Narcissists Want You to Question Everything Except Their Behaviour

There was a stretch, maybe the second year, when I genuinely wondered if I had an anxious attachment style, inherited from a mother who worked long hours when I was small. I read about it. I journaled about it. I brought it up, tentatively, in a conversation with Emeka, half-expecting him to reassure me I was overthinking it. He didn’t reassure me. He agreed, thoughtfully, and added a few observations of his own — a pattern he’d noticed, something about how I “needed a lot of reassurance” compared to people he’d dated before.

I left that conversation with a research project. Go understand your attachment style. Go understand your mother. Go understand why you react the way you do. I spent weeks on it, genuinely, generously, with real effort. It never once occurred to me, in that same stretch of weeks, to spend even one evening examining what he actually did on an ordinary Tuesday. The question of his behavior simply wasn’t in circulation. Only mine was.

Every question in that relationship pointed at me. Not one of them, not a single one, in three years, ever came back around to point at him.

I call this The Unquestioned Variable — the one constant in the entire relationship that was never, under any circumstances, placed under the same scrutiny everything else was. My childhood got investigated. My friendships got investigated. My moods, my memory, my tone of voice, my family history — all of it, repeatedly, thoroughly, sometimes by me and sometimes by him. His behavior sat outside the investigation entirely, the one fixed point everything else got measured against.

Here’s how that asymmetry actually operated, in the specific rooms I lived it in.

1. Your Memory Gets Audited. His Never Does.

Only One of Us Was Ever Asked to Prove We Remembered Correctly

Any time our accounts of an event diverged, the burden of proof landed on me, automatically, without either of us ever agreeing to that arrangement. I’d find myself searching old texts for evidence, trying to reconstruct a timeline, while his version simply stood there, unexamined, treated as the default unless I could disprove it.

This wasn’t two equally uncertain memories being compared fairly.

It was one memory granted the presumption of accuracy, and one required to earn it, every single time.

2. Your Intentions Get Interrogated. His Are Assumed Good.

A Double Standard With No Exceptions

If I did something that hurt him, even mildly, even accidentally, the conversation that followed dug into my motives — why had I really done that, what did it say about how I felt about him underneath. If he did something that hurt me, the explanation was simpler and arrived faster: he hadn’t meant it that way, I knew his heart, I was reading too much into it.

This wasn’t two people extending each other equal good faith.

It was good faith, issued generously in one direction and withheld carefully in the other.

3. Outside Factors Get Blamed Before He Does

My Job, My Period, My Family — Never Him

When I was upset, the first explanations offered were rarely about anything he’d done. Work stress. Hormones. Something unresolved with my mother. A long list of plausible outside causes, each one examined seriously, before his own actions ever entered the conversation as a possibility worth considering.

This wasn’t him being a thoughtful, holistic thinker about my moods.

It was a lineup of suspects with his own name conspicuously left off the list, every single time.

4. Your Past Gets Mined. His Past Is Off-Limits.

An Archaeology That Only Ran One Direction

My childhood, my previous relationships, my old patterns — all treated as rich, relevant material for understanding my current behavior. His own formative history got offered occasionally, briefly, usually as an explanation that closed a subject rather than opened it, never as material I was invited to dig into the way mine constantly was.

This wasn’t curiosity about both of our histories equally.

It was an excavation permit issued for one person’s past and quietly withheld for the other’s.

5. Your Reactions Get Pathologized. His Get Normalized.

“You’re Overreacting” vs. “Anyone Would Feel That Way”

My anger, my hurt, my frustration — these got analyzed, labeled, sometimes gently diagnosed, as though they required explanation beyond the event that had caused them. His own anger, his own frustration, got treated as self-evidently reasonable, the natural response any person would have, requiring no further examination at all.

This wasn’t him being more emotionally stable than me.

It was one set of reactions treated as data to be studied, and another treated as simply how things are.

6. Your Friends’ Opinions Get Dismissed. His Own Opinion of Himself Never Is.

Bias Assigned Selectively

When Ngozi raised a concern about something he’d done, it got waved off as her not understanding the full context, or having her own issues with trust. His own glowing read of his character — generous, patient, endlessly misunderstood — never once got filtered through the same suspicion. My trauma therapist named the pattern precisely when I described it to her.

“Notice who gets to testify in his own case. Your friend, who witnessed something, gets disqualified as biased. He, the person with the most obvious conflict of interest in the entire story, gets treated as the most credible witness to his own behavior. That’s not an accident of logic. That’s the logic working exactly as intended.”

This wasn’t him being understandably confident in his own character.

It was bias, applied selectively, disqualifying every witness except the one with the most to gain from the verdict.

7. You’re Asked to Explain Yourself Daily. He’s Never Asked to Explain Anything.

An Asymmetry So Constant It Stopped Registering

I explained myself constantly — why I’d said something a certain way, why I’d been quiet, why I’d needed space. He was rarely, if ever, asked to account for his own choices in the same granular, daily way. The demand for explanation flowed almost entirely in one direction, so consistently that I stopped noticing the direction at all, the way you stop noticing which way a river runs once you’ve lived beside it long enough.

I mentioned this asymmetry to Funmilayo once, trying to describe it, and she said something that stuck with me longer than almost anything else from that whole period.

“You explained yourself to that man more in a single year than I’ve had to explain myself to anyone in my whole life. That’s not a relationship. That’s a performance review you never agreed to be in, with him as the only person holding a pen.”

This wasn’t a relationship with mutual accountability.

It was a one-directional audit, so constant it had started to feel, to me, like ordinary conversation.

8. The One Thing Never Up for Debate

What Remained Fixed While Everything Else Moved

By the end, I could list, in detail, every flaw I supposedly had, every pattern I needed to work on, every piece of my history that might explain my own difficult moments. I could not list, with any confidence, a single flaw of his that had ever survived a conversation intact, unexplained away, unassigned to some outside cause, simply sitting there as his own responsibility to hold.

The reframeThis isn’t a relationship where one person happened to be more self-aware. It’s a system with exactly one variable permanently held constant — his own behavior — while every other variable in the room was treated as fair, constant, exhausting game.

I still catch myself, sometimes, starting to interrogate my own reaction to something before I’ve even asked whether the thing itself was reasonable to react to. I’m getting better at reversing the order — asking first what actually happened, and only afterward, if it’s warranted, what it might mean about me. It’s a small reversal. It changes almost everything about how a conversation unfolds.

I didn’t have an anxious attachment style that needed three years of research.

I had a relationship where only one of us was ever asked to hold a mirror up, and I mistook the mirror for a diagnosis instead of what it actually was.