One day over two years ago I Googled the term “pathological lying.”  In one article, I read about how some people who are pathological liars do so about things that seem so small, it makes no sense. It would be so easy to tell the truth, and the truth may even serve them better, so the rest of us wonder why they would bother to lie. I used to wonder that very thing when I caught him in small lies.  Why would he lie about whether he had or had not had sex with a particular girl in his past,...

If you are in a relationship with a narcissist, you’ve seen that moment when everything flips, when the narcissist plays the victim and you lose all sense of reality. Why do we get to the point to where we can’t tell whether our own actions are the problem? This is an idea that narcissists like to feed to their partners throughout the relationship after things start going downhill– and often to others outside of the relationship as well. [Read Mind Games Narcissists Play to Trick You into Blaming Yourself] They will say things such as that their partners are emotional...

(July 2014) The day after Independence Day, he and his friend ______ spent the day helping me to move into my new apartment in the heart of the District.  Afterward, I expected him to head home with his friend, but he wanted to spend the night with me again.  It would be the first time we spent an entire weekend together.  I’d had something else to do that night, something important, but I’d told him he could stay instead.  I was surprised when not long afterward, he fell into bed, foregoing our plans to go to dinner and go out,...

April 30, 2016 I remember the first time I opened our mailbox and saw our last names listed side by side as the current renters of the apartment.  Something fluttered in my chest, some combination of happiness and anticipation.  It was a little like what I had been feeling the day I graduated from college.  Seeing our names together in writing like that made it so real.    I had lived with men before, but it was never like this.  In the past, one of us had moved in with the other, the one with the apartment or house carving...

We let people we love help construct our version of lived realities.  We have to, because we spend time with them.  We have experiences with them.  We share our thoughts with them.  Because we’ve developed trust, it’s likely we share other emotions that have helped to bond us to them. But what happens when the person you’ve come to trust constructs a reality for you that has holes in it? Some parts are just blatantly false, you come to learn.  The dissolution of those portions, whenever and however that might happen, may rattle you to the core.  And yet just...

Imagine you are blind in your left eye.  One day as you are taking a walk, you happen across a river.  Across the river is a man, and he waves at you. “Hey!” he yells.  “I know you!  I’d like to help you.  If you come over to this side of the river, I have developed a state-of-the-art device that will cure your blindness forever so that you can see out of your left eye.” It sounds too good to be true, but the man gestures to a hospital behind him and continues for the longest time to tell you...

It was the question that I could not answer:  Did he ever love me or not? I would lie awake at night and wonder how he could have looked at me the way he had if he did not love me.  When love is a lie, can people fake enlarged pupils and do they look at you with their lips slightly parted, as if they are dying of thirst and you are a pool of endless water?  Do you look into their eyes and see yourself reflected back like rays of gold illuminating a forgotten darkness?  Do you catch them...