Welcome back to significant others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. In yesterday's

episode, we explored the relationship between Countess Sophia Tolstoy and her

husband Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. When I was working on this episode, I

thought, wouldn't it be great to talk this all down with someone who really

knows about relationships? My dream partner for this conversation, Esther

Perrell, is the host of the podcasts, where should we begin, and how's work,

an author of mating and captivity and the state of affairs? Luckily for all of

us, my dream came true, and Esther is here with us now. Esther, thank you so

much for joining us, and my first question for you is, how much of the trouble

here and there was a lot of trouble comes from Tolstoy's being a narcissist?

What's interesting is the easy conflation that we sometimes make between

genius and narcissists. The plenty of narcissists who are anything but genius, and

not every genius is a narcissist. It's the combination of both. Genius,

narcissists and wealthy. That's exactly what I was going to ask you. In fact,

was A, do you think that Tolstoy does qualify as a narcissist? I don't know.

I would never answer it like this. I've never diagnosed somebody without meeting

them. I think, and the world has changed meaning, you know, that I don't

even think the world existed at the time. And certainly was not part of the

vernacular. When you talked about narcissists, you went back to Greek

mythology. You didn't really, so I think that personality descriptions,

which then become personality disorders, which then become paradegematic

frameworks for describing relationship, change. The first thing when you

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