Gaslighting
Reality distortion: denying things that happened, rewriting what was said, and leaving you doubting your own memory.
What it looks like
- “I never said that,” about something you can quote.
- “You’re too sensitive” whenever you bring something up, so the subject becomes your reaction and his behavior drops out of it.
- A version of last weekend that keeps changing, and you are the one apologizing.
Why it is easy to miss
It works by making you the unreliable one. Once you are checking your own memory, you stop checking his. Doubt feels like fairness, like giving him the benefit of it, and it compounds quietly.
What it is not
Two people remembering a conversation differently. That is ordinary. The pattern has a direction: the record keeps bending his way, and you keep ending up wrong.
What to do
- Write things down close to when they happen, in plain words, before the retelling starts.
- Keep the question on what happened. Your reaction can be a separate conversation.
- Tell one person you trust the plain version, and notice whether it sounds different out loud.
How Bondary reads it
Her record is built for this. Each entry is dated and kept in your words, so when the story changes you can read what you wrote at the time instead of arguing from memory. When the denials repeat, she names the pattern and shows you the entries it came from.
She never tells you to leave. She shows you the pattern and the entries it came from, and the decision stays yours.
Tell her about someone.
Bondary is an AI dating coach who's on your side. She keeps the record and gives you an honest weekly read. For iPhone.
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