Lunch with a Narcissist

I'm not proud of how I handled him.

Recently I met two friends for sushi. I initiated the lunch because I was getting ready to launch a deeply personal memoir into the world and I wanted to tell them about it.

A day before our meeting, I got a text from one of them informing me that he had invited someone to join us. He told me his friend was in town for business, and I thought, No problem, it’ll be nice to have another guy there.

As we sat down for lunch, I sensed it might have been a mistake to have him come along. This guy was a talker. And he was a bit of a dominator and I noticed both my friends seemed to defer to him; they let him carry the conversation.  

I didn’t think much of it and settled in to let them catch up. But the longer he went on, the more he controlled the conversation and brought things back to himself and shared way more details in his stories than anyone seemed interested in. I saw the other guys start nodding mindlessly and smiling politely. Their eyes were open, their heads were bobbing, but I’m convinced they were thinking about what they needed to pick up on the way home, or maybe trying to remember the name of that show they started streaming last night. They sure weren’t engaged in this guy’s monologue, I’ll tell you that.

But hey, I thought, this is my lunch, this is my chance to share something really personal with my friends.

So I interrupted the conversation and told the guys about my memoir. I let them know it was coming out in a month, that it was very raw and personal. I told them I was nervous to expose myself to the world. My son had gone to prison. My wife and I had struggled. My faith had been tested. I don’t think I got choked up, but I was laying it out there.

Then, shockingly, he interrupted me. And before I knew it, he and one of the other guys were carrying on with an entirely different conversation.

Wait, what just happened? I thought to myself. Did he just do that? Did he just take off on a tangent? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Normally around narcissists I’m passive, I just sit back and let them do their thing while I go to my happy place, which is usually hiking in the mountains with my dog. But at that table, with these guys, I felt the warm humidity of steam making its way through my ear canal. I looked to my right and saw the steam floating up toward the ceiling.

This guy is not going to hijack this lunch. In the middle of their hop, hop, hop down memory lane, I snapped, “Seriously guys? Is my story that uninteresting to you? Really?”

The narcissist stopped midsentence, mouth agape, looking like he’d been slapped in the face, and slowly nodded for me to go on.

I collected myself, trying not to make the moment too awkward, and continued on with my sharing.

A few minutes later he interrupted again, but this time I just kept talking over him. For several seconds it was awkward to have two grown men blabbing over each other at the table. But I wasn’t about to stop. Heck, at this point, I would have done the blah, blah, blah all the way through lunch, forget the sushi.

I’m not proud of how pissed I got. I’m not proud that I had to be an asshole to the asshole. But that’s just my natural reaction and seems to be the only thing that works with them.  

Forgive my pessimism, but in all my years I don’t think I’ve ever seen a narcissist change.

I once had a friend who struggled in this area of his life and really wanted to change; he didn’t want to be so selfish; he wanted to take a genuine interest in others. He was very good at business but lousy in relationships.

He thought the solution might be coaching and working on his technique. He learned how to ask better questions and how to demonstrate better body language and how to use mental prompts to remind him to show empathy.

But the experiment didn’t work. In fact, it was painful for me to watch him trying so hard. It was like he was contorting his body and twisting his arm behind his back to create something that just wasn’t there. Finally, he gave up and today he’s just accepted himself as he is.

Maybe I should have been more gracious with that guy over sushi. Maybe I should have just persisted without taking it so personally. Maybe I should have made sure I wasn’t trying to remove the splinter in his eye when I had a log in mine. I don’t know. But I really struggle when narcissists narcissize.

According to Greek mythology, Narcissus drowned in a pool of water after falling in love with his own reflection. He’d become despondent that the beautiful image he saw in the pool could never reciprocate his love.

I don’t wish that fate for narcissists—of course not. But I do wish they’d learn the lesson of Narcissus.