narcissistic behaviour in men — 1 thorough investigation
narcissistic behaviour in men — 1 thorough investigation
behaviour in men, with the british spelling because the british spelling sounds slightly more like a documentary, is the topic and the topic is broad. i am about to narrow it. narrowing is, frankly, what i do best at three a.m.
this morning the desk has me, a lukewarm cup, and an open tab i refuse to close. carla is in the annual planning meeting on the third floor, the one with the doughnut box that nobody admits to opening. that gives me, by the count i keep running, something like the rest of the morning. enough to type with both hands.
i write down the topic. narcissistic behaviour in men. i underline it twice because the underline is free and the british spelling is paying for itself in seriousness already. the cursor blinks. it has opinions, the cursor. it always does.
narcissistic behaviour in men, the disclaimer
before anyone takes me to court for what i am about to type, the disclaimer. i am not a doctor. i am, however, a man with a desk, an unopened mail pile growing diagonally, a microwave count i will not say out loud, and a third yoga mat under a sofa that has, by now, accepted the yoga mat as a roommate. these credentials are not credentials. but they are data, and data is what we have.
this post lives in the wider gaslighting investigation, the one where i keep adding small evidence to a folder that nobody asked me to keep. narcissistic behaviour in men is a sub-folder of that folder. some of you came in through the side door. welcome. there is no coffee. there is, in fact, never coffee.
second disclaimer. i am a man. that means the topic includes me, structurally, by birth, by paperwork, by elevator small talk. i am not exempt. anyone who tells you they are exempt is the first person you should investigate. that is, in a sentence, the whole shape of the genre.
third disclaimer. i ran the topic through ChatGPT last week, just to check whether i was being unfair. ChatGPT gave me a measured paragraph with bullet points and the word “boundaries” used four times. i closed the tab. then i opened it again and asked it to be honest. it gave me the same paragraph, slightly shorter, and then suggested i talk to a professional. the algorithm has a way of pretending it is on your side while quietly handing you off to the next adult.
the elevator where the doctor said interesting at the wrong moment
last month i shared a slow elevator with a man who was telling another man, loudly, that his ex-wife “didn’t understand the volume of his work”. those were the exact words. the volume of his work. as if his work were a faucet. the other man was nodding. the other man, i think, was a doctor — he had the small lapel pin and the patience of someone paid to listen, which is a profession most of us cannot afford.
at the third floor the doctor said “interesting” the way doctors say it when an x-ray comes back wrong. the man with the volume of work did not hear it. that is the first behaviour, right there, framed perfectly inside a moving box made of metal: the failure to hear “interesting” said the wrong way. you and i hear it. he never does.
the elevator, by the way, smells like nothing. that is its only smell. nothing. i mention this because the man with the volume of work was wearing a cologne so loud it qualified as a press release, and i think part of being a man-who-doesn’t-hear-interesting is also being a man whose presence arrives ninety seconds before he does.
i got out at the lobby. they kept going up. wherever they were going, the doctor was getting paid for it, and the volume-of-work man was, by my best guess, about to find out he had a thing.
the hot take defense, item by item
now, let me say this clearly. every meeting could be a 3-line email. i will defend that take in any room, in any vest, against any wine man named stefan you can produce, and i bring it up here because the hot take and the topic are, when you put them next to each other on a desk, deeply related.
here is what i think is happening, and you can write this down, i’ll wait.
a man who insists on a forty-minute meeting when a paragraph would do is a man performing his own importance. he is staging the meeting because the meeting is the proof. take the meeting away, replace it with three sentences, and the proof goes too. the same instinct, the same need, the same small theatre. the meeting is the elevator with the cologne. it is the wine tasting where stefan said “interesting”. it is the volume of his work, presented as a building.
i rest my case.
this is why HT12 belongs in this investigation and not in the productivity one. productivity is the cover story. the actual feature is the audience. a 3-line email has no audience. a meeting has a captive one. tell me which one a certain kind of man chooses, and tell me why, and we are halfway through the diagnosis already.
A MEETING IS AN ELEVATOR THAT GOES NOWHERE. BUT SLOWER.
behaviours 1 to 5, the chatgpt-flagged ones
i fed five anonymised stories to ChatGPT and asked it to flag the patterns. it flagged them. it did so calmly, in numbered form, the way a calm man at a help desk explains why your refund is not coming. i am going to translate them out of help-desk and into english.
1. the rewrite. a conversation happens. you are in it. two days later, the same conversation is described back to you, and in the new version you said different things, with a different tone, and the other man is the reasonable one. the algorithm calls this “memory drift”. i call it the rewrite. it is on the menu of typical narcissistic behaviour in marriage and in offices and, very specifically, in elevators where two people remember a sentence differently and only one of them is willing to die on that hill.
2. the meeting-as-stage. see above. see HT12. see stefan with the wine. see the volume-of-work man at the third floor. anywhere a man can convert a five-minute task into a forty-minute event, he will, because the event is the point. the task was always going to get done either way.
3. the silent inbox. messages go unanswered until they are inconvenient. then a long, generous reply arrives, full of sentences praising you for “patience”. this is, weirdly, included on the unofficial list of the hidden signs someone is in a narcissistic relationship — the silence, then the praise. the praise is the bill. it is presented after the meal, when refusing it costs more than paying it.
4. the borrowed authority. “my therapist says”. “my coach said”. “i was talking to a friend who is a doctor”. the borrowed authority is a tactic. it lets a man hand you a verdict without writing it himself. you can argue with him. you cannot argue with the friend who is a doctor and who is, conveniently, not in the room.
5. the soft demotion of everyone else. the ex with the volvo, the colleague who “doesn’t quite get it”, the mother-in-law who is “well-meaning, but”. this one shows up in traits of a narcissistic mother in law lists too, but the man-version runs on an internal demotion engine. everyone in his life is, in his telling, slightly less competent than him. apparently. for reasons he does not have to explain. and yet, somehow, he is always the last one promoted, which is itself a clue.
i should mention: the algorithm flagged a sixth pattern. i am not putting it in the post. it was too specific to a real person, and one of my soft rules is i don’t write about real people, even when the algorithm hands me their initials on a plate, like a waiter who has decided we are friends.
verdict, the behaviour is durable, every meeting could be a 3-line email
here is the verdict, written in a hurry because carla is, statistically, about to be back at any minute and i have been on this draft longer than the rest of the morning allows. the behaviour is durable. that is the key word. it survives apologies. it survives therapy that is not really therapy. it survives the volvo guy joke i make in every other post. what it does not survive is being treated, repeatedly, like a 3-line email — short, factual, no audience, no stage. take the audience away and the performance ends. it is, after all, a performance. like a famous television husband whose entire Frasier dynamic ran on a brother-shaped audience: remove the brother, the routine collapses by tuesday.
i am, again, not a doctor. but i am a man with a desk and a lobby story and a microwave count, and i can tell you what i see from here. narcissistic behaviour in men is mostly small theatre. small, durable, well-rehearsed theatre. it does not get better when you clap. it does not get better when you boo. it gets quieter when you simply stop showing up to the show. and showing up, i’m fairly sure, is the only ticket they can’t print themselves.
the unopened mail pile, by the way, is up against the wall now, leaning at maybe a thirteen-degree angle. one of those envelopes, a recurring caller left a voicemail about. that voicemail is full and has been full for eight months. i mention this only because a desk full of leaning mail is, in its own quiet way, the opposite of a forty-minute meeting. nothing is being staged. nothing is being performed. it is just the truth, leaning sideways, waiting.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
leading expert, the lobby elevator on the third-floor route
p.s. the volume-of-work man, if he is reading this, will recognise himself, but he will recognise himself as someone else. that is the whole investigation, condensed into one sentence, leaning at a thirteen-degree angle against the wall.
