What Did You See in the First Three Months?

On their third date, Mihir sent the dal back twice. The second time he told the waiter, loudly, to go and find someone who knew how to cook.

Then he turned to Anushka, took her hand across the table and said she had the most beautiful eyes in Bengaluru.

She remembers having two thoughts. The first was that the waiter was about nineteen. The second was that nobody had ever said such a thing to her. She kept the second thought. That was eight years ago.

They were there from the start

The psychologist Ramani Durvasula asked her clients, and the people she interviewed for Should I Stay or Should I Go?, when the warning signs first appeared. The answers agreed. In every case the signs had shown themselves within the first three months. Not one person told her they had felt completely easy about their choice on their wedding day.

She also found that the early signs were not passing oddities. They turned into the themes of the marriage.

Where to look

Durvasula lists thirty traits of a narcissistic partner and attaches an early sign to each. Some of them are small enough to see across a restaurant table.

Watch how he listens. She calls the yawn the best early test of empathy. A person who checks his phone and looks round the room while you talk is showing you something. Her view is that if he is not listening now, when he is trying to impress you, he never will.

Watch how he treats people who serve him. Waiters, drivers, the guard at the gate. Entitlement shows first with people who cannot answer back. He may be delightful to the ones who can do something for him.

Watch how he drives. Rage tends to come out somewhere. Durvasula has no patience with the idea of a man who is a lion with everyone else and a lamb with you. She says it is only a matter of time.

Watch the phone. He guards his own and asks a great many questions about yours.

Watch how he takes good news that is not his. Is he pleased for a friend, or does he find the flaw in it?

And listen for talk of a once-in-a-lifetime love in the first few weeks. It is flattering. She warns that a romance pitched that high has trouble surviving the question of who buys the groceries.

Why you kept the second thought

Durvasula borrows a term from the psychology of perception. In a new relationship the tenderness and the excitement are the figure. The carelessness is the ground. You look at the figure.

Then there is the story you tell. When she asked people what they had made of the signs at the time, their answers were touching. His jealousy meant he cared. His anger was him being vulnerable. It was time to marry and the family was pressing. I felt I had to protect him. One person said simply that they had romanticised the red flags.

Jealousy and control are the ones she is most concerned about, because they look so much like passion. In her interviews they were often the first step towards being cut off from friends.

One snowflake

A caution, and it is hers. “One snowflake does not make a blizzard.” Everyone is short with a waiter on a bad day. Plenty of kind people like a tidy car. What matters is a pattern, meaning it happens more often than not, and several signs together.

She also says that nobody can diagnose a person they have not met. You are not being asked to. The one thing you are qualified to judge is how this person leaves you feeling.

Hindsight is cheap, and I am not offering it to Anushka as a reproach. The signs matter now for a different reason. They were an accurate map of the country she has lived in since.