Pathological narcissist wonders why woman won’t return his call

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This morning, a friend emailed me a reminder of just how pathologically arrogant people can be, with a heaping helping of gender dynamics on the side:

The story is this:  a girl was out with friends having drinks on King St (in Toronto ).  This guy approaches her and won’t leave her alone -saying how cute she is. She finally gives in  and hands the guy her business card to get rid of him. The attached  is an MP3 file of not one, but TWO voicemails this guy left. This goes down  in the history books – especially the second voice mail.
After hearing them you can clearly see why she didn’t call him back – instead she called in to the Z103.5 morning show & had them play this on the air.Ladies: He is out there…

I’ll relay a few snippets, but you really should click over and listen to the voice mails to hear his tone of voice. He sounds not so much confident as bored while he explains for a total of four-and-a-half minutes what a “catch” he is, and how he’s “approached by six or seven women a day” but he’s “very picky about what” he likes. She’s “very elegant” and he “couldn’t take his eyes off” of her, and her “friends were very jealous, even if they say they weren’t.”

On the second call, he wonders why she hasn’t returned the first one. Perhaps she just doesn’t understand that he’s “a complete catch”, and in fact “one of the few men in the city that has nothing wrong with him” (Toronto has over 1 million people), so he gives her a deadline to get back in touch with him or else she can “forget it.”

But, being a thoughtful soul, he acknowledges maybe there’s another reason she’s not calling back. Perhaps she was “abused in childhood” or her “mother has cancer, and you’re going to chemo” or maybe she’s just “extremely frightened.” For a second there, you think he’s getting warm, but no: he means frightened of intimacy. Oh. Never mind.

Then he says “nobody hands someone a business card and says ‘call me’ and then doesn’t return his calls. It’s very passive-aggressive – you should actually look that up: passive-aggressive personality disorder.”

Yeah. Now he’s dispensing psychiatric advice. In a slightly menacing tone.

And this apparently reminds him to mention that if she’s on any sort of psychiatric meds, he’s not interested. “But if you’re psychologically normal [his emphasis, not mine] and you haven’t called me because there’s been some horrible thing that’s happened in your life which prevented you, that’s fine.” The “that’s fine” is said in a very gracious tone of voice. Total 180 from the slightly menacing tone. People who can master an emotional U-turn in mid-sentence are not, in my experience, actually belabored with the complexity of any emotions beyond simmering, self-indulgent rage.

Clearly, in his mind, there are only two reasons a woman wouldn’t call him back: she’s been swept off by a tornado and lost her cell phone, or she’s insane. Because he is such a catch.

It’s hilarious – or maybe it’s just that I had to laugh in order to cope, because I know firsthand these guys are out there – but it’s also scary. This man may or may not be prone to physical violence, but he clearly:

• Feels entitled to force his way into a woman’s life, using her socialization to play nice and not make a scene to his full advantage;
• Believes that no matter how he bullied her into giving him her number, the giving of it constitutes the start of a relationship and immediately imposes certain obligations upon her;
• Attempts to isolate her from her friends (“they were jealous, even if they say they weren’t”);

These are signs of an abusive personality. All this guy had to do was get into a public place and refuse to leave this woman alone until she appeased him, and boom, he’s in her life. Just like that.

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