When he told me he adored me more than anything and that he had the best time with me he’d ever had with anyone, but he couldn’t see me anymore, I was confused. He wrote me a passionate, moving goodbye email, telling me how he hoped one day we would finally end up together. Then, I later learned, he gave all the stuff I left at his house away to a roommate as if I had died. When I learned about the cold disposal of my belongings, I went into a state of deep unease. It was the kind of unease victims often report after a burglary, brought on by the knowledge a stranger has enjoyed unfettered access to your inner sanctum, the place where your most intimate life is lived. This is often seen as a greater violation than the actual theft of items. He and I had spent weeks at a time together, met each other’s families and friends, confided secrets, and effectively declared mutual love. Suddenly, he was behaving like someone else. Had he been a stranger all along?
“Sounds like he’s a narcissist”, a woman I knew at the time sighed. “My ex was one too”. I soon fell down the hole of online narcissism discourse. In her thought-provoking 2016 book, The Selfishness of Others, which I read recently, author Kristin Dombek calls this the “narcisphere”, an internet ecosystem of supposed experts in narcissism and their audience, typically people who understand themselves to be victims of narcissistic abuse. Once a rare clinical diagnosis reserved for the likes of
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