10 appalling facts about your romance with a sociopath 

You’re shattered. You thought you finally met your soul mate, the person you were waiting for all your life. Then it all fell apart. What does this mean? I’m going to explain 10 appalling facts about your romance with a sociopath that you must believe, even though you don’t want to.

It started when your charming, charismatic and attentive romantic partner swept you off your feet in a whirlwind romance. It was good — no, it was fabulous — until it wasn’t. Now you know you had a romance with a sociopath. 

Perhaps you were subjected to the “devalue and discard” routine. Or you discovered that your partner wasn’t the person he or she claimed to be. However it happened, you are heartbroken.

I talk to a lot of people, both men and women, who are, or were, romantically involved with sociopaths. They’re devastated, of course. But what is truly mind blowing is the level of deception that they experienced. What they felt as a true, heartfelt connection was, for the sociopath, nothing but a charade.

10 appalling facts

Based on the email I receive and my conversations with so many people, here are 10 appalling facts about your sociopathic partner that you must believe, even though you don’t want to.

1. Everything the sociopath said to you was manipulation. If it wasn’t an outright lie, there was certainly an ulterior motive.
2. The sociopath’s objective from the beginning was exploitation. If the sociopath didn’t take anything, he or she was just looking for entertainment by playing with your emotions.
3. If he or she acted in a helpful or caring manner, it was only to butter you up for later exploitation.
4. The tears were fake.
5. The proclamations of love and happily-ever-after were fake.
6. All sociopaths really want is power, control and sex. Of the three, they want power and control the most.
7. The sociopath intentionally isolated you, to make you easier to control.
8. He or she knew you were hurting, but just didn’t care.
9. Once a sociopath is an adult, there is no treatment or cure for exploitative personality disorders.
10. He or she never loved you. Sociopaths are incapable of love as we know it.

These facts can be really difficult to accept, especially when relationships with a sociopath are okay for a while, and then suddenly change and become terrible. For example, Lovefraud received the following letter from a reader:

Letter from a reader

I was not in a disastrous relationship with my Sociopath. Our relationship was less than three years, our marriage less than two — when he openly cheated and decided to leave me, then played games of false reconciliation, which in hindsight were so he could have two sex partners.

The short end of my question is — How do you reconcile the basically happy marriage, the illusion of a man you married, with the horrible monster he has become in trying to create turmoil in your life and use your greatest love (your child) to hurt you?

The 10 facts I just listed probably all apply to this situation. But here’s some more food for thought.

Sociopathy varies

One reason why it’s so difficult to spot sociopaths is because they are not all the same. Sociopathy varies from person to person. You could compare it to a trait like intelligence—not all intelligent people are intelligent in the same way. Some people are smart in academics, some people have mechanical skills, some people are artistically brilliant. They are all intelligent, but intelligent in different areas of life.

Sociopathy manifests differently in different people — I like to say the disorder ranges from sleazy to serial killer. Some, therefore, are violent — but many, probably even most, are not. Some sociopaths are low-level criminals; others have successful careers in business, government, medicine, the military, education, the clergy — every possible field of endeavor.

The point is, sociopaths exhibit a range of behavior, so behavior by itself is not always a reliable way of spotting the disorder.

The mask

Another reason sociopaths are difficult to spot is that they wear a mask — until they decide that they can no longer be bothered keeping up appearances. I think that’s what happened in the case of this Lovefraud reader. The sociopath she was with played the part of the committed husband — until he had enough of that game and wanted a change. Oh, he kept it going for a while with the false reconciliation. But when he was well and truly tired of the marriage, he became the monster.

The reader didn’t say how he was using the child to hurt her, but based on what I’ve heard from other parents, I can take a few guesses. The sociopath considers the child to be his property, and he wants to own it. Or, the sociopath thinks the child will be useful to his image — he’ll be able to play the doting dad, so that he can snag another victim. Or, the sociopath simply wants to win whatever battle their custody situation has become, and win convincingly, so that our reader never has the temerity to challenge him again.

Given all of this, how does our reader reconcile the “happy marriage” with the “monster”? She has to understand that the happy marriage never existed. It was an illusion, carefully crafted by the sociopath to reel her in and get what he wanted. Once he changed his mind about what he wanted, the marriage was no longer useful to him, so he dumped it.

Social predators

This is what sociopaths have in common: They are social predators. They are users. They have no heart, no conscience and no remorse. You cannot interpret them through the way you live your life. We feel empathy for other people. They do not.

Regardless of how it manifests, the common denominator is that these people are empty shells pretending to be human. When you look carefully inside them, you’ll see nothing.

You simply have to accept the 10 facts about your romance, which boil down to this: Sociopaths are staggeringly different from the rest of us.

Learn more: Beyond betrayal — how to recover from the trauma