I want to tell you about a woman I’ll call S, because that wasn’t her name, and a relationship that lasted about three years in my early thirties.
S was, by most measures, a remarkable person. Bright, accomplished, very funny in a particular dry way that made me feel, in the early months of dating her, that I’d finally met someone who could keep up. She was, I told my friends at the time, the smartest person I’d ever been with.
What I didn’t tell my friends, because I didn’t yet have the words for it, was that being with S also involved a particular dynamic I’d never experienced before. In every disagreement we had—and we had, like any couple, a normal volume of them—I lost. I don’t mean I lost most of them. I mean I lost all of them. The mechanism was clean and consistent. Whatever the disagreement was about, by the end of the conversation, I had been wrong, and she had been right, and the path between those two facts had been so cleanly argued that I couldn’t, in retrospect, find the place where I’d been talked out of my original position.
This was, for the first year, exhilarating. I genuinely believed she was just smarter than me, and that I was getting the benefit of being challenged by someone whose mind worked faster than mine. The losing felt like learning. I’d come out of an argument bruised but, I told myself, better.
By the end of year two, the bruising had stopped feeling like learning. It had started feeling like erosion. I noticed, around that time, that I’d begun checking my own thoughts before I shared them, in a kind of preemptive audit. Was this thing I was about to say defensible? Could I argue it all the way through? Did I have evidence? Because if I didn’t, S would find the weakness in it, and I’d end the conversation having been wrong again, and I’d been wrong, by my count, several hundred times in a row at this point.
I want to write about what this kind of relationship actually does to you, because I don’t think the cost is well understood, and I think a lot of people are inside one and don’t know yet what’s being slowly taken from them.
The thing that gets eroded isn’t your confidence
The popular framing of this kind of relationship is that it damages your self-esteem. You leave with low self-esteem. You feel bad about yourself. The damage is in the emotional register.
I don’t think that’s quite right, in my experience. Or rather, the self-esteem thing is real but it’s downstream of something more fundamental.
What actually gets eroded, when you spend years in a relationship where you can never be right, is your relationship with your own judgment. Not your confidence in yourself as a person. Your confidence in your own ability to perceive reality and form reasonable opinions about it.
This is a much deeper kind of damage, because judgment is the operating system you use to make every decision in your life. If you no longer trust your own perceptions, you don’t just feel bad about yourself in some general way. You become unable to function as the author of your own life. You start outsourcing decisions you’d previously made on your own. You start checking with the other person before forming opinions. You start, in extreme cases, not even noticing what you think about a thing until you’ve heard what they think about it first.
The first time I noticed this in myself was about eighteen months into the relationship. A friend asked me what I thought about a particular film we’d both seen. I opened my mouth, and I genuinely couldn’t tell, in the moment, what I thought about it. I knew what S thought about it. She’d been very clear after we’d come out of the cinema. But what I thought, independent of her opinion, was suddenly inaccessible to me. The opinion-forming machinery had quietly gone offline.
I was thirty-two years old. I had had opinions about films my entire adult life. I’d worked in restaurants, where having strong opinions about everything was, basically, the job. The fact that I couldn’t, in that conversation with my friend, locate my own response to a film was a piece of information about my interior life that scared me more than I let on at the time.
How the mechanism actually works
I want to describe how a relationship like this produces this effect, because I don’t think the partner is always doing it on purpose, and the moral framing of “manipulator vs. victim” obscures the actual machinery.
It works through repetition more than through any single act. Each individual argument is, in isolation, fine. The partner makes a good case. You can’t quite counter it. You concede the point. This happens, at first, in the way arguments happen in any relationship—sometimes they win, sometimes you do, sometimes you both end up modifying your views.
What changes, in this kind of dynamic, is that the wins start going one way and stop coming back. There’s no real reason for this to happen. People don’t actually have one-hundred-percent correct opinions about everything. In a healthy relationship, the score is roughly even over time, because both people are wrong sometimes, and both people are right sometimes, and both people are willing to update their views when the other person makes a good point.
In the kind of relationship I’m describing, the score is not even. The other person is, somehow, always more articulate, faster on their feet, and more committed to the rightness of their position than you are to yours. They don’t update much. You update a lot. Over a hundred arguments, the score becomes lopsided. Over a thousand, it becomes structural.
And here’s the thing about being on the losing side of a structurally lopsided argument record. After enough rounds, you start, very reasonably, to draw the most parsimonious conclusion from the data. The data says: when we disagree, I’m almost always wrong. The simplest explanation for that data is: I’m not very good at thinking about things. Therefore, I should probably defer to my partner’s thinking on most matters.
Once you’ve internalized that explanation—and it’s almost impossible not to, after a few years of consistent evidence—you’ve made the move that costs you your judgment. You’ve decided, in your own mind, that your perceptions are less reliable than the other person’s. You’ve voluntarily handed over the calibration of your own reality to someone else.
That handover is the real damage. The arguments themselves are just the vehicle.
Why your friends notice before you do
I want to mention something that I’ve heard echoed in a lot of stories like mine. The friends usually figure it out before the person inside the relationship does.
I had a friend in New York, around year two with S, who took me out for a drink and asked me, very carefully, whether I noticed that I’d been agreeing with everything S said for about a year. I remember being surprised by the question. I remember pushing back on it. I had not, in my own mind, been agreeing with everything she said. I had been, in my own mind, having normal disagreements with my partner that I’d happened to lose.
My friend pressed gently. He pointed to a few specific things I’d said in the months before that, he claimed, sounded like S’s positions rather than mine. He was right. I checked. I’d been quoting her, basically, on a number of topics where I had previously had different views. I hadn’t noticed the migration. The migration had happened, gradually, in the small spaces between arguments, as I’d updated my positions one by one to match the person I was apparently always wrong against.
I’ve since heard the same story from other people who’ve been in similar relationships. It’s almost always a friend who notices first. The friend has the advantage of seeing the before-and-after. They knew you a few years ago, when you had a particular set of views and a particular voice. They see you now, and the views and the voice are different. They can tell you that. You can’t tell yourself.
If a friend ever takes you aside and gently raises this, take them seriously. They might not be right. But they’re working from a vantage point you don’t have access to. They’re worth listening to.
What it took to recover
The relationship ended, eventually, for reasons that were complicated and don’t belong in this article. What I want to talk about is what happened after, because I think the recovery period is the part that doesn’t get described enough.
I expected, when the relationship ended, to bounce back relatively quickly. I’d never had trouble with breakups before. I assumed there’d be a few weeks of sadness, then a return to baseline.
What actually happened was that I spent about six months in a kind of cognitive fog. I couldn’t make decisions. Not big ones, not small ones. Standing in front of a menu was disproportionately hard. Choosing a film to watch felt impossible. I’d find myself paralyzed by choices that, two years earlier, I’d have made in seconds. The opinion-forming machinery I’d noticed going offline in the cinema had, it turned out, stayed offline, and turning it back on was much harder than I’d expected.
I called a therapist, partly because I needed somewhere to put the confusion, and what she said in our first session has stuck with me. She said: you’ve spent three years training yourself to not trust your own judgment. The training worked. You’re going to need to spend some time, now, retraining yourself to trust it again. That’s not going to happen on its own.
The retraining was, in the end, a series of small, dull exercises. Forming opinions about things and not checking them with anyone. Making small decisions and noticing whether I was happy with them afterward. Disagreeing with people, in low-stakes contexts, and seeing what happened. Practising, in essence, the muscle of trusting myself to perceive reality accurately.
It took the better part of a year before I felt like I had my judgment back to a level I trusted. The recovery wasn’t dramatic. It was incremental. But it was real. By about month ten, I noticed that I was, again, having clear opinions about things in real time, without first running them through the imaginary tribunal of S’s likely response. The tribunal had finally closed.
What I’d say to anyone in this situation
If you’re reading this and something in it sounds familiar, I want to offer a few things.
The first is that the dynamic I’m describing isn’t always the result of malice. Sometimes the partner is doing it on purpose. Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re just a very confident, very articulate person who has never been challenged by their previous partners, and the dynamic emerges by default rather than by design. The damage is the same either way. The diagnosis matters less than what you do about it.
The second is that the cost of this dynamic compounds. Each year you stay in it, the recovery gets longer. The retraining of your own judgment takes longer, the deeper the un-training has gone. Three years cost me close to a year of recovery. Ten years would have cost me a great deal more. If you’re in something like this and you’ve been in it for a while, the time to start examining it is now, not later.
The third, and this is the most important, is that being right occasionally is not a luxury in a relationship. It’s a basic structural requirement. If you can’t remember the last time your partner conceded an argument to you, that’s data. It’s not data about how smart you both are. It’s data about whether the relationship is built in a way that allows two people to coexist as equally real perceivers of reality.
The thing I learned from S, eventually, is that I’d rather be in a relationship where I’m wrong sometimes and right sometimes than in one where I’m always wrong, no matter how much I’m learning, no matter how impressive the partner is, no matter how flattered I am to be playing in the other person’s intellectual league.
The arguments aren’t the cost. The cost is the slow handover of your own reality. You don’t get that back automatically when the relationship ends. You get it back through deliberate, slightly humbling work.
I have it back, mostly. The opinion-forming machinery is online again. I have, on occasion, been wrong, and on other occasions, right, and the score, in my current life, is roughly even.
That’s what an even score feels like. I’d forgotten. It’s better than the alternative.
