Relationships From A Psychopathic Perspective
Our very different experience... Part Two
When you Google relationships in relation to psychopathy you are inundated by copious amounts of websites that are just hoping that you will click on them and buy their books. The sales pitch is always the same.
“I was in a relationship with a narcissistic sociopathic psychopath. They were the worst thing that happened to me, they scammed me out of all my money, broke my heart, murdered my dog, burned my house down, had fifteen affairs in one month, love bombed, devalued, and discarded me, and is now stalking me. They’re right there, out the window. See them?!!”
All right, maybe not quite that dramatic, but close. They are overbearing hyperbolic victims that are so devastated by their experience with their “narsociopath™” that they are here to tell you how to survive it. Of course, you are an innocent, pure as the driven snow victim, and they can help you get over this terrible event in your life. Just pay them for their time, their books, and only then will you be free.
It’s all nonsense of course, and this is all you are going to find when you look for psychopaths and relationships. However, if you truly have a relationship with a psychopath that has left you hurt and seeking understanding, this information will mean nothing to you.
I criticize these types of articles and websites quite frequently. They are very amusing to explore and debunk, but that doesn’t mean that someone that has had a relationship with a psychopath might have very valid questions about that relationship. Where are they going to get those answers? Certainly not at the site that is combining every negative trait in the world and claiming that equates to a psychopath.
As much as those sites are useless, and yes, I think that they are entirely useless to anyone that finds them, there are things that if a neurotypical understood about the relationship that they had, it would clear some things up for them. After all, psychopaths are different, and those differences run in direct contrast to how neurotypicals experience love. I am going to try and address some of this in a few posts, starting with psychopaths, dating, and sex.
Psychopaths are not wired like NTs, and this can cause a lot of questions to which you are unlikely to get any answers. I am going to address this in terms of actual relationships, and not dealing with relationship scammers. People tend to believe that relationship scammers are all psychopaths. This is incorrect. Some of them likely are, but psychopaths are not the ones filling up the ranks of the scammer pool.
Psychopaths do not experience chemical love. Psychopaths do not process oxytocin, and oxytocin is the basis for chemical love. We are never going to be head over heels in love, and chemical love is never why we will decide to be in a relationship with you. The fact that this experience is missing is almost definitely going to be hidden. if you discover it, you certainly will feel lied to, and that’s because you were.
We know that this is something that is important to you, and while I am not going to try and dismiss that feeling. We will do our best to replicate it for your benefit, but we don’t share it. I will say that masking like this is standard for us. It isn’t something that is reflective of you, it is something that we do for a couple of reasons. One would be that blending is something that we have always had to do, and at least in my case, masking that aspect is something that I do for the other person. I enjoy their presence, so I will make them feel welcome.
However, that doesn’t mean that I am experiencing the same thing that the other person is in the relationship. I am providing for them the emotional feedback that they require… withing reason. For me, the relationship is about my interest in the other person. I like being around them. I find their outlook on life, how they relate to the world, their sense of humor, their intellect, and their external appearance, attractive.
I think that the best way to explain the difference between our experience and that of a neurotypical would be to speak about it from my perception, and what it is like to be in a relationship, especially at the beginning.
This of course, depends on the person, the situation, and the motivation behind dating them. It is a very different answer between dating to have fun, and dating to have a real relationship with sustainability. That we will talk about in the next part. That post will speaak about success of relationships and how they depend on how compatible we are as people. Provided that we are, sustainability can be explored.
When it’s for fun, it’s fun. There’s no pressure. The emotions are manageable because I don’t have to deal with them too long. It’s a temporary relationship, and I have no need to worry about the long-term viability of it. In my case, I am very clear about relationships that are just for fun, that they do not have long-term prospects. I do not lead people on, as that tends to create problems for me that I am not interested in, and it is cruel to the other person. I do not have emotional empathy, but I can certainly see why that is unfair through cognitive empathy.
Long term, it can also be great, but often, it’s maddening. NTs need a lot. So so much work. Things that NTs require that I do not want to have to do.
Call you
Text you
Check on you
Have you check on me
Snuggle
Kind words
Support
Emotional interaction
See you every. single. day… do you people not have lives? Because I do, and I like it. Probably better than you. I assume that you do, and you logically like it more than you like me, but again and again, I am proven wrong.
Things I can’t do for some reason while in these relationships.
Comment that anyone else, male or female, is attractive. This is not commentary on the person I am with. I just think that beauty abounds. Appreciating it hardly seems an insult. Go figure. No no, you’re right, Angelina Joli is most certainly NOT hot as Laura Croft… yup, not at all... Mmmmm.
Have time where I don’t need to know what you are up to. Don’t care. Really I don’t. I was happy and curled up watching a documentary about death and mayhem... why are you calling me again? We talked thirty-six hours ago. Get a FREAKING HOBBY!!!!! This doesn’t mean that I don’t like you, it means that I value my time and what I want to do with it. Having another person in my life does not shift my priorities as it does for neurotypicals. Instead, it’s more like, when you’re around cool. When you’re not, all right, also cool.
Be me. Most relationships do not appreciate psychopathy. Not the actuality of it, as in, I tell you I’m psychopathic, or the presentation of it. The first one I surmise by the reality of the second one. I got my diagnosis after I was with my SO, so I have no experience telling another intimate partner that news. However, based on their interactions with me less masked when I was with them, it would not have gone well.
Apparently, as much as NTs say they want honesty, they do not. They LIE. They want you to tell them that they are the bestest brightest awesomest niftiest star EVER!!!!! Men and women by the way. There is no limit to insecurity based on the sexes.
If you want to have a successful relationship you have to meet me in the middle. You cannot treat me like I belong to you. You cannot think of me as someone that is controllable. You cannot expect me to understand your need for certain things. I will try to provide for you what you need, but I find that people tend to take that for granted.
Also, and I cannot be more clear about this. You are NEVER going to change me. I am not a project for you to attempt to *fix* or improve. If I decide to change myself I will arrive at that conclusion, perhaps with your input, but not because of your pressure. It will be a decision based on me being able to see an area I can improve and be a better version of myself.
You can tell me that you have a need, and I can attempt to accommodate that need, but that doesn’t mean that I suddenly share your need. You want me to pay more attention to you? Okay, I will try. Do not in return do the same thing. I am already at my limit of wanting to interact with you, and now you are doubling your demands on me.
I have long learned the lesson, that what people do for you in a relationship is often what they wish you would do for them. So I mirror them. This works rather well, but often doesn’t get them to knock off whatever it is that I have now begun to provide for them. It becomes a bit smothering really.
There are good aspects. If there weren’t I wouldn’t have bothered. The people that I undertook relationships with were either, as I stated previously, for fun or because I saw value in them as a person. It is always a learning experience. I found that it was interesting to learn about their thought process, and see how they viewed the world. It is still something that I am educating myself in. I think I always will.
I could write a great deal about the emotional interactions and the pitfalls that they can become, but really this is long enough and it would triple it. There are many though.
Relationships with NTs are work, and if the fun, or the compatibility with that person were lacking, I wouldn’t trouble myself. When the issues overrun those aspects, it is time to call it. Sometimes that takes a good while, other times it is very rapid. It just depends.
A real relationship with someone like me is work and most NTs will not get out of it what they tend to need. They may think that they can make the sacrifices, but usually, it just makes them resent us for being us. It is normally long before this that I feel the effort is over the value and it is time to go.
The problem is pretty apparent. My list of what works and doesn’t work for me is going to leave most NTs feeling unfulfilled. That isn’t fair to them, and they would likely get on much better if they found someone wired like them. I can only imagine what a relationship with a psychopath would be like if the psychopath didn’t have decent cognitive empathy.
Neurotypicals tend to look for fault in a situation that doesn’t play out the way that they were expecting. In this case, however, it is usually just very different people with very different ideas of what a good relationship is. A psychopath will never be exactly what a neurotypical wants, and a neurotypical is not going to be exactly what a psychopath wants.
We both have aspects that require us to make concessions if a partnership is going to work. That is, assuming that the psychopath knows that they are one. Without that information, there is going to be a long confusing road ahead of you both. We will get into that in much more detail in a future post.
Again, a very interesting post. Reading these make me aware of certain traits both my wife and I share. We’re both extremely independent and neither of us will tolerate being controlled by the other person. I think that was probably why marriage was ultimately something I accepted, because neither of us were interested in marriage for the sake of a ceremony; but it was a practical consideration so we could have the option to choose which country we lived in. Otherwise, we would have just continued to live together unmarried.
We also trust each other totally. If I’m meeting friends, even if they are female friends, my wife would never think there was anything untoward going on. Her main concern would be that I would spend too much money on cocaine, but as she enjoys taking it herself - it would be a roll of the eyes from her and then promptly forgotten about.
Being Thai, she lives in the moment. Plans happen as we go along. Everything is spontaneous. In the UK it’s harder to live like that as we are confined by certain rules eg getting fined if our son misses school. In Thailand I’d say, “shall we go and stay up in the mountain resort in Pai tomorrow?” and she’d either agree (usually) or disagree. Then we’d ask our son, “Do you want to go on holiday tomorrow, to the resort with the wooden elephants that spray water from their trunks into the swimming pool?”
Of course he wanted to go! 😅
Thank you for another very interesting post. I'm going to relate bits of this to my experience as one autistic female, like I've done before.
Some of the similarities and differences between my experience and what I understand you to be saying, Athena, make me think that I do have functioning oxytocin receptors. However either they function differently than NT ones, or my brain and sensory setup causes them to be activated by different experiences than most NTs.
The "head over heels in love" thing... omg, I think I had two "crushes" in my life, ever, that seemed chemical. I have found various people "hot", but that's a different thing I think, not sure what receptors are involved in that. A.J. as Lara Croft, yep!!! :-)
Rather than the list of "call, text, ..." that does seem to be critical for many NTs, I feel most connected to people when working toward a common, valued, goal -- alongside them. Snippets of interaction! Not having to have deep soulful eye contact, which I think took me decades to *not* have my brain interpret as a tiger staring at me while about to rip my throat out. Only kidding a little. There is a lot more to that, being watched was actually dangerous many times when I was a kid, so it's hard to separate neurotype from childhood experience. Too long a story!
But most autistics don't have the same positive from eye contact that NTs have, as I understand it.
I felt the most "at home" in a cooperative household for many years, with people I valued. Perhaps others were not NTs, I'm pretty sure of that actually. But I value certain kinds of low-key community greatly; is it oxytocin? I have no idea...
The one thing that I do have for sure... a love of snuggling. But not just any touch, it can be way too much.