This week I received a letter from a woman asking, ”What is wrong with me, why would I feel bad and believe his twisted stories? I am really sick, aren’t I? I fell for him 2 times! After almost losing everything, including my life with the first one?”
I have answered this question before but the issues raised by these questions are so important that I’ll discuss them again.
The real question here is, what exactly is love? Love is the glue that binds us together as a social species. Without love, we would all live solitary lives, husbands and wives would not stay together, parents would not care for children and none of us would have any friends. Scientists have found that the social glue we call love has at lease four different ingredients.
Attachment is the first ingredient of love. Attachment is defined as a compulsion to seek proximity to a specific special other. Seeking proximity means trying to get near the other person, i.e., calling him/her on the phone, driving by his/her house, sending emails. A compulsion is something a person feels he has to do. It is an unconscious force that drives behavior. Typically, once a compulsion starts, it will produce a great deal of anxiety/fear until it is acted upon. For example, people with obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, have urges to do things and will feel overwhelmingly anxious until they do what those urges tell them to do.
Having sex with someone, sharing emotional intimacy and time, create attachment. This attachment means a compulsion to be with that person. Typically, people with an underlying tendency to have anxiety have stronger attachments because they experience a compulsion to be near the other that causes anxiety until it is acted upon. People who already have anxiety, have anxiety on top of anxiety, and feel more compelled to give in to the compulsion.
Generally speaking, it is good to be unconsciously compelled to be near loved ones. These compulsions remind me not to get too busy to call my dear parents. They also remind me to keep track of my teenaged daughter, even though she is more independent now. Problems only arise when one has the compulsion to be with a person with sociopathic personality traits. There is nothing worse than a compulsion to be near a psychopath!
Sociopaths and psychopaths are con artists. They entice others to form attachments to them through deception and trickery. The problem is that our unconscious minds do not distinguish between attachments made after deception and those made legitimately. Furthermore, the anxiety psychopaths create in their victims only serves to strengthen attachment!
The woman who wrote me asked, “What is wrong with me, why would I feel bad and believe his twisted stories?” When a person is under the influence of a compulsion, he has to adjust his view of reality to fit that compulsion. For example, people who feel a compulsion to repeatedly wash their hands see germs everywhere. If we feel the compulsion to seek proximity to someone, we automatically believe that person is good. In these instances our beliefs are caused by our actions, not the other way around. We may think we love someone because he/she is beautiful, when in reality he/she is beautiful because we love them. (There is a song from the musical Cinderella, Do I love you because you’re wonderful or are you wonderful because I love you?).
What I have written explains why attachment/love is like addiction. Really, it is addiction that highjacks the attachment pathways in the brain. All this explanation is of little value unless it can help us deal with ourselves better. So the real problem is, what does a person do when he/she discovers a compulsion to be with a sociopath/psychopath?
It is very important to recognize the role that anxiety plays in compulsions. Combat anxiety and you combat compulsions. Start by not drinking alcohol and avoiding excessive caffeine. Alcohol temporarily relieves anxiety, but the anxiety intensifies when the alcohol wears off. Next, get enough sleep. Will power is required to fight a compulsion; lack of sleep impairs will power. Fight anxiety by exercising and cultivating quality friendships. At least, have a dog to take walks with! (Louise Gallagher’s dog has helped her to recover; she wrote about this in Dandelion Spirit.)
Many people who are fighting compulsions to maintain proximity to a sociopath/psychopath become so self-absorbed that they fail to honor important obligations to self, work, friends and family. This reaction only magnifies the attachment compulsion, because guilt only increases anxiety. Furthermore, neglect of children makes genetically predisposed behavior worse, and children who behave badly are a source of stress/anxiety.
To all of you who are parents, your relationships with your children can either hurt you or help you when it comes to recovery. If you focus on loving your child and spending quality time with him/her, your anxiety will go down for three reasons. First, if you are emotionally distant from your child, your own unconscious mind knows this and makes you anxious. Second, quality time with your child will make your child easier to live with over time. Third, real intimacy with your child will relieve your anxiety. This is healthy, not unhealthy, you and your child need each other, especially during times of stress. Intimacy is what family is all about.
I bring up this issue of our children because what I find is that many parents, especially mothers, become preoccupied with their relationship anxiety and withdraw from their kids. This response only makes them more anxious. It only serves to create a more dysfunctional family for the children.
We are challenged in life to do the right thing for ourselves and our families in spite of anxiety and compulsions. Start today to get well by seeking your own true well-being.
For more information, see:
Hi,
This is what I have been asking myself lately. I am really really sick. I am tearing off my nails down to the cuticle and shaking with nerves, I have no strength and lost 20 lbs in 2 months. I can’t eat, my sleep is fitful with crazy dreams, and my whole life is suffering.
The desire to see him and be near him is torture and I always give in even though I know he is with someone else that “he loves.” But denies he loves her even though he wrote it all over the internet. He says she wrote it and is crazy.
Still when he says “I miss you Kitty” it’s so sincere so like when he used to say it when we were together. I just fall back into him and believe him.
We are talking about a man who was accused of stealing from every employer (he denies it), was in prison for 4 years (says he changed that lifestyle), has been sleeping with someone else and posting it all over the internet (says we were broken up so it doesn’t count as cheating – which is true), took my roommate’s credit card number and ordered jewelry and a fake pistol (says he wanted to commit suicide by cop), has been in the psych ward of 3 different hospital 5 times in the past 3 months, oh the list goes on….
Still when he calls I feel “better” and when I see him I feel “normal” instead of anxious.
He says he doesn’t love this other girl and loves me and wants to be with me. Says he messed up so bad and made mistakes – cries and cries uncontrollably, lies about everything and when I catch him twists it around to make me look like the bad guy.
He says he cares about me and was with her because he didn’t want to be alone. That I left him alone (I did most of the time), that I wasn’t there for him when he was cutting himself and I left him on the side of the road.
I am twisting everything around to fit into my head but my mind can’t even wrap istself around the idea that the person I spent well over three years with – took baths with – held at night – who caressed my cheek and played with my hair – is a sociopath.
He is in the hospital AGAIN and begs me to come see him and gets angry and hangs up if I say I won’t or can’t.
He cries and says to me “you are doing this to yourself, you are emaciated, you are tearing your own nails off, you need help too.” He says, “I want to help you but I am helpless myself, you need to get your studio and work together, people love you and need you and you do a great service for people, please don’t destroy yourself.”
I believe him. I momentarily forget the insanity that has gone on for the past three months, let alone all the things that happened in three years.
He made me so angry all the time. I was yelling and screaming and calling him names. It was like he would do things to enrage me.
He had his license suspended and never told me then got arrested, I never knew until later.
I don’t know what to do anymore.
He says he is going into a 90 day rehab but he needs me to help him through it to know that I will be here when he gets out and to visit him when he is there. He says when he gets out we will get a place together. Oh how I want to believe him.
I have sick ideas that he is going to get back with this other girl and turn his life around for her and have everything he wanted with her and buy a house together and marry her like we were supposed to.
This grils writes all over the internet how he is her “boyfriend.” Balh Blah Blah.
I feel they are both out to get me and are scheming and planning my demise all the while he is telling me he wants to be with me and help me.
NO CONTACT IS SO HARD. I just can’t do it. My thoughts of the good times with him are so strong. My thoughts of how I treated him badly make me feel so guilty. The thought of him with another person kills me.
I am that far gone and can’t even bring myself to shower each day for fear of being naked and having to see myself naked.
Ugh
Holehearted,
As Dr. Leedom said in this post, staying away from the psychopath is like breaking an addiction. That’s what you need to do. Stay strong – minute by minute.
No contact is hard, but it is essential. Especially for you. Each time you allow him to talk to you, he is manipulating you. Change your phone numbers. Change your e-mail. Do not allow him to contact you. Minute by minute.
He’s like an alien that has gotten inside your mind. He’s sucking the life out of you. Don’t let him do it.
I have been struggling the same as Holehearted for over a year now. It is absolutely insane and even dangerous to be around him but I just can’t get strong enough to fight his lures. Even though I know they are lures! Donna you are so right about the alien analagy. It’s funny you use that term as that is how I try to explain to people who have never encountered a sociopathic relationship before..”like being abducted by aliens…undescribable…nothing of this world”. (I only wish)
I did well for a while, even got to the point of starting the no-contact order. Police sent a warning letter about criminal harrassment. A month later, I couldn’t stop myself and started talking to him again and now the same old games continue and I feel the same old emotions… weak, angry and emotionally ruined. Why does it make me so so sick to know that he is with other women? I should be happy to have his attention away from me so I can start to get on with my life. I’ve never been so in love, so attracted, so connected to someone and yet never been so destroted by that same person. I tried dating someone for a while but just couldn’t feel attracted…nothing felt like I wanted it to, the ex was all I wanted touching me’. I’m financially independent, going out with freinds, excerising doing all I think I can to be ‘healthy’ but life feels so so neutral without that ‘connection’. Sometimes I feel I will be like this forever, that nothing will ever compare to those feelings I experienced and that is what depresses me deeply because that is what I have wanted forever. I know everyone says time will fade this but it feels it will take the rest of my life and I therefore end up thinking I should just take the lures. Damed if I do, damned if I don’t. I know how sick this thinking is and am embarrassed to even admit I want to be with him after everything he has done to me. Life just seems to suck worse somehow without contact if that’s even imaginable.
Dear Wiserbutruined.
Honey, I feel the SAME way. I just spoke to him and asked him how he expects me to take him back and plan a future and think about getting a place with him after all he has put me through in the last 3 months. Not to mention the years of lost jobs, accusations of theft, etc.
You know what his response is? “You have to get over it and get well.” Take it one day at a time with me.
He actiually said, “Maybe if you had treated me right the past 2 years and didn’t degrade me and make me feel like crap all the time and maybe if you didn’t push me away, I wouldn’t be in the hospital and wouldn’t have been with someone else.
I have to admit I have serious anger issues not just with him but with my family, my workplace, my friends, practically everyone.
I can be downright evil with my comments sometimes for no reason but just to get a reaction from someone.
I definately have borderline personality traits coupled with histrionic tendencies and narccisitic grandious feelings that everyone is beneath me or not competent and I have a sense of entitlement.
I do have to say that this whole encounter as strange as it may seem, has led me to take to good long hard look at myself and I don’t like what I see at all. I don’t like how I have treated people and I certainly don’t like the way I am now.
I seem to go between feeling superior to feeling totally worthless sometimes in a matter of minutes and other times days.
I have to say he never “abused” me, never called me names, never yelled at me for more than a split second if we were fighting, he never hit me, and never cheated on me as far as I know.
He did treat me with respect and cared for me and tried to do everything I asked of him. My narcissim however made me demand things of him all the time or at the very least expect things he was not yet capable of giving.
I pretty much denied him sex and if he bought me something I didn’t like it was a battle making him feel like crap.
Yes i made little or no effort to every give him what he needed. If he asked me for a hug I was too busy, if he asked me to make love, I couldn’t be bothered. If he asked me for something for his birthday I just got him whatever I wanted and he accepted it gratefully and didn’t complain.
I am so twisted up inside I am not sure who is the sociopath anymore.
I like to think I am better than that.. I teach Yoga, yet I smoke, I teach about healthy eating, yet I haven’t been eating.
I have college and graduate education and he has a GED and boy did I throw that up in his face all the time.
Sometimes I think I am just as much the monster – maybe more so I don’t even know.
I could never prove he stole from his employers – he said when the found out about his record, they automatically accused him unfairly. This could or could not be true, but three times in three years? He did crash his cars a lot. Not sure what that was about… reckless thrill seeking of the sociopath?
Sometimes I think I am dealing with a child of anywhere between 5 and 13 years old and I act like the abusive or neglectful parent. It’s so sick I want to throw up and die.
Yet, I say I love him unconditionally and forgive him for anything.
The other day I actually said to him “please don’t leave me I promise I’ll be good.” Which made him cry and he said he used to say that to his mother.
I should say my parents were both heroin addicts, I grew up in a house where my grandmother was co-dependent and enabled my father. I watched my grandfather get stabbed and mugged when I was about 5 and then he died a year later after my grandmother.
I did live feral for a whiile in a filthy apartment when my dad was doing drugs or in the hospital. I was abused by the neighborhood kids (being I was the only white girl). I bounced around from foster home to foster home, and then ended up with a family who became “my family.” I got the double whammy with the alocholic foster fother and crazy co-dependent foster mother though.
I thought I turned our “normal” considering my circumstances. I got an education, I worked hard (bounced from career to career though), I got my Yoga and other certifications, have my own studio, and my borker’s license, and teach at local gyms. I thought I was okay, but I realize that I am just as parasitic as he is since my car and my phone are not under my name because of my bad credit. My roommate is my ex-boyfriend who I helped buy the house with. (Yes the three of us lived together, but it seemed to work).
I don’t have the means or the motivation to get my own place I know I would feel so alone.
I am so much sicker than I thought I was and I have tried to get help, they just give me meds, or tell me I need lithium in an in or out patient setting.
The only thing I look forward to now are his phone calls and teaching. My life is horrendous and all I can do is complain.
The sick part is.. he is in the hospital saying to me but you aren’t doing anything to help yourself you are just sitting in your shit because you like being miserable. Go out do something – drive yourself to the therapists office and demand an appointment.”
He is giving me sound advice and this is from the person who I see as doing the most damage.
I am so sick, I just want it to end. My health is starting to fail I can feel it too. Just being so weak and drained and my chest hurts all the time. I liked it better when I was angry all the time I think…maybe that’s why I want him back.
Either that or I just can’t stand the idea of him being happy with someone else.
I feel no one will ever love me, that any love I ever had was a lie..that even though I had someone who loved me I pushed him away because I felt he wasn’t good enough for me.
I truly think I need to be hospitalized at this point bur I have to keep my teaching appointments and keep my studio running though it is barely surviving. I am barely surviving.
The only good thing I did today was get a teaching spot at NYSC Gym which is exactly where his other girl goes to the gym. Not so sure how good that is.
I have a job interview on Monday for a PR firm as admin. I need to work and I am broke, I am depressed and I see no hope for any kind of future. I look and feel terrible.
I am hooked on sleeping pills and I am can’t continue with these mood swings. I am scared to be in public places except to teach and run quick errands.
I have no joy in my life and I am neglecting my cats.
This board gives me some hope but I see some many of us struggling even after years of leaving the sick relationship behind.
Sorry to ramble. Thanks for listening and being here.
Oh yeah I failed to mention my grandfather had a heart attack and died right in front of me about a year after he was mugged and stabbed. I was so young it killed me because all I could think was who will take care of me now?
You aren’t sick – you’re brainwashed!
holehearted – if his lips or keyboard are moving he’s lying!!
This is how he got you CLICK HERE And by treating this as the trauma it is, as Donna said, and taking it one day at a time – you need to REPROGRAM yourself. Our site’s victims say it takes 2-3 years for them just to feel “normal” and like themselves again.
You aren’t sick on your own. You were INFECTED on purpose for someone else’s gratification. PREDATORS HUNT THE WOUNDED and they smell lonely, depressed, divorced, sad, disabled, abused women a mile away. It’s not your fault.
Hi,
I am new with an new but probably a very familiar story….Until I found this sit I had no idea there were others like me..My Dr told me her was sure my ex was a sociopath although I saw red flags I never knew what it was called….Sad but true I sonsered a man from Italy he married me for ten years we adopted two kids..I remember I found him a job he hated it but told me he would leave then the pear was ripe he called this an italian phrase yet it scared me. I always had a feeling he could do it to me and he did after sexual abuse, he learned the laws and divorced me claiming i abused him!!!!!He put on the best show it took only a few to see what he had done..Now my daughters told me last night that they are scared daddy will kill momma with a sword..They cried and made me lock all of my windows..
What to do he is the most charming con I have ever met or even seen in a movie, I just want him to back to Italy..
I am so thankful for this blog. I’ve been involved with a
man for the last two years who fits this same scenario.
I married him, paid off his debts, lost almost everything I
valued and collected over the past 30 years.
I think my story is unique because I contracted the HPV-
16 virus from him, which he knew he had (his previous
wife got cervical and oral cancer from him) and didn’t
disclose it to me. Therefore, I pressured him into providing me with 3 years of his health insurance and he is paying back to me a portion of his debt that I paid off for him. I have to have a colposcopy every three months
til who knows when. Cancer is very likely for me.
I’m 51 years old, have a stable background, and suddendly find myself in the most intense turmoil I’ve
ever known. I’m so sick of his hot and cold attention
towards me. He justifies his behavior to himself only.
He has no one else in his life except his son who visits
him periodically to appease him.
He was honest with me throughout our courting and I
was mesmerized by his honesty. He revealed to me the secrets of his past and even blatantly told me the truth but that only served to snag me even deeper into his drama.
Now I truly know humiliation and regret. I’ve died a hundred deaths since knowing him. I’ve been in
therapy since I met him and I don’t see an end to it any
time soon. He’s left nothing but destruction in his wake.
He’s taken all the steam out of me, and I let him do it.
I want to be rid of him and feel even worse when I fall
for his attempts to reconcile with me.
I can so relate to all of your stories. My life is in ruins
and I have very little hope for my future. I’m so tired.
Smellcat
I am always amazed how similar all of our lives are during and after the “psycho experience”. It’s like we were all married or otherwise found ourselves in a relationship with the same person!
I have been seperated and going through an ugly divorce for 4 months now. I spoke to him on the phone 3 times the first 2 weeks we were seperated. I’ve seen him twice, once when I went to the house to get some of my belongings (he was court ordered to do it) and again when I was moving some larger items from a warehouse I PAID TO BUILD, BUT NOW HE SAYS IT IS HIS ! When I just even think of seeing him, or much worse having to speak to him I get nausiated and my shoulders tince to the point of aching and burning.
The last time I saw him was 4 weeks ago in the court house hallway. He doesn’t have the balls to go in the courtroom! I still have to see him and actually sit in the same room during a deposition in 3 weeks.
I still cry every day, I mourn the loss of someone I was so much in love with and thought would be there the rest of my life just to realize that person never existed. I fell in love with, and had my soul ripped out by a figment of a psychopaths imagination; a figment that was molded out of my dreams of the perfect man and the perfect lover, to steal my life and my dreams and make them his own. I hope I am not out of line to say that, I sometimes think it would have been easier to take if he had died.
4 months and I can’t stand to look at any male figure without getting a feeling of total disgust. If I see a man looking at me or, God help them, they speak to me and want to lash out at them. I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t help it right now.
Thanks for listening, This blog is a real mind saver.
loserchooser and smellycat,
I can’t believe how many people are/were involved with a sociopath and are in such bad places in their lives right now.
My “other” is still thinking I believe that he wants to reconcile with me. He talks to me the same way now as he did when we were together as if nothing has happened.
This is after his friend told me he was stealing from everyone, after he has been with another woman on and off for 3 months bouncing back and forth between us, after he took my roommate’s credit card and banged it out, after he has been in the hospital five time in the last 3 months, and after I have seen photos and read stories of him having sex with this other woman that she wrote. Again, after having texting me he was going to kill himself and after having me look for him and then telling the police I was stalking him, and having his friend call the police to say I was harrassing them.
This is the problem, I see him getting his life together, getting a job, and having a happy life with her, the life we were supposed to have together. That would be fine if he said that to me “look I love someone else and I am moving on.” But he doesn’t, he keeps saying he loves me and wants to be with me and was only with her because he didn’t want to be alone.
We have no children together and are not married so it’s supposed to be easier I think, but the feelings are still the same.
It’s like he knew how to make me angry when we were together. He knew if he took $20 out of my bag without letting me know, I would say okay the first time, get a little upset the second time, get angry the third and then just freak out every time after that. It wasn’t so much that he took the money, it was that I had nothing for that day or had to go to the bank. There were times he took my bank card without telling me and I couldn’t deposit or get cash out the whole day.
He knew my weak spot was getting panicky about not having enough money or a decent place to live, since my childhood was so bad.
On the one side he wanted to “make me happy” and on the other side he was “making me afraid” every time he crashed a car or lost a job and was accused of stealing.
This is just an example of the little things he did. He would do things and then lie about them or not tell me and then when I found out and got angry, he would say “I didn’t want to upset your day, I wanted to make your day easier without any worries.”
At the time it made sense and made him look like a good guy. My mind is so twisted at this point I look back and think, I was so aweful to him and mean and nasty and all he ever wanted was to love me… I am the crazy one.
Then I will look back at the employers who said he was stealing from them, the crashed cars, the repossesed car, the melingering and constant visits to the hospital for sinus infections or whatever, and think, this was not normal. I was angry because I was afraid and kept in the dark about what he was doing.
Like loserchooser, I mourn the loss of something that maybe never existed, but he’s still around and saying it’s all my fault. Al he ever wanted to do was love me and I pushed him away. He says all I ever had to do was be nice to him and everything would have been okay.
I believe him too. I say well if only I hadn’t done this or said that, things would have been okay.
I never lied to him, my anger was honest, I only lied a few times when I took off the engagement ring because I was angry and told him it was getting dipped, I think I did that twice or three times. Still not right to do, but my anger was so intense it was blinding.
I was angry not just at him but at everyone including myself.
I am not an angel or a perfect person, but I thought I was. I held myself above everyone when in reality I was really insecure and depressed. Not his fault but the relationship did take a toll on me.
I don’t know why I let myself get so angry. But it was like he was controlling my anger, not me. He knew how to play the good guy while doing things he knew would make me angry. passive/aggresive.
I am pretty much convinced that he was done with me a long time ago when he moved out. Though he said it was because he wanted to show me he could do it on his own.
When he got his landscaping business I should have been more supportive and excited for him and went and saw his equipment and the properties he was working on. I could have given him more encouragement. I don’t know anymore.
I wish I could go back in time and change everything.
My dreams are haunted by him too. I dream of him sleeping with this woman and laughing at me behind my back, I dream of him really having a normal life and having lied to me about being broke all the time and he goes and buys a house and marries this girl and they have the life I should have had with him. I wake up crying and shaking.
I even had a dream that he threw me on the floor and drive a knife through my chest, and I look down and he pulls the knife out and there is blood spilling out and I try to cover it with my hand, and “I say you killed me.” Then I wake up.
Everone says NO CONTACT, this site, my friends, my family, everyone and I don’t listen because of my own guilt and stupidity.
The funny thing is toward the end, I was actually proud of him, he had his own place, his own business, and had gotten another vehicle. I was ready to move in with him.
Then it’s a whirlwind of… another accident, his friend saying he wasn’t working the business when he told me his was, his cat that didn’t die that he said did, his friend telling me stories of him stealing and cheating on me, him cutting himself and going in the hospital… on and on….
I wonder if it was all a plot that he really was working his business and didn’t crash his last car…that he was pissed about the money I said I was going to keep so he planned this elaborate hoax with his friend to drive me nuts.
I can’t even tell you the lies his friend told me because I don’t know the truth from the lies anymore.
They had me running here there and everywhere. I feel like a fool and I know he is laughing at me…
He gets me everytime though…get me with his sweet voice and I love you and I only wanted to make you happy…
If I question him or ask about the lies… he calls me a piece of shit…
Devalue and discard I guess is the way he is playing it.
I asked him to go to the police and tell him that he really took the credit card and I had nothing to do with it… he got enraged and called me names and hung up the phone.
Then he called me back and asked in a sweet voice if I was still going to pick him up.
I am afraid he is setting me up for something really bad…but I want to trust him.
I should just move out of the state.
Why couldn’t we just have had a normal life, gotten married, gotten an apartment together? Why did it have to be so bad???!!!
He says he just wanted to feel loved and wanted and I didn’t make him feel that way. I guess I didn’t for whatever reason out of fear, resentment, my own insecurities.
Now this other woman he is with is 9 years younger than he is, she’s got a lot of insecurities too. She’s got a lot of problems, and I see her trying to fix them “for him.” She wantes to stop drinking for him, etc. I kind of feel bad for her and don’t like her at the same time. What scares me is that she would do “anything” for him. I think she would kill me if he told her to.
Here’s the kicker, I have so much going for me.. I have an education, a small business, a place to live etc… and I know he could do things to make me lose these things. He said it many times… “I could ruin your life if I wanted to… you would lose your home, your business, everything… but I don’t want to see that happen to you because I love you and it would ruin you and devastate you.”
I should be running for my life right? I should just tell him to be happy and go be with this girl. I have tried that too.
I should just ignore him. He wants me to pick him up and he says, “I know I can’t rely on you..and there was ever a time when I wasn’t there for you when you needed me?”
He’s so good at twisting everything around to make me look like the bad guy…and in ways I was not the best person.
I don’t want to go into the hospital.
He says to me… “I will leave you alone and never contact you again, but you have to promise me that you will take care of yourself and get help.”
He’s so convincing…and part of me believes him. The other part feels he is setting me up for something… that he is going to ruin me and hurt me in some way. He already has hurt me and then turned on me saying, “You created all this, you set the wheels in motion when all you had to do was be nice to me and love me.”
Maybe he’s right….or maybe it would not have mattered if I had been nice to him…maybe it would have been worse.
Thing is if he applied his energy, intelligence and charm in the right direction, he would do very well. I could say the same about myself I suppose.