This is the story of the love of my life: a 6-foot-2 bald man with an enormous nose. We share a first, middle and last name. I am what’s known as a narcissist.

I didn’t know my mind was odd until my new girlfriend, Julia, started poking around in it. “Tell me some of your worst-of reel,” she asked as we lay in bed, covers pulled over our naked bodies.

“What’s a worst-of reel?”

“It’s like the five most embarrassing moments of your life.”

I tried to think of a single thing I had ever done wrong; nope, there was nothing. “How often does yours play?”

“All the time, pretty much, unless I distract myself. It’s particularly bad when I meditate.”

I scrambled to sit up, many of our early differences now making sense. Why she couldn’t sit with her thoughts without diving into her phone while I could stare at a wall for an hour. Why she would slam back two drinks as we arrived at an event to take the edge off her nerves while I barely ever drank.

Her mind was a hostile place while mine wasn’t. Which made it so surprising that she had become a workaholic political spokesperson, braving the world’s daily crises, while I was a stay-at-home memoirist, braving nothing at all.

Despite our differences, or perhaps because of them, we kept dating.

One day at the post office, she saw me hopping from foot to foot, tutting loudly, and said, “Why can’t you ever queue?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think, deep down, I don’t understand why someone isn’t blowing a trumpet and inviting me to the front.”

She laughed, my favorite sound in the universe. “Do you think you might be a bit of a narcissist? Let’s do a test.”

I took out my phone and took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test, picking the most appropriate from 40 pairs of statements, such as: “I prefer to blend in with the crowd” or “I like to be the center of attention.”

I scored 24/40, deep into narcissist territory. We repeated the test for her: 1/40. It would have been zero if I hadn’t talked her into picking “People like to hear me tell stories.” I liked to hear her tell stories. Not as much as I liked to tell her stories, but let’s not make this about me. (Ha. Yeah, right.)

“People with narcissistic personality disorder,” she read, “have exaggerated feelings of self-importance and a diminished ability to empathize. That’s not you.”

“Are you kidding? It’s so me.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “I’m fine with it,” I said, because I thought that’s what a narcissist would think. She seemed fine with it too because we soon decided to have a child, and together, even. We spent a year and a half trying to conceive, first for fun with the help of wine, then as work with the help of fertility apps, then as financial masochism with the help of clinics where Julia was probed, biopsied, drugged and harvested while I occasionally masturbated in a large cupboard.

The fertility industrial complex — cavernous, interminable, dehumanizing — made our different minds diverge further. Julia’s, as was its tendency, turned the screws on her. She became convinced it would never work, that her body was beyond redemption. She lost small things (sleep, hope, being able to experience joy) and then a big thing (the patience to listen to me talk about all the great metaphors I had nailed that day) and became obsessed with researching fertility science, chasing her own cure.

Narcissists need control, or at least its illusion, but infertility offered me none; it’s a torturous biological limbo where, if you have money, science will keep selling you hope. I have always assumed reality will be what I want it to be, and so I offered her little except platitudes it would all be fine. When it wasn’t fine, I hid in my work, if you can call what I do all day work.

“How about therapy?” she asked on the subway back from one of our countless fertility clinic appointments.

“I always thought I’d be good at it,” I said. “But I don’t have the patience.”

“I meant us going.”

“Oh. Why would we go? Our only problem is infertility.”

“I used to think that, too,” she said, but I heard only “I think so too.”

Then there was the Saturday I came home to find my bag out and partly packed in the hallway. The same bag I had packed in my last two breakups. It was happening again; it couldn’t happen again.

Fortunately, she wasn’t kicking me out. Instead, a last-minute place had opened at a 10-day, silent, Buddhist Vipassana retreat she had been bugging me to go on. I protested that I had already met all my demons. She joked that someone whose passion was themselves should really know that person better. I needed to go help myself so I could come back and help her; infertility was too heavy to carry alone.

The retreat center was a quiet, gender-separated place full of rules (no talking, eye contact, stimulants, exercise, reading or writing). The first 45-minute block of meditation felt like a decade dragged over spikes dipped in acid, and there were 11 more hours that day.

During these sessions, my mind searched for ways to distract me — an endless cascade of songs, memories, ideas, traumas, fears and unhappy childhood memories, my mind turning screws I didn’t even know it had, in what rapidly became the worst week of my life.

After a particularly torturous session, I ran crying into the woods, punched a tree, and talked to a worm which talked back, scaring me so much that I murdered some nearby ants, got a confusing erection, and had a realization: What I was experiencing, this madness and mania, was similar to what Julia was going through — intrusive thoughts becoming dominant, crowding out everything else.

I felt this not intellectually but emotionally, how terrified and lonely she must be and how spectacularly I was failing her. Which meant I was capable of much more empathy than I realized.

I went back to the meditation hall and began actually listening to the teachers, resolving to stop hiding from the unpleasant things looping in my mind.

The next six days were still awful but productive. The retreat was about changing some of the stories I had begun telling myself in childhood, and one in a post office queue. I am not a narcissist, although I know how to think like one, something that started when I was a shy and sensitive child in an environment that didn’t value those things. Feeling too much, I began telling myself I felt little.

Similarly, if people don’t like you, you can decide they’re either right or wrong. Repeat a lie often enough and you’ll start to believe in its truth. But these were choices, like the choice I’d made to become a memoirist — intentionally making my life small and self-centered. Choices that made me an emotionally unavailable partner and would make me the same kind of father, if I were lucky enough to have that chance.

Back in the real world, I did a lot of apologizing and took a break from work, not wanting to write about happier times until we had made this one, even childless, as good as it could be. Then, after we had given up hope, we found ourselves in yet another doctor’s office, after I.V.F. treatment, sobbing with joy, seeing the first snowy glimpses of our daughter on the tiny screen.

Worms don’t talk to me anymore. Because of the retreat and all that’s followed it, I know myself better but love myself less, which has created all this extra space for me to love others, and more intensely than I ever knew possible.

Julia and I often knock back a drink together when we arrive at a party now, to take the edge off our nerves. I care what people think of me. Which means I buy presents. Arrive on time. Listen before I talk.

I have a worst-of reel now too, looping the times I have let Julia down. But a mildly hostile mind has its use; it keeps you honest.

In that spirit, I must correct something that I hope is already blindingly obvious. This isn’t the story of the love of my life but the loves of my life — a workaholic political spokesperson with a mix of intellectual strength and social anxiety who still chooses to keep her world large, and our daughter, who, at 2, has her mother’s thick blonde hair, her own cheeky humor and — because the world can be cruel — my nose.

We don’t share a name, first, middle or last, but we share just about everything else.

Adam Fletcher, a writer in Berlin, is finishing a memoir about his Vipassana experience.

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