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.
Thank you so much aloha. Finally someone understands without me having to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
It’s not that I beat myself up for anything I did do, because I didn’t do anything I am ashamed of. You hit the nail on the head really. Unfortunately, out of this bad experience, what we also have with us, is the heady remembrance of how they made us feel in those early days, the most desirable sexy woman and somehow bring that sexy desirable woman out of us. It’s not a feeling that is easy to forget. Who would? Here is a man making you feel the most gorgeous, stunning lovely woman who he desires and loves. Who wouldn’t want to feel like that? And why wouldn’t we believe it is possible? It’s “The One” factor we always dreamed of but never thought would happen, and suddenly here it is, right here, in our life.
Somehow all the bad stuff doesn’t every erase that memory. The idealisation of you is total and intoxicating. The slow demoralising of you is damaging to the extreme, but the memory still lingers. I can only imagine it is like a torturer who offers a hostage freedom by giving him a glimpse of the sunlight before he laughs and throws you back into the hole. Bit extreme maybe.
He was so supremely confident. He drew people to him like a magnet. He was softly spoken, seemed kind, and to all appearances he is. But in romance and love, it’s a different ball game. He never harmed me, he never directly asked me to do anything. He was more insiduous than that. He let you know in his texts and emails what he fantasised about, whilst in the flesh he made you feel special and wonderful. It was hard for me to see the two sides as the same man.
I guess what I beat myself up about the most is that I didn’t get out sooner once I realised I was in trouble mentally. If he wants to live that way, who am I to judge? I was staggered by the number of willing people on those sites who incorporate this kind of thing into their normal daily life. But, the one major difference seemed to be that they were comfortable with who they were, and pretty open about it. He was not. He was devious and secretive. When I faced him with it, he refused point blank to discuss it. I said, if you had told me from the start the kind of things you want I would have been able to make an informed choice whether I wanted to live with you and be a part of your life. I would have at least been aware.
He cheats. He lies. He deceives. He doesn not admit to the things he says or does. If I found out about a woman, they were chasing him. When I asked him point blank if he had ever been with a man as his emails seemed to imply, he just said, I have never been with anyone but you. I just want to explore with you and see you experience pleasure, it would please me to see you enjoy yourself.
He would tell me he was so proud of my body and my sensuality, it was this that made him want to share me with others.
It is the classic make you feel good and make you feel crap in one sentence. I liked that he loved my body, I hated that his idea of love was to share me around like a piece of meat. His piece of meat.
I ran from him. He just said of this, “we wanted different things..you didn’t want to explore with me”. Like that’s all there was to the 2 years I gave him???? Exploring?
What about the fact I gave up my job, my home, my family to fly a thousand miles to live with him because he got a job overseas? What about the times I held him while he cried because he missed his daughters so much? (even though in the 3 years he has been gone he never once flew home to see them). What about the help I gave him when he was moving overseas and had no idea what to do with his stuff so I stored it for him? The promises he made but never kept? That he told me we would be together forever because “you can live your whole life and never find the love we have found together”? These are the things that mattered to me. That and the fact I felt incredible with him.
He took all that special feeling and trashed it. He sullied it. He dirtied it. I have always had a healthy sexual appetite. He brought it to life and then twisted it and turned it into something I still to this day can’t fathom.
You are right, I think – we got addicted to the way they made us feel. We wanted to feel that way. I tried to deny the other stuff just to hang on to those feelings. But, like the instinctive animals they are, he knew. He knew I wasn’t really into his fantasies, that I was finding them hard to handle, and slowly started to punish me by withdrawing those things from me. He stopped the loving romantic gestures and texts. He never even looked at me when we went out. The more he withdrew, the harder I tried. I dressed to kill, he didn’t notice. I flirted with other men, he was oblivious and didn’t care. I cried. He ignored. I asked him what was wrong – he told me I was too negative.
I was putty in his hands because I wanted to feel that way again. I wonder, is it that feeling I seek and know somehow will never get again because it wasn’t real in the first place? It was real in me, but not in him. I truly believed it was a fairy tale romance. How sad is that? And now I have tried dating men again. I have known I don’t feel any great feeling for them, but if they express desire for me,and they do, and they seem nice men, I respond to it and then beat myself up for that because I realise very quickly I don’t want to be involved with them. I just needed to know they found me desirable. It’s awful. It’s as though I need to have that feeling that I am desirable to them, even if they are not desirable to me.
I am not a nympho, I have only tried dating 3 times, and then stopped when I realised I just can’t seem to feel that way about anyone. I actually want the love and romance more, but it always seems to get tangled up with needing to feel attractive and desirable. It’s like I have lost my “self” and only feel good about my self if I am “desirable” and I never felt that way about myself before this experience.
You are far from a dork. It has the same effect on me. I read a story, I resonate so much with what they say, and I want to reach out and hug. Say, hey, it’s ok, I understand completely how you feel.
I am 18 months over it now. I have come a long way, it is just this one aspect now I can’t seem to a)explain b) understand and c) heal.
The abusive behaviour, the contempt, the belittling, the silent treatments, the controlling, the lies, oh the constant lies, those I have seen in these sites I read and books I read, and I recognise now his pathology.
But the sexual aspect, the way he seems to have undermined my core belief system and made me feel somehow I have to identify myself now by sex rather than by who I am, that is something I seem unable to deal with.
Thanks. Thanks so much.
LJ
ellejay
I feel so sorry for you. But the best part is that at least you didn’t get any disease with these evil one. Sociopaths are so secretive with their promiscus life which makes so difficult for us to figure them out. The best thing to do is to get out of the relationship as soon as possible before contracting an STD. This is so scaring.
First thing I did when I returned to the UK Pitanga. Got full health checks. Was clear.
But how humiliating that we have to go to that length because we have no idea. I have never felt so humiliated and debased in my life answering questions about why I was there.
I am out of the relationship now some 18 months. Just still bear some scars.
Thanks
LJ
I absolutely agree that sociapths have no fixed perference when it comes to sex. Like everything else in their lives it is just a tool to wage control over another person to get what they want.
After I discovered the whole scam, I talked at length to his OW. She told me that she suspected that he was gay as he was always in the company of men friends and looking back, he did seem to have a strong control over many of the young boys he worked with. It had not occurred to me when I was with him but now I can see that he would sleep with anything for power.
I am lucky that the shock of finding out all the lies ‘woke me up’ from the surreal situation and I was able to free myself from his evil mind. The OW though is still with him, even though she felt she needed to get an AIDS test!! It seems nothing he does will make her walk away. I believe now that she must also be a P or have some kind of personality disorder as she is just as dishonest, manipulative as he is and they both conspired to con me of a great deal of money.
Swallow
Thanks, Donna, you have really hit on something crucial here.
1. It helps to explain the prevalence of sex (rape and not rape) in prisons by ‘straight’ men. The argument that “men have their needs and I’m not really gay” just doesn’t sound right. What we have is a population with a high proportion of psychopaths (and very many others with strong psychopathic traits) who are devoted to power and sex and locked up together.
2. It also points to the not uncommon phenomenon of married men-who-have-sex-with-men. Some of these are really gay men who for one reason or another don’t come out. But maybe some are psychopathic.
Neither gay nor straight nor bisexual, really – pansexual. Anything and anyone will do.
I agree, it is a hard thing to talk about, the sexual relationship with the S. Our first year he could not have enough. It was constant. I am a pretty sexual person so it was ok, but then he started bringing in all the suggestions for having another woman in with us, or when we were in Las Vegas, he wanted to get a prostitute to come in our room or he was always trying to be a little violent.. starting to choke me just a little or pull my hair way too hard…. these things were a constant little thing going on in the background all the time. I didnt feel comfortable doing the things he wanted to do and I felt our sex life was really good and very often. Why was it never enough I wondered. Then to find out later, he was cheating all along.. I cant even understand how the man could find the energy for even more sex on the side!
The second year.. all of the extreme things he wanted to do all the time – he stopped asking. He became very “normal” and sex was always good. Now I look back and realize he was probably fullfilling all those way out desires elsewhere, which allowed him to act like a normal guy with me.
The other thing that has ruined it for dating most men, is that he was sexually knowledgable beyond any womans dream. He knew a womans body like no man ever has. I guess you learn alot when you’ve slept with a million women like he had but how do you ever feel attracted to less? Once you have had the best sex.. it was so emotionally empty and full of bad intuition though that I think normal sex with a guy would be nice to not be feeling sick on the inside about the reality of your relationship. I think that’s how he traps so many women – once they have experienced sex with him – he has them on the hook. They follow him like a puppy.
Yes findingmyselfagain.
The Bad Man knew all the tricks too. Interesting. I mean I had always wanted a deep relationship that would go deep in the bedroom as well. One out of two ain’t bad. It is a hook.
I have an email saved somewhere that I wrote long after being off island. It was like a love letter where I told him all the things I loved about him (because he had complained that all I said was bad things). It was like a Valentine and there were some steamy things too but it didn’t cross the line. Now, I look at it and I say, “WOW! How could I write something like this to a man that was so destructive?!” And the strange thing was I expected that he would honor me in the same way and tell me what was special about me since the dust had settled between us. His reaction was like “thanks.” Occasionally he would write how he missed me (or should I say, missed my parts). His emails were gross and degrading and lacked the sentimentality I had hoped for. Instead, I felt degraded and gross.
BLECH!!!!
Looks like one of the common elements to this thread is
1) Any personal boundaries set by their target is treated as a betrayal by the socio- ie “if you really loved me you would do …..”
2) They have a lot of trouble coming to grips with the notion that anyone could burst the bubble and escape the spell… or should I say hell….”How could you leave me?..But You said you loved me…? (little boy voice)
Mine sat face to face with me for a month after my sordid discoveries…I got us thru a traditional Christmas, family – grandkids etc. and for a month he had no explanations, no remorse,no guilt and no empathy for the extreme emotional pain I was in – to the contrary – I think it beat watching his favorite sport.
Now that I hav managed to get rid of him and stay in my home (3 weeks) he is going to all my firends and playing the dejected victim, telling them all how much he loves me… can’t understand why I would break up the family that he cares so much about. blah blah….THEY DO IT FOR SPORT. Stay strong ladies and gentlemen, don’t forget they are only 4% of the population, and there are 6 billion people on the planet. We all deserve one of the other 94%
One other point, I was with this man for 27 yrs. stupidly ignored some red flags because he was just too “decent” and only in the last year have been making my getaway. For those of you that catch on in a couple of years, pat yourself on the back. You have won yourself tthat much more time to heal. Peace to all.
My experience only lasted two months, but I am still dealing with the aftermath. Waiting for my window period to be over to get a difinitive answer on my HIV test, and then having to deal with seeing his sorry ass around town…..I cannot imagine how years of being with a sociopath would feel, then finding out……I just cant imagine it. sometiems I feel I will never ever truly be over it- not until I know I will never see him again. How do I get past that feeling? I do I not care one way or the other?
I think what drew me initially to this blog was that I had believed I was in a unique situation. I couldn’t talk about it to anyone, that this man I loved had transpired to be a man who had no boundaries, no real ethics.
Pansexual. Yes. That works for me. See, there is no way this man is “gay” in the way we understand it. He loves women, he loves what he can do to women. As the reality began to hit me, and I realised that this special little erotic world we had that I believed was exclusive, something we were creating just between us, was something he did with countless people, male or female, sharing erotic fantasies and more specifically degrading filthy ones, like some people breathe. It is almost robotic.
I noticed, when he was writing fantasies, or more particularly, encouraging you to send them to him, he was a different person. His tone, his language, was blunt and brutal. On the odd occasion that we were apart and he phoned to get “dirty” his voice became monotone. When he was romantic, it had a lovely lilt. I could tell, just by the tone of his voice, which it was to be.
But looking back, it was his constant use of certain words. “Exploring” was one of them. He referred to his penchant for very dirty sex and fantasies as “exploring”. Or “playing”. Let’s “play” was a favourite one.
He was strange. He only had to write one line in an email to a woman such as “tell me one of your darkest fantasies my sex babe” or something like it, and they would send an essay back of the darkest filthiest they could, but ending up with how much they loved and desired him.
And in those early days, I did too. With me, as his partner, he was more “selective” choosing instead to woo me with “erotic” fantasies – he didn’t want to push me away with his dark ones so he went elsewhere for those – but the pattern was the same.
With the men I witnessed him contacting – it was always very blunt. Cold. almost menacing. I believe now that he hated that part of himself because he wrote in such a way that he sounded like he was putting up with their desires, rather than actually seeking it himself.
I also realise now that although he made me feel fantastic, he never once told me I made him feel the same. I know now that any time we were together, in his head he would have been somewhere else in a fantasy. He observed and watched how his moves worked on you and somehow I would sometimes get the feeling he had tried this somewhere and wanted to see if it worked on me.
Oh this is hard to talk about.
Sorry.
LJ