“There is a form of narcissism that seems to affect men more than women…it stems from a very close and unhealthy mother-son attachment relationship.” – Berit Brogaard I’m not a psychologist. I’m someone’s daughter and could be someone’s support. And maybe that’s all I need to be. I can sympathize with a man’s suffering, but not more than that. I can’t live in a man’s world, and I can’t will myself into depression any more than these men can will themselves out of it. So, here is my last time: An open letter to the mother of the boy who broke my heart. I went on a date (pshht) with your son who spoke about you with feelings of great distress, discomfort in the mind and body. I called my girlfriend the next day and told her about our romantic misdemeanors – and they were many – uptil date, invariably unforgiven. Her advice to me was: “Run,” which I didn’t. So, while it is completely normal for your heterosexual son to see a woman who he is sexually attracted to as a sex object, the intense gratification he receives in hurting and humiliating her or staying ambivalent towards her, is more than often a sign that he is impacted by the relationship he shared with you, his mother, in profound ways – the one permanent fixture in his life. Dear mother-in-law who could’ve been, you loved him first while he loved you first too, and you’re the first woman in his life who could have broken his heart. But what was any fault of mine? Perhaps the persistent increase in narcissism in our society is in part due to the fact that the narcissistic personality as a trait is moulded by a dysfunctional early environment that comes from being the son of an unloving mother. Each individual narcissist is plagued by feelings of incessant and rampant internal negativity, obsession with self-image and dangerously exaggerated feelings of self-importance that remain out of touch with reality. Dear narcissist mother-in-law who could’ve been, maybe at one point you idealized your son and put him on a pedestal, but by the time he started growing up into a boy you began to resent him for not pleasing you as he used to. Maybe that is why his defence mechanism has kept building up his ego as a façade that covers the deepest of his angst and insecurities. Narcissism is primarily a sexual perversion, according to Freudian theory. In Sigmund Freud’s seminal 1914 essay, On Narcissism: An Introduction, he wrote: “A narcissist is a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated—who looks at it, that is to say, strokes and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities. Developed to this degree, narcissism has the significance of a perversion that has absorbed the whole of the subject’s sexual life.” Dear crippling mother-in-law who could’ve been, when you scolded him five or six times a day for being a “crybaby” or slapped him hard right across the face for being too boastful, were you simply being unattuned, cruel, or just enforcing the masculine code? How does a son own up to a decidedly “unmasculine” hurt? The only one emotion then the Boy Code permitted him to externalize was anger. And doesn’t all of this just make perfect sense, since ‘anger’ in men is culturally acceptable, even if often uproductive and sometimes self-destructive? Gun to my head, sons clearly suffer as much as daughters do and in some way, perhaps, even more deeply, because they tend to suffer alone and in silence. Dear beautiful mother-in-law who could’ve been, maybe he wanted to hurt me just because he wanted to hurt you. Maybe he fixated on me as a feminine object of desire in order to fill in for the deprivation of motherly love. Maybe how he got aroused just by a glance at my arm, my ankle, my calf, my thigh, my stomach, reminded him of you. Maybe I, in that glimpse of a second – the moment that passed as swiftly as it had arrived – was the forbidden loathsome fruit? Aside from you dear mother-in-law who could’ve been, he will always have another woman for sex, another for companionship, another for when he visits a different place and another to mentally challenge him. No one woman satisfies his numerous and inexplicable desires or fills the void in his life. To the mother of the boy who broke my heart, this is the entity that you have created for daughters of other mothers to try to love. All in vain. I hope you are proud of him.