the partner. naming the signs is for you. it is so you can stop thinking you imagined it. that’s the entire service this post provides.

the post you came here for is, in the end, a list. but a list with a thursday around it. the thursday is the dmv. we’ll get there.

the dmv line where the bank app stayed unopened

two months ago — let’s call it a tuesday in march, late afternoon, the kind of light where everything looks slightly used — i was in line at the post office, which in this city shares a counter with the dmv, which means you take a number and then you spend a portion of your one wild and precious life standing between a man with a manila envelope and a woman holding a clipboard like it owed her money.

i was there to mail a thing i could have mailed online. that’s its own post. the bank app was in my pocket. unopened. it has been unopened for, it depends on how you count, between four and seven weeks. inside it, presumably, are numbers. i prefer the numbers stay in there. they’re safer in there. nobody is hurt.

and while i was standing there, the memory arrived, the way memories arrive, sideways and uninvited. it was a memory of a specific apology. the apology was not an apology. it had the words. the structure was correct. the volume was right. but at the end of it, i was, somehow, the person who had done something. it was a magic trick. i had walked into the room intending to be sad about a thing that happened, and i walked out of the room having said sorry for being sad about it. the trick was so clean i didn’t notice it for two days.

that is one of the signs. the trick. the apology that audits you instead.

standing in line, watching the clipboard woman win her argument with the clerk, i thought: the bank app is unopened, the apology was a redirect, the room had the wrong door. that is a lot of things to think between number 47 and number 51. the dmv gives you time to think. the dmv is, in this respect, a wellness retreat with worse chairs.

the productivity bro thread on this, briefly

there is, online, a productivity bro. there is always a productivity bro. this one had a thread. the thread was about how to spot a narcissist partner in seven steps, with a thumbnail of his own jaw. i read the thread in the post office line. i read it the way i read all of his threads, which is with the muscle in my neck that you use to roll your eyes without anyone seeing.

step one of his thread was: they make everything about them. step two was: they make everything about them. i kept scrolling. the thread was, in essence, the same step seven times in different fonts. and then at the bottom there was a course. there is always a course. the course was $397. i am quoting from memory; it was either $397 or the kind of price that ends in $97 because someone read a book in 2014.

here’s where i’d like to be clear. the productivity bro is not wrong, exactly. the partner does make a lot of things about themselves. but he’s wrong in the way a weather report is wrong when it just says “weather is happening”. the actual signs are smaller than that. they are the size of a ring of dishwater on a counter. they are the size of a sentence that ends a fight you didn’t start. they are not thread material. they are not course material. they are post office line material, which is why we are here, in this post office line, on this thursday, on the desk that is not really a desk anymore but a workshop.

i closed the thread. the man with the manila envelope coughed. the line moved one inch. i opened the unopened mail pile in my head and tried to ignore the parts that were red.

signs 1 to 5, the muted-group-chat ones

i have, in my phone, a group chat about a person. the group chat is muted. it has been muted for, by the count i keep running, eight months. the group chat exists because, at some point, several of us realized we were comparing notes and the notes were the same. the group chat is private and i am not going to tell you what is in it. but here is what we agreed, in a thursday-night conversation that was not on the muted thread but adjacent to it, over a single beer at mike’s bar where mike has a system for taxes that does not involve filing them. these are not narcissist partner signs in the diagnostic sense. these are the signs you actually notice. these are the post-office-line signs.

one. the story you were in is not the story they tell. you brought a casserole to a dinner; in their version, you forgot the casserole and they covered for you. you went to a wedding together; in their version, they took you. small edits, repeated, until the original is gone. when you push back, you are tired, you are remembering wrong, you are doing this again. the gaslight is not a single beam, it is a slow dimmer.

two. the most tired person in any room is them. they out-tire you. they out-busy you. you came home from your hard day and within ninety seconds your hard day is the warm-up act for theirs. eventually you stop bringing the hard day in the door. eventually you eat your hard day in the car. that is, by the way, a sign. the parking-lot sandwich is a sign.

three. reactions are the problem, not the actions. you reacted poorly, the email reads. you reacted poorly is the entire sentence. the action that produced the reaction is, somehow, off the agenda. it has been moved to a backlog that nobody can access. nobody can find the agenda. you start to wonder if you wrote the agenda.

four. the audience matters more than the partner. they are, with a stranger at a party, electric. with you, on a tuesday, they are checked-out wallpaper. they have a face for the dinner host and a different face for the drive home. you start to dread the drive home. that is a sign. the dreaded drive home is the entire genre.

five. the apology is a sentence about you. i’m sorry you feel that way. i’m sorry you took it like that. i’m sorry that hurt you, i didn’t mean it like that. the subject of every apology is your reaction. they are not in any of these sentences. they are in the directing chair, taking notes about the actor.

i could keep going. there are at least four more. but the dishwasher is a cabinet, and i am running out of morning, and you have a search bar that brought you here for a reason. five is enough for the post office line.

verdict, the partner is filed, the signs travel

so. the partner. the signs. the dmv. the bank app. the productivity bro and his $397 course. the muted group chat where eight months of evidence sit in airplane mode like a tom clancy plot nobody asked for. is there a verdict.

there is a kind of verdict. the verdict is that the signs travel. they are not specific to a partner. they are specific to a shape. you can find the same shape in a boss, in a mother, in a roommate, in a man at a wine night named stefan who nods at his own opinion. you have already met this shape. the partner version is louder because the bedroom is closer to your nervous system than the dinner table is.

the second thing the verdict is, is that recognizing the shape does not move the shape. recognizing the shape moves you. you start to plan around it. you start to pre-write the apology you will be expected to give. you start to keep a small private memory of what actually happened, which becomes, over time, a notebook, which becomes, over time, a spine. that is, i think, the work. that is the post-office-line work.

i am not your therapist. i am not anybody’s therapist. i looked at the question, in the search bar, on a thursday, and i sat with it for the rest of the morning. there is also a related question about whether the partner is, technically, a liar in the strict sense, and the answer is: the liar version is the louder cousin. they share a household. they wear each other’s clothes on laundry day.

the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges. that is a fairly sure thing i believe about appliances. it is also, in a smaller way, what the partner is. a cabinet. that judges. quietly. about the wrong things. the seventh microwave, which i killed on a separate tuesday and which has its own post somewhere in this archive, was a more honest appliance. it made one sound and then it stopped pretending. partners take longer.

the post is filed. the partner is filed. the signs are not. the signs travel.

(if you ever want to see what bad apologies look like turned into screen acting, the long-running run of frasier contains, in casual estimation, six full seasons of the genre, and is technically a sitcom, which is the most generous label ever applied to a series whose central premise is two non-listeners.)