Murderous partners

I’m going to address a disturbing subject: the motives, the thinking, of men who eliminate—yes, who murder—their partners.

But first a caveat: Females also sometimes eliminate their partners and share, I suspect, similar mindsets and motives with male murderous eliminators. 

And so what I write, here, applies, I suspect, across gender lines.

One other caveat—when I use the term “eliminate,” as you might suspect, I’m excluding killings in self-defense, of passion, and as responses to insufferable abuse.  This will be apparent as the discussion unfolds.

Last, by “eliminate,” I refer to two possible means of disposing of a partner—by one’s own hands, or by outsourcing the job.

So let’s hit the ground running: Why would a man murderously eliminate his partner?  Here’s the short, but surprisingly complete, answer: He’d eliminate her because he perceives that she’s in his way.

That is, he experiences her as an unacceptable obstruction; and he concludes, eventually, that the only solution is to remove, to eliminate, the obstruction (her).

In the mind of the murderous eliminator, the partner to be eliminated is impeding something very important to him; something that feels vital to his selfish interests; something that promises him gratification that he must have; and something to which he feels strongly, compellingly entitled.

These factors of his thinking, in combination, support and groom his eliminationist mindset.

The idea that he should be denied access to what he wants feels wrong, intolerable. Worse, it feels like an injustice. And so he grows to resent, increasingly, the obstructive entity (his partner); and increasingly, he rationalizes the validity of his growing resentment.

The murderous partner believes, in his entitlement, that he is meant to have this “something,” this “experience” that he covets, as if destiny has promised it.

Consequently, whatever or whoever stands in his way assumes antagonistic, hostile properties, further supporting his rationalization that the obstruction (or obstructor!) isn’t just an inconvenient nuisance, but worse, malignantly undermining.

And so he develops a warped, almost paranoid view that the thwarting factor is inimical to the fulfillment of his agenda. This is a view that supports his inwardly germinating position that he is justified, if necessary, to remove the source of the interference.

It follows, then, that for the murderous eliminator, his partner isn’t just an object to him, which, of course, she entirely is; more than that, she is an object that is in the way of his getting something he’s determined to have, and to which, by now, as I’ve suggested, he feels completely, even desperately, entitled.

I repeat: the combination of these attitudes conspires to ripen his receptivity to the budding idea, to the cold-logic necessity, of eliminating his partner, if this is what’s necessary to ensure his access to what he covets and believes deeply is his right to possess.

Consider the archetypal case of the man who eliminates his spouse to end up with his mistress. In this scenario, from the murderous eliminator’s perspective, the spouse impedes, obstructs his access to his mistress.

Because he is desperate to have his mistress, and because his desperation is inextricable from his sense of entitlement, he experiences his spouse’s existence as less than merely a frustrating inconvenience than as a threat to his determination, capacity and right to possess what he feels he must, and deserves to, have (his mistress). 

I’ve used the word threat carefully. Remember, threats must be trouble-shot. Whenever anything, in our minds, reaches a level of threat, we feel justified to act to remove it. This is a normal, and not necessarily sociopathic, reaction.

However the sociopath, in his abject narcissism, will experience limits to, constraints on, the gratification he is pursuing as threats! He will feel outraged, if not enraged, at circumstances that interfere with his pursuit of intensely coveted gratifications.

In his mind, these obstructions are perceived as threatening.

I stress: he will perceive these obstructions not just as the unwelcome, inconvenient life interferences with which most of us, grudgingly, come to terms; rather, from his more paranoid, grandiose perspective, he’ll perceive them as personal threats to his right to feel gratified in the way that he wants to feel gratified.

For the murderous eliminator, nothing must interfere with his plan—in this case, to clear a path to his mistress!

There may be children involved. He may spare the children if he thinks they won’t obstruct his plans. If this is the case, it may be enough to eliminate only their mother, who is in the way, while sparing the youngsters, who may not be.

To be clear, his decision to spare the children is made easier if he perceives that, in so doing, he isn’t jeopardizing his access to his mistress, the paramount consideration.

Conversely, it’s possible that he may deem the children, too, and not just their mother, as irremediable obstacles, in which case they, too, will be perceived as threats.

In this case he may feel the need and, on a twisted level, the right, to eliminate them as well.

This is all morbid stuff, of course, but we know that it happens. But who thinks like this? What kind of individual thinks like this? Most sociopaths don’t murder their spouses, or eliminate their families, to be with a mistress.

At the same time, only a sociopath is capable of conceiving, and executing, such a calculated, callous, coldblooded, selfish, murderous plan.