Why happens when hormones change how you treat your life-partner?

Let’s start where most misunderstandings begin.

When people hear dark personality traits, they think character.
When clinicians hear hyperthyroidism, they think arousal.

Those two categories are not the same thing. But in everyday life—and often in therapy—they get collapsed into a single moral verdict: this is who you are.

New research published in Current Psychology suggests that collapse may be a mistake.

The study found that folks with hyperthyroidism reported higher levels of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism, with narcissism showing a weaker and less consistent pattern, compared to people with hypothyroidism or no thyroid disorder.

Not destiny.
Not diagnosis.
Association.

Handled carefully, association still tells us something important.

The word untenable is often used casually in relationship conversations. It shouldn’t be.

Here is the clinical definition I use:

Untenable relationship:
A relationship that cannot be sustained without ongoing self-betrayal, distortion of reality, or erosion of dignity.

In practical terms, a relationship becomes untenable when continuing it reliably causes psychological harm, regardless of intent, effort, or love.

This is not about how unhappy you feel.
It is about what continuation costs you.

An untenable relationship is not difficult.
It is structurally unsustainable.

Upskirting is not a prank enabled by technology.
It is a sexual violation facilitated by it.

What this research clarifies—without moral inflation or rhetorical excess—is not merely who commits this act, but why it continues to function. Not technologically. Socially.

Upskirting persists not because it is misunderstood, but because it reliably attracts folks low in empathy and reliably encounters a culture prepared to minimize its meaning.

That pairing is not incidental. It is efficient.

They tell us that childhood passes.
They do not tell us where it goes.

A new analysis shows that certain kinds of childhood hardship do not disappear so much as settle—quietly, chemically—into the body, where they reemerge decades later as accelerated biological aging in women.

Published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, the study demonstrates that early social disadvantage leaves a biological trace, unevenly distributed by sex and by racial or ethnic background.

This is not a study about memory or psychology.
It is a study about how inequality becomes cellular.

Narcissism is one of the most common traits couples weaponize against each other.

It shows up as diagnosis-by-insult (“You’re a narcissist”), as explanatory shorthand (“That’s just how narcissists are”), or as quiet despair (“Nothing ever lands with them”).

What it almost never shows up as is what it actually is: a strategy that once worked and may no longer be working.

A large cross-national study published in Self and Identity makes this harder to avoid.

Across 53 countries and nearly 46,000 participants, narcissism follows the same demographic contours with almost boring regularity.

Not just in Western nations. Not just in individualistic cultures. Everywhere.

Young people score higher.
Men score higher.
People who see themselves as higher in social status score higher.

This is not a culture-war finding.
It’s a pattern-recognition finding.

And it quietly dismantles several comforting stories we like to tell about who narcissists are and where they come from.

Vulnerable narcissism Isn’t Vanity. It’s a shame-management procedure.

Vulnerable narcissism isn’t the “I’m amazing” version of narcissism.

It’s the “I am one bad look away from evaporating” version.

And if you’ve been online for more than twelve minutes, you already know we’ve collectively agreed to treat “narcissist” as a single character: loud, glossy, entitled, always auditioning for the mirror.

That caricature sells. It also sabotages clinical accuracy.

Because the quieter subtype—the one that arrives wrapped in sensitivity, grievance, and a permanent sense of being slightly emotionally robbed—maps differently.

And annoyingly, the research is clearer than the discourse.

The claim the internet hates: insecure attachment links more strongly to vulnerable narcissism (not grandiose).

There is a certain kind of person who feels injured everywhere they go.

Not harmed, exactly.
Not necessarily traumatized.

But persistently wronged—across friendships, partnerships, workplaces, families.

They do not simply suffer.
They organize themselves around suffering.

A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences offers a precise psychological name for this pattern: the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood.

What the research shows—quietly but unmistakably—is that this tendency is strongly associated with vulnerable narcissism, not with objective trauma exposure itself.

This is not a moral claim.
It is a structural one.

This is the confusion that keeps getting rebranded.

One of the quietest confusions in modern relationship culture is this:

Emotional detachment is repeatedly mistaken for emotional maturity.

They look similar on the surface.
Both are calm.
Both avoid drama.

Both speak the language of boundaries.

But they are not the same psychological achievement.

Emotional maturity expands a person’s capacity to remain connected under stress.

Emotional detachment reduces exposure to stress by limiting connection.

One builds tolerance.
The other builds distance.

Only one supports intimacy.

Longer, clinically accurate answer:
Narcissism is not a defense against Borderline Personality Disorder.
It is often a defensive solution to the same underlying psychological problem.

That distinction matters—clinically, relationally, and culturally.

What This Question Gets Right Immediately

When people ask whether narcissism is a defense against BPD, they are intuitively sensing something real.

Both narcissistic and borderline presentations involve:

• fragile self-structure.

• intense sensitivity to shame and abandonment.

• difficulty holding mixed or ambivalent feelings about self and others.

What differs is how the psyche organizes itself when attachment feels dangerous.

The question isn’t misguided.
It’s aimed at the wrong level of analysis.

There is a difference between a narcissist and an asshole.

It is not a difference of manners. It is not even a difference of morality.

It is a difference of ontology.

An asshole knows the world exists without them. A narcissist is not entirely convinced it does.

That distinction explains almost everything that follows—especially why narcissistic conflict never feels like a disagreement, and why reasoning so often makes things worse.

Do narcissists hate sick people?

Short answer:Narcissists don’t hate sick people. They hate what sickness does to the relational economy.

That distinction matters—because it explains why illness so often marks the moment a narcissistic relationship turns cold, punitive, or quietly over.

This is not about cruelty in the cartoon sense. It is about structure.

Calm is often treated as evidence of health.

If a relationship isn’t volatile, dramatic, or chronically distressed, we assume it’s stable. Mature. Under control.

But calm can mean very different things.

There is calm that comes from mutual regulation—where conflict exists, but repair is active and responsiveness is reliable.

And there is calm that comes from emotional disengagement—where conflict has been quietly retired because it no longer seems worth the effort.

From the outside, both look the same.

From the inside, they are not.