Many women have written to Lovefraud about husbands who they’ve come to believe are sociopaths. They were astounded to discover that, not only was the husband cheating, but he was having sex with men.
Lovefraud reader eyeswideshut writes about this in a recent comment to the post, After he’s gone: looking at the sociopath through open eyes. She asks:
Now that I know he is also gay, is sociopathic tendency in married gay men not common as well? When I read the stories of the women in the book (“Straight Wives”), many of the men sound like sociopaths as well. Have you studied this phenomenon? Is it possible that gay men who choose to live the lie of married life are likely also socios?
To this, another Lovefraud reader, Leslie, commented:
On the third extended date I had with the SP, I turned to him one night, after we’d been together, and said, “Have you been with men?” Something in the way he’d made love made me think he had. He stared at the window and said in a monotone, “I have never made love to a man.” It was the same monotone he used to deny that he was living with a woman when I asked him that a year later. He was. I don’t have hard proof, but I know the guy had had sex with men.
Then alohatraveler commented:
I have heard from another victim of my sociopath that he was starting to get more “experimental” when she knew him. She knew him after me. He was expressing an interest in having sex with a man, but of course, with a woman present, because he was “not gay.” We both also saw an ad that he posted looking for sex with a transsexual. Then he placed an ad where he wanted a traditional type of woman.
“Not a gay bone in my body”
Shortly after I met my sociopathic ex-husband, James Montgomery, he proclaimed to me, “There’s not a gay bone in my body.” I had no reason to doubt him. But when I left him after two-and-a-half years, I learned a lot about his sexual activities:
- He had sex with at least six other women during our relationship.
- He was heavily into Internet porn.
- He solicited gay male prostitutes.
- He tried to arrange threesomes and looked for swinging couples.
In short, he wanted sexual thrills. The more different kinds of thrills, the better. I’m lucky I didn’t get a serious disease.
Screw anyone
Sociopaths are hard-wired for sex. They have an excessive need for stimulation, excitement and sensation. They also have no fear and no inhibitions. From a sexual perspective, that means a voracious appetite and anything goes.
Dr. Liane Leedom writes that sociopaths only want two things. One of them is power. The other is sex.
So when it comes to sexual orientation, I believe sociopaths are neither straight nor gay. In short, they’ll screw anyone.
Lovefraud has heard from gay individuals—men and women—who were involved in gay relationships with sociopaths. I asked several of them if they thought the sociopath was actually gay. They all agreed with my theory and said the sociopath was not gay.
Sex with an agenda
This does not mean, however, that sociopaths are out of control. On the contrary, to them, sex, and sexual orientation, is just something to be used in order to achieve their objective, whatever that is.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the case of James McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey. McGreevey, you may recall, resigned from office after proclaiming in a news conference that he was a “gay American.”
The truth was that his political career was imploding under a series of scandals. As I wrote in a review of the book written by McGreevey’s wife, I believe the former governor played the gay card because it was the best way to spin his political collapse.
Sociopaths use people for sex, and use sex to get what they want. Anybody who suits their agenda will do.
If it suits their agenda to be married with children, then that’s what they’ll do. But if sociopaths indulge in same-sex relationships, in my opinion, it’s because they’re sociopaths, not gay.
Dear Nothatgirl,
You say in the beginning he was “seemingly empathetic and caring to my feelings ”
But when the real test came he couldnt have been further from being seemingly empathetic and caring…
I misunderstood your comments about him thinking he could “cure” you of your interest in healthy fun loving normalcy of monogamy.
And I know what you mean when you recollect the way your relationship unfolded and the false impression he made upon you – versus all that he showed you through various thorns along the way. But yes, I remember all of my toxic ex’s attentions and calling me to tell me I couldnt get there fast enough etc… again they are charmers and physically moving and strong and get us to fall flat on our brains because of all the things they will do in the beginning (unfortunately unlike decent folk – they have a reason — to get us to change our ways and do things they want.
Ive learned that too much constant attention is a red flag and that when it gets down to having to “fight” for us… then we are past the red flag stage.
Sometimes we just have to go through many different scenarios with them. And realize we will be angry alot and wanting to say over and over again “what was THAT little stunt”… until we finally get that what it was …is what it was from the beginning… a selfish toxic person in our life.
Stay strong. You sound very informed but not really certain of what /who youre dealing with. All of the warning signs and red flags are there, once you get past the “imagining he has forgotten about the lifestyle he really wants and and wants to try out a normal lifestyle with you” — and once youve been around him long enough again to see his actions vs his words — I hope your strength will rise to the occasion and you will cut him off before giving him the chance to destabilize you or your life in any way shape or form.
Thanks for posting and sharing. Its such a process of being able to see how they operate and what they do…because after the first time around, we end up letting them do it again. 🙁
ps. I would def request another round of STD testing. So glad to hear that you did that the first time! GOOD FOR YOU!
Keep in mind that many STDs don’t show up right away after infection, and may have a “negative” result for months after infection, these include HIV and Hepatitis.
ps. many people who have sex with multiple partners at a time do not engage in “safer” sex with them. NO sex is totally safe BTW.
We met today and as I thought, he wants to be with me again. I am moving soon…not taking him with me and I will get a little fun out of this before I move on. That’s all he is able to offer even though it will be in the guise of a relationship. We know how our futures have differnent plans and that we will part at some point.
Hi everyone.
Looks like discussion of this topic has been quiet over the past few months but I thought I’d share my story.
To start…I’m an openly gay male in my late twenties living on the East Coast.
For 4 months at the beginning of this past year I was involved in a “friendship” with a European-born narcissistic sociopath working in a surgery research lab at a city hospital. I’ve researched both N and S thoroughly to gain some semblance of perspective, control and sanity to this crazy-making experience during my aftermath and recovery. I’ve looked back at the experience through the lenses of NPD and APD; and wrestled with the usual problem of identifying the difference between these character disorders and diagnosing my abuser. I could not fathom that I would allow someone to enter my life with the motive of faking friendship/intimacy to manipulate me to fall in love with him, control me when I was emotionally attached, and then abuse, devalue, and psychologically torture me to make me go crazy and question my sanity.
But today I have no doubt he is a psychopath. He is devoid of conscience, aware of his sinister acts (which is most evil), a predator, a modern day Iago. He is a schemer and manipulator. To the best of my knowledge, he enjoys wreaking havoc on relationship-seeking gay men for no ulterior purpose. But to start, let me quote him” Whenever I slip into nostalgia and desire the love bomb phase of our romance I recall him texting me: “I’ll f*ck with you, no worries”. “You’re so easy to fool”. And most disturbing, after our first disagreement sending me a picture of a mouse in a cage at his lab that he would be perform a past surgery I received and giving it my name.
Life is always 20/20 in retrospect. I met the P at a gay bar through a mutual friend of mine. He was very attractive, smart, funny, and witty yet aloof during the early stages of our “bonding”. His sexuality was completely confusing. He identified as heterosexual, yet most of his friends were gay men, he was completely knowledgeable about the city’s gay culture, and spent most of his time in gay bars and clubs. He’d often suggest to hangout at a bar where gay porn was blatantly displayed across the screen. During the course of our relationship, I suspected that he might be confused or closeted; later I suspected bisexual. Most men who have sex with men that identify as “straight” aren’t sociopaths; they’re in denial. But he’d never want to have sex, yet he’d flirt. He wanted to live a completely gay life but identify as “straight”. In retrospect, I reasoned that because of his psychopathy he is gender blind ”“ any man or woman will do. If you are walking or breathing he will pray on you, seduce you, flirt with you, trap you, and play games with you. And furthermore, he used his ambiguous sexuality as a means to torture, gaslight, and manipulate gay men he pursued romantically or as friends over and over again. This also provided him the narcissistic pleasure of making him the unattainable straight guy which attracted attention from other gay men.
And so on a weekly basis we’d meet for drinks, act like we were dating, and he’d charm, seduce, flatter me, and use sexual innuendo as we flirted back and forth with one another. Nothing about this process was normal at all. He’d refer to his previous relationships as “girls” but after some further investigation I discovered they were all men. A mutual friend mentioned the P would go through periods of having a close friendship with other gay men, and then the relationship would end. He even joked about getting one of them to fall in love with him. He is notorious for his flirtatious and charming behavior.
During the assessment phase, he’d throw in the occasionally irrational devaluation: nitpicking me about my grammar, spelling, weight, looks, my friends. I knew something was off when he began his salutations addressing me as “f*ck up” and “loser”. There was always some implicit competitiveness to our email and text exchange. He seemed to get pleasure seeing me writhe in pain that he was getting me sexually frustrated and angry when he would flirt without intent. And then the love bombing started: 15-20 texts or emails a day. From “good morning” to “good night” he was there providing me constant attention, seeming to care, offering a “relationship that would last forever”. Every romantic gesture was empty, the words were used for manipulation and control.
We had 3 arguments where I confronted him about his flirtatious, manipulative behavior and sexuality and threatened to end the friendship. Each time he sucked me back in, asking me to move with him back to Europe, exchanging upwards of 80 emails a week, threatening to perform a “real severe surgery” on me if I ever strayed from his script. The gaslighting and pathological lying was all there. He had no guilt for intentionally hurting me. When I finally had the strength walk away, I confronted him about having NPD but he was in complete denial that he was hitting on me and refused to watch what he said around me. I couldn’t take it anymore. He would talk in a semi-detached way about unfortunate circumstances in his past relationships, having cancer, his work environment (his evil boss forcing a pregnant coworker to use a toxic chemical that would harm the baby, a coworker behind fired for manipulating with experiments), and previous “girlfriends” that refused to put up with his bullshit. I had the last straw when he talked about the suicide of a friend, and then gaslighted me about the entire conversation.
Here was a person who mirrored my every desire and kept me emotionally and psychologically off balance for his shear enjoyment. The trauma and bond of this experience still lingers. The cognitive dissonance resulting from someone who presented themselves as my soulmate clashes with the P’s process of mentally disassembling my beliefs about who am I and the “relationship”.
Yet I still miss him. I never knew Prince Charming came in the form of a psychologically manipulative sociopath.
notavictim, Thank you for opening up this conversation again. It’s an area I’ve written about before and I know the pain of being with someone in denial about who and what they are. I’ve written above about my experience but basically I first found out because he had a profile on an adult site and was looking for men. I questioned my own femininity for a long time after that. I applaud you for being so open about your sexual orientation. Personally, I don’t give two hoots to a holler what a person’s sexuality is. Your honesty is refreshing to me even as I understand that this is a very personal part of all of us.
Yes, we do have to disassemble, as you to aptly put it, our beliefs about soul mates and I still believe, even after all of this, that we ARE meant to have a soul mate in this lifetime. I know that in time, I’ll be ready for a new relationship and I believe in the heart’s ability to love, even after it’s been cracked in two. WE are blessed in that we are not the disordered individuals that they are. I’m GLAD I can feel grief. My grief has made the happiness I feel at times that much greater. How empty a life they must lead, that their only happiness, which will never be true and real, comes from abusing others. All the wiser you are now..when Prince Charming really does come, you will know the difference. We learn so much from these experiences!
Your story about him telling you about someone committing suicide gave me chills. One time, when I was alone in the car with the ex spath, I was telling him that it was over and that he needed to take what was his and get out. He merely glanced over at me and said, “Did I ever tell you about the trouble I got into for stalking a girl when I was in high school?” There was a VERY clear message there. I had forgotten that part, but your story brought that back to me.
Thank you for sharing!
Cat
notavictim,
Thanks for telling your story – sorry that you were preyed upon by a psychopath. We all know the damage that occurs when someone fails you miserably as a person, turning out to be an evil, manipulative person. Staying No Contact will help you to miss this creature less and less. We have all been “through the war,” not one of us coming out unscathed. It will take time to recover from this spath encounter, but you will be better in the end, having learned some valuable lessons, one being that there are people on our planet who are absolutely wicked, inflicting unnecessary pain on good-hearted, unsuspecting normal people.
Dear Notavictim
Welcome to LF. Glad you’re here. There is a great deal of information, good articles in the archives and people who understand a bit of what you’ve been through. A diverse group here, gay, straight, US and other countries, old and young—just a cross section of folks who are great, caring and comforting and GET IT about what you have been through. Again, WELCOME!!!! and God bless.
Notavictim,
I am sorry you had this experience, and I think you should be too. Look again at your post; you are describing sadistic torture which is not what a prince charming would do. People who love other people don’t treat them like garbage, crap, and the like. I am reading this post for the first time, and it is uncanny. Your story sounds a lot like mine except I was fooled by a spat female who twisted me emotionally even though I am happily married. But looking back, she had nearly everyone in our workplace wound up about her from young to old to male and female. I believe she also got several women to pursue lesbian relationships even though I am not sure she really did participate. She was good at withdrawing and devaluing to the point of torturing people. I suspect she did that to everyone to get pleasure from it. I swear I saw her smiling when I approached her in tears about our relationship. Many posters here have mentioned the tendency of spat men with this type of sexual orientation, but I suspect millions of women as the same. I am not addicted to porn any more than I am an alcoholic, but is it just me or are there not millions of women who are doing it with both women and men? And the excuse they are doing it for the money is about the same as the men’s sorry excuses for sleeping with anyone. Bottom line is if you are a psychopath you don’t give a shit about anyone, so f*#k them.
teacher123,
I read your post and I agree with you. There ARE millions of women out there doing exactly as you said. I’m glad you brought that up. It’s all about the actions and I believe you when you say you saw her smile. My ex did that and I knew then I was looking into the face of the devil itself.
Hi everyone.
Thank you so much for you kind words and, most importantly, your validation. I believe I am one of few people who knows this creature for what he is: an abusive psychopath. Our mutual friends see his charming mask – the straight doctor who hangs out and flirts with gay men. Nothing wrong with that, right? And he’s such a great guy. You’d be a fool to expect a romantic relationship to develop with someone like that. Even my therapist was fooled; he saw nothing wrong with a straight man openly flirting with me. It was such a brilliant setup to make me look crazy and question my own perception of reality. Perhaps that explained his delight in drag queens at the gay bars – even the prettiest ones can fool an unsuspecting heterosexual man. He certainly had me fooled. Plus in his view gay clubs/men are “less competitive” (his quote) – straight men competing for women is too challenging. The gay scene offers him a better hunting ground. Sick, sick, sick. Those were his only two explanations for why he strangely spends most of his time in the gay scene: the drag queens, and the less competitive atmosphere. Wow how did I end up in another gay bar over and over and over again. Caught flirting and harassing another gay boy. Whoops. Nothing added up.
His ability to alter your perception of reality was entertaining to him. I recall him mentioning that he was able to fool his young god-daughter about the easter bunny when he went back to visit europe. Really sick. One of his first remarks to me when we met was how much he enjoyed making fun of people. So while he gathered information about me, he sat back and watched me over drinks while I opened up honestly about my past, my goals, and dreams. This was information he’d later use against me. During our first “date”, he asked me what major surgeries I had, and what STDs I had. This was one of many “WTF?” moments during our folie à deux. The red flags were always there. In some way I’m relieved I stayed as long as a did because despite the amount of abuse I made the decision to end the relationship when I discovered what he was. Had I left earlier, I would have walked away thinking I was at fault and the whole thing was one big misunderstanding. He’d cycle between being sweet and stroking my ego (overvaluing me), and swiftly attacking me via devaluation with some nasty remark, criticism, or backhanded compliment (he was a GENIUS at coming up with these). One minute he’d call me a smart, sexy stud, and then the next day he’d insinuate that I offered sex for money, abused alcohol, and used drugs (which he claimed distorted my own perception of reality).
His past memories and use of written language (quite the master wordsmith) were twisted and contradictory – when he mentioned that he had a form of skin cancer, he added that the doctor performed an involuntary HIV test as a routine procedure. This was incredibly odd coming from a trained doctor – the last time I checked the state required individuals to sign paperwork for this type of screening. This would set my mind reeling and seeking an explanation – is he HIV positive? what is he really trying to tell me? is he implying that he is sexually active with gay men but refuses to be with me? is he lying about having cancer? This was just some of the delight in dealing with this creature. His Facebook wall displayed praises about his charm and personality from other targets – a man and woman. The “relationships” looked long term (1+year) – it took him only a short while to expose his real self to me. I wonder if he attempted to abuse them.
The strange happenings at his workplace later led me to believe that he was projecting his evil deeds on his boss/coworkers and responsible for the chaos in his lab environment. Even his description of his friend’s suicide was crazy making. After turning 30, he mentioned that he was surprised he had survived to that age and then described his friend who ended his life by jumping off a bridge. What was very concerning to me was that the personality traits of his friend mirrored his own. My confrontation with him about this story initially came from concern – I thought he could be depressed, potentially suicidal and asked him to elaborate more on the story. To this day I still wonder that, if this story were true, that he could have contributed the unfortunate downfall of his friend.
Rejected. Unrequited love. Verbally abused. Called a b#tch, loser, f*ck up, moron idiot. Lied to. F*cked with. Manipulated. Played. Harassed. Flirted without intent. Devalued. Overvalued. It was a see-saw, teeter-totter game. Up, down. Up, down.
I could go on and on…