Editor’s note: The following story was submitted by a Lovefraud reader whom we’ll call “Marsha” about the coldest man she’s ever known.
I just wanted to write and share my story. I did some research on all the characteristics of what makes someone a sociopath. My father is a psychologist and knew my situation. He had mentioned the concept that my ex-fiance was a sociopath after everything that happened to me and I didn’t think to ask him more about what that meant. After exploring this site with the symptoms, I realized that my dad was 100 percent right. Here’s my story:
When I met my ex-fiance, it was through a mutual friend. He was charming, funny and seemed to be very witty and smart. He displayed himself as a go-getter, very ambitious, etc. We were friends for several months when our relationship seemed to get more serious. It was around that same time that I was living in an apartment that I loved within five minutes of my workplace. He lived in a fairly expensive high-rise condo on the beach, a condo that he owned, whereas I was renting.
He was a mortgage broker at the time and the housing market was steadily headed into the downfall. As we continued to date, his job stability as a broker seemed to be in question. Sure enough, about six to eight months into our relationship, he lost his job working for one of the major banks as they had some layoffs. He faced the challenge of paying his bills and mortgage in his condo as he waited for the opportunity of new employment.
Moving in with him
He created this idea that our relationship was headed in the right direction and that he “loved me.” He advised that really the only thing to do at this point would be to move in together. He urged me to quickly move into his condo so that we could play house in a sense and combine our incomes. Looking back I realize just how much I was duped.
I decided to give up my wonderful, beautiful, convenient apartment to move 30-45 minutes across the town to his location. I began paying him rent, month after month and not really seeing where the money was going. It turns out he was saving the money with plans to not pay the mortgage and lead his own self into foreclosure. He then anticipated that since we were not married he could just short sale the property in my name.
Now during all of this time, I let a lot of these financial plans slide through the cracks. I trusted him and figured that he had a plan. I didn’t know that this was a true con artist act in disguise.
During the span of time that I lived with him, he had kept in contact with an ex-girlfriend and stated that they had to keep in touch because he had known her for so long and that she was a friend. Again, I let this slide, even though I didn’t like the thought of it. Mainly because the communication was often and not of real purpose. Flirtatious, in many ways.
The marriage proposal
After one year of dating and living together I truly felt that I was in love with him. He proposed to me but even the proposal was cold and emotionless. We were arguing one afternoon and he laid the ring on the table showing that he had gotten the ring and that this should get me to stay.
This was never what I would have thought my proposal from the love of my life would have been like but again, love is blind and the sociopath can find a way to have you hanging onto a relationship that you know deep down doesn’t make sense.
He wanted silence
Needless to say, after several additional months his personality began to change and change and change. I never knew what personality I would get on any given day. He was oftentimes very irritable and mean. He was cold. I would come home from work and he would state that he couldn’t talk to me, he wanted silence. He would spend nights upon nights sleeping on the couch (by choice). What young engaged man chooses to sleep on the couch and not in the bed with his woman by choice?
Read more: Seduced by a sociopath — it’s not love, it’s love fraud
It was as though all he cared about was the money that I was paying and the plans for the short sale.
He would talk sometimes about how people always betrayed him growing up and that he blames his father for being abusive. But, he rarely ever showed affection — kisses, hugs, terms of endearment.
I made excuses
I always would make excuses for him and say to myself — He’s just going through a lot right now —or he really cares, he just doesn’t know how to show it. Yet, over time it just seemed to be that he was purposefully being emotionally abusive and standoffish. He told me that I was too close to my family and should cut the close ties. It was almost as if he was jealous of my close relationship with my family and didn’t want that closeness to continue on.
Looking back, I realize that he didn’t want anyone else to figure him out. He didn’t want anyone else to realize that he was a fake, a fraud and that his love wasn’t real. His love didn’t mean anything.
He would always find a way to charm me, or reel me back in like a fish out of water, when I started to question his intentions or when I would take a stand. Then, there were other days where he just really didn’t give a crap.
I can’t say enough how this was the coldest man I’ve ever known.
Charmed again
After additional communication between he and his ex surfaced, along with his decision to allow a buddy of his (male) to come stay in our house for well beyond a few weeks, without asking me of course. I decided it was time for some separation. Although separation was there I still missed him. After a few days, he charmed me again and offered the possibility of my coming back home and things changing.
I came back, of course, and things didn’t change and he was as aloof as he had always been. The problem was that I still loved him and wanted to marry him, wanted to change him. Within a few additional days something very devastating took place — He cut the ties of the relationship with as much care or emotion as a gravedigger. Again, it was cold and at this point he devastated my life — he told me that he just couldn’t deal with this anymore and couldn’t be in a relationship.
After all I had sacrificed emotionally and financially, he was just easily done with everything. I took steps to move out. After that point, he didn’t call; he didn’t attempt to communicate at all.
I would have never been happy
At first, I went through hell. Replaying the events and wondering what I could’ve done differently. But looking back, he just wanted to live by his own rules — he clearly was a sociopath.
What is he doing now? I hear he is still living in the same place, filed bankruptcy and works out all the time to make himself look more muscular. He dabbles into drugs and is even further down the wrong path.
I’m just happy that I got out because I would’ve never been happy. He had no care or concern for anyone but his own self. I tried not to blame myself or get depressed. I try to realize that people like this, I call them users, don’t have a heart. They don’t care! They are truly sociopaths and will do whatever they can to win and to live by their own set of rules.
Please learn from my lesson.
Learn more: Sociopathic seduction — How you got hooked and why you stayed
Lovefraud originally posted this story on April 30, 2009.
To escape a sociopath, trust your perceptions
Rosa-
They “want to do” whatever is opposite of the victims desires/wishes. It’sall about control and opposition and manipulation.
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Rosa:
Mine didn’t sleep in a separate bed — at least when he was with me. OF course, he withheld sex so much that I was climbing walls. I’ve discussed this ad nauseum with my shrink and he told me that when the sex goes out of a relationship, it is headed for the tank. At a minimum, when the sex. At a minimum, when the sex decreases, it is pretty much a sure sign that your partner is cheating on you.
Empty bed, no sex, it still gets you to the same place with an S — that they are cheating on you and using sex, or the lack thereof, as a means to control you. If your instincts are telling you that your S is cheating, your instincts are probably 100 percent right.
No matter if the S claims that you are making too many sexual demands on them and that’s why they are sleeping on the sofa or not putting out. No matter if the S claims he is ill — cancer, leukemia, or the possiblity of a stroke (mine used to claim he couldn’t have sex because of the anti-hypertension drugs. Right.), No matter what an S’s excuse, denying sex is all about their controlling us.
WOW!!
I am seeing this dynamic in someone else’s relationship.
Do I tell the person who is being controlled what is going on, or let them figure it out on their own?
I do not feel comfortable getting into other people’s sex lives.
I think I will just let that huge, Communist-size RED FLAG blow until someone figures it out.
Should not take too long, anyway.
Marsha, your story is like my “deja vu”
Your “S” filed for bankrupcy after you move out..mine went bankrupcy before he moved in with me. The same way I was supporting him financially while he was in my house.
Your’s had an ex-girlfriend as a back up plan…mine had two ex-girlfriends as his back up plan.
Mine didn’t sleep on the sofa but use to cover himself up with the blanked when in bed with me and torn to the other side to avoid me to touch him.
The silence….Oh I know this one too…No talking for like days.
Even the workout. At the end of the relationship he started to go to gym and do weights and improve his muscles to charm another victim.
But it is OK. At the end we’re the ones laughing.
They are failed lives.
changedforever:
The similarities in our stories always make me think of Yogi Berra’s old saying “It’s vuja de” (deja vu all over again).
“By the way, I thought you’d be interested. I just came back from lunch with the guy whom I met through S. I had a great time he paid. But, seriously, it was a really nice lunch. He’s a really interesting guy and great conversationalist. And know what? S wasn’t mentioned once. By either of us. Kind of amazing considering the amount of oxygen S consumed in both our lives.”
I’m happy for you both. You deserve a good time and this new relationship, whether serious or just friendly.
JaneSmith,
It sounds like you’re in a good place right now. I rather hope to have a bit more time to myself later in life. It’s very renewing. I read somewhere that if people wear you out, you’re and introvert. If they energize you, you’re an extrovert. Sounds like you and I are both introverts. Even before I heard that definition, I used to say “I love humanity, but people exhaust me!”
I’m an introvert stuck in an extravert’s roll, at least for a little while longer. While I’m homeschooling, it’s important I network with other homeschool families so my kids can have a good social life. It’s getting easier. I’ve lived in the same place for about 8 years, and I’m starting to have a comfortable number of mutually respectful relationships of all kinds. It feels good.
My encounter with the S drove home how dangerous my easy going temperament can be. I am trying to be assertive, but I want to be reasonably forgiving of unintended slights as well. I hope I can find a balance.
“Your “S” filed for bankrupcy after you move out..mine went bankrupcy before he moved in with me. The same way I was supporting him financially while he was in my house.”
Interesting that financial irresponsibility is also a “big red flag”. Even Dr. Hare talk about this issue and how most fit this MO. We worry and think about how we are doing to pay this bill or that one, but I guess they just think about how to get someone else to pay for it. And OMG, how we will pay for it. 🙁
James:
“We worry and think about how we are doing to pay this bill or that one, but I guess they just think about how to get someone else to pay for it. And OMG, how we will pay for it.”
That was me — the human ATM. And by the end of our “relationship” I hadn’t just taken a financial battering, but an emotinal one as well.
When I met S, he had something like 15 creditor judgments againt him — everyone from department stores, on to the IRS and –brace yourself for this — SALLIE MAE. Since Sallie Mae will do anything to keep a student loan borrower out of default, it gives you an idea of how far he pushed them. And the judgments went back almost 20 years — from the time he graduated from college.
When we were together, I paid for every damned thing — including paying his rent for 3 months. When I finally decided BASTA — he was trying to get 10 grand out of me? Why because his locks had been changed that day because — he hadn’ paid the damned rent from the time I brought him current, 7 months earlier.
Isn’t keeping a roof over your head life lesson #1? Apparently not for sociopaths.
Hi,
I am new to the blog. I am going through a divorce from a man, a sociopath, that I was only married to for six weeks before going to see an attorney. Before we married, he was the most affectionate man. Charming, loving, and wonderful to my family. Everyone said that they were so glad that I had finally found my “soulmate”. I am almost 53 and had been in an abusive marriage for 24 years. I had a relationship with a man after my divorce who was only after my money (another sociopath)
Then I met Ken. He was the perfect man for me, or so I thought. He had taken a job that is four hours away from my job and family, and I gave all of that up to be with him. He had the real estate agent show us million dollar homes but I insisted on our not being house poor and found a beautiful home on acreage for a whole lot less. After signing the contract, everything was fine until he told me in an email that he didn’t have the twenty percent downpayment needed for the loan. He asked my mother to let him “borrow” the money
assuring her that he and I would pay her back. He signed a Promissorry Note and a Prenupt. that would supposedly protect me and my mother should Ken and I separate.
He borrowed $63,000 from my mother and I put $5,000 down for earnest money. It never entered my naive mind that the love of my life was a con artist, a narcissistic sociopath who was about to destroy my life that was still fragile from the pain I had just gone through. We married at my parent’s home and went back to Ken’s that night. I slept alone for the first three nights while he fell asleep on the couch. It was as though a switch was flipped. He began telling me things to make me feel that wasn’t acceptable and was trying to destroy the self esteem that I had left. There was no love, no sex, just insults, and he did things that I knew he was doing to make me feel crazy. One day just six weeks into our marriage, my mother called and told me that Ken had been writing emails to a former girlfriend. She forwarded them to my mom and brother. They found out about her from Ken’s ex. It turns out that he emailed her on the day he proposed, professing his love for her and saying that he was done with me. He emailed her the whole time we dated and the worst one was on our wedding night when he was supposed to be with me!
Now, after almost a year of fighting to get the house in my name only and not succeeding, my house is in foreclosure.
The legal system is not working on my behalf. Ken has not made a payment since last July and had a restraining order on me where I couldn’t even make a payment.
I am going to lose $68,000 because I did pay my mother back when my other house sold. Between my ex and Ken I have nothing. What good are Settlement agreements and Prenuptial Agreements?
He is making six figures at a job that he got fraudulently. He said that he had two degrees in engineering and he has none.
The company didn’t bother to check, but I did. He never attended either school.
I have to say that had I stayed with him much longer, I doubt that I would be sitting here typing this very long letter because
I found out that he wanted to make me so depressed that I would kill myself, or that he would kill me and make it look like a suicide. I am glad to be away from him but the thoughts of him haunt me everyday and the fact that the money that I worked so hard for is gone because of a flawed judicial system, makes it hard for me to recover. I don’t know if I will ever be able to trust again.