narcissistic behavior in a relationship — 1 investigation

behavior in a relationship is the dataset i have been involuntarily collecting for about six years. the data is bad. the data is also rich. it is the kind of data that ruins a vacation. it has ruined a vacation.

i am writing this from my desk because the office is, briefly, a kinder room than the one in my head. carla is upstairs in the all-hands on the third floor. i was given, in passing, the rest of the morning. that is the budget. that is what we are working with.

this is supposed to be a piece about gaslighting and other things my ex insists did not happen, but narrowed. specifically narrowed to what changes when there is, in the room, another person. because the behavior i am about to describe does not exist on a desert island. it requires an audience of one. that one is the person who shares the lease.

1. narcissistic behavior in a relationship, the disclaimer

i am not a clinician. i looked it up once. i looked it up the way most people look things up, which is at 1:14 in the morning on a phone whose battery was at 23%, after a small fight that i had been told, repeatedly, never happened. so the disclaimer is this: what i am calling narcissistic behavior in a relationship here is the version that lives in apartments, not in the literature i am fairly sure exists somewhere serious.

the difference matters because the behavior, in a relationship, does not look like the behavior in a movie. nobody monologues in a velvet robe. nobody admits to anything in act three. the closest cinematic version is still the 1944 film “Gaslight”, in which a husband moves the picture frames and tells his wife she imagined it, and even that is, by domestic standards, theatrical. real life is quieter. real life is, “i never said that,” repeated calmly, while the dishwasher runs.

the second thing the disclaimer needs to do is separate this from the solo version. a person, alone, can be self-centered and the only injured party is themselves and possibly a microwave. i am on my seventh microwave. the microwave does not file a complaint. the microwave does not remember. the microwave is a saint by comparison. the relationship is the part that turns the same set of habits into a measurable, documented, witness-bearing problem.

third disclaimer: i was, in this story, also a person. i am not pretending i was a saint with a clipboard. i was a person who, in some weeks, contributed. the data set includes me. i am, by my own admission, contaminated.

2. the moms house where the draft idea came up off-page

my mother lives in a small house with a kitchen that is bigger than the rest of the house. this is not a metaphor. the kitchen is structurally more important than the bedroom, which tells you something about my mother and possibly about me. she called on a sunday. mom called on a sunday because mom calls on sundays. that is the schedule. it cannot be moved.

she said, in passing, between two unrelated sentences, “you should write about the difference between someone being difficult and someone making it your fault.” she said it the way she says everything, which is like she has already written the draft and is now waiting for me to catch up.

i went to mom’s house two weekends ago. i sat in the kitchen. she made coffee i did not ask for. she opened a drawer i did not know existed and pulled out a stack of envelopes, which she placed on the table without ceremony. it was a small drawer of certified letters, addressed to me, that she had been receiving for months and not forwarding because, she said, “you would have done nothing about them.” she was right. i would have. i did. they are, currently, in a different drawer of certified letters in my own apartment, where they have joined an unopened mail pile that is now structurally part of the furniture.

that visit is the off-page reason this post exists. mom did not say “narcissistic behavior in a relationship.” mom said “you let people rearrange the room and then call it your room.” which is, i would argue, a working definition.

3. the toms phone i did not return, briefly relevant

tom called twice last week. tom is the friend who owns a house and a wife and two children and a Volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. he calls every couple of months. he calls when his life is going so well he needs an audience that will be, structurally, less distracting than his own household. that is fine. that is the deal.

i did not pick up. i looked at the phone, watched it ring, watched it stop, and then watched the_notification arrive saying “tom — voicemail.” the voicemail joined the other ones. the voicemail count is now, by the bank of the phone, full. eight months full. the phone is not technically broken. the phone is a museum.

i bring tom up because he is the comparison case. tom is in a long, functional, slightly boring relationship in which neither person is, as far as i can tell, rewriting weekly history at the other one. when tom describes a fight to me, the fight has a beginning and an end and, occasionally, a small shared joke at the end of it. when i used to describe a fight from my own relationship, the fight had no beginning, because the beginning had been moved during the night, and no end, because the end was always rescheduled.

that is not me being romantic about tom’s marriage. tom’s marriage probably has its own quiet horrors. but tom does not, when i describe a tuesday, tell me i am misremembering tuesday. that is the bar. it is a low bar. it is the bar.

4. behaviors 1 to 5, the textbook ones, in a relationship

here is where i would, in a more responsible piece, list these calmly. i will try.

1. the rewrite. a thing was said. you remember it. you remember what you were wearing when it was said. the next morning the thing was, somehow, never said, and now the question is whether you are tired or whether you have a problem. this is the daily one. this is the bread.

2. the credit ledger. good things in the relationship are introduced as their idea, retroactively. bad things are introduced as your idea, also retroactively. the timeline is fluid. you start to notice you have, on paper, done less than you remember and caused more than you remember.

3. the audience tax. in front of strangers the behavior softens. in front of your friends it warms slightly. in front of their friends it disappears entirely. this is, i think, the most diagnostic one, because it requires the behavior to be, at minimum, a choice.

4. the pre-emptive accusation. a thing they are about to do is, the day before, attributed to you as a thing they suspect you are about to do. when you do not do it, the suspicion is filed as evidence that they “knew” and were “right to worry.” when they do it, it is, technically, your fault for having put the idea in the air.

5. the small unequal apology. when you are upset, the apology is conditional. “i am sorry you feel that way.” when they are upset, the apology you owe is unconditional and dated. it must be in writing. it will be quoted later, possibly at brunch.

none of these are dramatic on their own. each one is, on its own, an annoying friday. the diagnostic is the volume. it is, i am told, possible to live with one of these for years. five at the same time, on the same tuesday, is the part that turns a relationship into a slow archaeological dig.

5. verdict, the behavior travels with the relationship

here is the verdict, and you can write this down. i’ll wait.

the relational version is also, i think, the most fixable, because it requires a witness and witnesses can leave. nobody leaves a microwave. that is why the microwave keeps getting replaced and the relationship, eventually, does not.

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