My ex had to be right about anything/everything, even the kind of low-value trivial bullshit that no one would ever give a second thought.
We were having an offhand small-talk conversation about an old film and ex names an actor as the lead whose father was actually in the film. I say Oh you mean Kirk Douglas. No he insists, it was Michael Douglas. I'm still thinking this is one of those things where you've got the names the wrong way round - easily done - and anyway who gives af? But he insists, he is absolutely committed even in the face of it being implausible. I say was Michael Douglas alive when the film was made? I shit you not, we were walking in Charing Cross Road and stopped in a bookshop (pre-smartphone era) to look it up so he could prove to me that he was yup, wrong right.
If it had been the other way around and I (or anyone normal) had made the flub I would've said, Hmm, maybe I've got them muddled up and not given it a second thought. But it was his absolute commitment to his statement, his total insistence that he was right and I was wrong that gave me pause. I used to carry on having the conversation, thinking we were trying to find common ground, not realising that the die had been cast and we were not going to end up in friendly agreement, it was all about him being right and me accepting I was wrong. It was bonkers.
You couldn't ever have one of those meandering speculative discussions about whether or not vodka is made with potatoes or if a partly-cloudy forecast is different or the same as a partly-sunny forecast because he would come down on one side or the other and his reasoning would involve telling me where I had made the wrong assumption or how my logic was otherwise flawed.
Re-reading this I feel I haven't explained it well, but it was like both of us were looking at something black, with a label on it that says 'BLACK' and he was telling me not only that it was white but that the label says 'white' too, and I was reading it wrong.