Free You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein

pretended to be fascinated by the guy sitting next to me. I could sense Damon occasionally looking at me, and I felt the smug satisfaction of the deeply righteous and imagined his excruciating guilt. Surely , I thought, he is feeling that special kind of remorse that jolts you into realizing you are in love with someone . I did not know at the time that there are no recorded instances of a man ever feeling this, ever in all of history.
    Afterward, a bunch of us piled into Damon’s friend’s car to get rides home. His hotel was just a few blocks from where I lived. He leaned over and whisper-asked if he was coming back to my house. A snap decision had to be made about whether he was staying over.
    The “me” I knew before I met Damon would have quickly perused her standards pamphlet and known that the answer should be no. But this was a new, shittier me, whose standards were slowly fading from view.
    What I was thinking was that I would have it both ways again. Keep this amazing uncomfortable vibe going. Have him come back home with me, but confront him about what happened. Not let him off the hook. By which I also mean, I didn’t want to let him go. I didn’t want to be alone. I really, genuinely liked him.
    We got out of the car in front of my house and stood on the sidewalk. He looked at me, a confused almost-smile on his face. “Is everything okay?” he asked.
    “Why do you think it’s not?” I replied. I was a genius.
    “Your feelings for me seem to have cooled since this morning,” he said.
    At that point I asked him why he even cared how I felt.
    To which he replied, “I just want you to like me.”
    The biggest difference between me now and me then is that back then, I didn’t clock what was wrong with that sentence. I heard “I” and “like” and I invited him in, even though I was still mad, and even though I didn’t want him to think I was okay enough with what happened to have sex with him again, which I did.
    It wasn’t until months later, when I was even more deeply entangled with him, and had been hurt umpteen more times, that I looked at that moment differently. I realized that “I just want you to like me” was not in any way related to “I like you.” He was the object, the person looking to be liked. Whether or not he liked me was beside the point.
    This was a revelation. I had heard girls talk about the perils of dating a “narcissist,” but I had never truly known what that meant and was not familiar with the personality profile. It wasn’t until I sheepishly started taking online quizzes titled “Are You Dating a Narcissist?” and getting A+ results on all of them that I realized I was most definitely dating a narcissist.
    As soon as I opened my eyes the next morning, I felt a wave of regret. When he woke up, I made up a lie about having to get to a Pilates class (if he’d known me any better, it would have been obvious just what a huge lie that was) and ushered him out the door. I called my friend Tracy, a talented writer and my longtime unofficial relationship guru.
    “He needs to man up and let you know he understands what he did wrong,” she declared at breakfast. I nodded vigorously into a glass of white wine the size of an adult cat.
    “How will I know that he really understands?” I asked.
    “He’ll make a gesture,” she said.
    A gesture. I’d never really dated men who’d made gestures. I’d gotten some flowers here and there on the usual mandatory occasions—Valentine’s Day, wisdom teeth being extracted—but I had never been with a guy who had made a genuinely thoughtful, romantic gesture.
    Tracy went on to remind me that a man having his friend call you after bailing on plans was substandard behavior. “Men rise to the standards you hold them up to,” she explained. “Their behavior will always be at the exact bar you allow it to be.”
    I bought Tracy breakfast. I felt like I owed her a lot more than a poached egg and a salad for words of advice I