Picture This
We all know that a picture paints a thousand words but with my kind and me, you are far more likely to receive a novel. If you know what to look for, my use of pictures is a helpful indicator for you. Initially, I will take hundreds of pictures of you as I shower you with compliments. I will also ensure there are thousands of pictures of us, wearing beaming smiles, radiating out our long-standing love (of three days so far). These pictures will be taken in a sun-drenched location, on a ski-slope, outside the theatre, at restaurants, at the game and so on and so forth. These markers of happiness and location will be plastered all over my phone and social media as part of my Relationship Bulletin (see post) and also a general declaration to the world. Look at us together, see how happy and content we are. This is going to last forever.
Wait a number of months and then ask to see the photos of my phone. I will be evasive and no doubt pick a fight and engage in one of my numerous manipulative techniques to deflect you from pursuing this line of enquiry. The reason? You are no longer clogging up my photo album, in fact I will have stored there various pictures of my new target. None will have been taken with her consent. No, these photos might be surreptitious ones taken at work or most likely copied from her Twitter feed and Facebook account. You might think in the evening that I am sat poring over our photos. Not a chance. I am studying my next source of fuel.
You will also notice a reluctance for me to pose in photographs with you. I will come up with all manner of excuses and invariably suggest we have plenty of pictures we do not need any more.
“Honestly, you take so many selfies, anyone would think you were a narcissist,” I will declare in a delicious moment of irony. I will be refusing to appear in a picture with you and slowly removing all those pictures of us and you from social media accounts. I will not do it in once fell swoop ; that is too obvious. Instead, I do it little by little, imagining I am erasing a little bit of you each time. My version of a death by a thousand cuts.
If you do manage to get a picture of me unawares there will not be the brilliant smile I always used to flash, instead it will be a scowl. If I submit to a posed photograph the smile will be thin and the eyes will be cold and dark, just like how my heart feels for you.
23 thoughts on “Picture This”
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Amusing how some people can consistently answer more than one question with a single answer. LOL 🙂
With me was diferent. He never in one year of meriege posted nothing about us. No one single picture. ZERO. Relationship status ? He never had changed. He had hidded all his contacts on facebook , ( i dont need to be a genious to understand “why”). Sp i had a big fight with him about that and just after he had destroyed my name and reputation to everybody of his family and friends, he said to me : “Now i am ready to change the relationship status but YOU dont want “. And call me dramatic, bipolar and so on….
CURIOUS! I never saw pictures of him and other girl in his social media. Just him and male friends. No girl/ woman. he seem to be problems with “female pictures”. And if i know him very well, he dont accpet any woman prettier than him.
Hummmm….
Ha. Exactly what I found on their social media. Very few pictures together, never touching, his thin smile, no crinkly eyes, looking off to one side, distant. IPPS trying to maintain the facade.
Are you Johnnie Boden ? Lol
HG , are you around a lot of clothing models ? 🌸
What about a narcissist who doesn’t do this quickly? Can this take years?
Why would you later tell a person that you had snuck a picture of them when they didn’t know awhile back?
Fuel.
Thank you, HG! I need to remember that is the ultimate goal.
HG, I am curious if it raises any flags with your friends/family/co-workers that you have had so many relationships? When I see the same people continually “bulletin” relationships regardless of the time that has elapsed it certainly raises a flag for me.
Friends joke about it, some family members frown on it, colleagues don’t tend to know – I of course plausible deniability that is nothing to do with me but is as a consequence of their shortcomings in terms of their personality or as a hazard of what I do professionally which some cannot handle and/or makes long-term relationships difficult to sustain.
HG,
“… as a hazard of what I do professionally which some cannot handle and/or makes long-term relationships difficult to sustain.”
Does the fact that the nature of your profession is a partly a cover for a high turnover of partners play into keeping that particular profession long-term? (In addition to being good at your profession, as I think you’ve stated elsewhere.) Or do you just want to save full-time book writing for retirement – as it would be less likely to provide as a good cover story?
I do not do it because it provides cover, that just happens to be a beneficial consequence.
Thank-you for you answer.
But to clarify, I did not inquire if that is *why* you do it…but more specifically – especially since, as you say it is a beneficial consequence – would it factor into your decision to continue the same line of work for the long-term? Or, in other words, would you hesitate to change to a career that lacked the same ‘beneficial consequence’? Or would you just find another means to explain it away to those who questioned the high turnover in your primary relationships?
Sorry if my initial question was unclear.
Bounty hunter, eh? Like Dog, but without the permed and dyed mullet?
Hahaha – MB!
I suspect that it gets good mileage to be able to say, ‘ Yes, my previous relationship didn’t work out because my line of work requires a lifestyle that she just couldn’t tolerate in the long run…”
Will your profession ever come out?
I find that the most intriguing about you. I play guess the career and wonder if your aloofness helps with your role?
And if you can “retire early”, as a result of your profession. Allowing for futire writing.
(Or if you told me, would you have to kill me?)
Not unless I chose.
Yes it does.
I can if I choose to.
WhoCares,
It works out easily for narcissist who never decides to marry or settle down. We blame the narcissist for creating the facade for allowing their abuse, but one of the main “evidence” the somatic narc uses to showcase that he/she isn’t the problem, is all of the exes who will be hoovered back “as friends”. Cerebral Narcs have their excuses too, which include important “obligations”. They do it with finesse. Unfortunately, the judgement falls on the victims who have been smeared and forced to rebuild.
NMP,
There are ways around that. Especially with privacy settings.