Lovefraud has heard from many people who have been romantically involved with sociopaths. They often comment on the “amazing sex.”
Many sociopaths are skilled lovers, and there are reasons for this.
First of all, 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.
Secondly, sociopaths get a lot of practice. They usually start young—precocious sexuality is one of the early behavior problems typical of a sociopath. As they get older, sociopaths continue to engage in frequent, casual sex. Sociopaths have plenty of partners, and plenty of opportunities to learn.
Sex but no love
But just because there’s sex—even what appears to be wild, passionate sex—doesn’t mean there’s love. Sociopaths may be technically competent lovers, but there will never be any true intimacy or emotional sharing involved.
Many people who have contacted Lovefraud have been confused by this. Their encounters seemed so caring, so earth-moving, that it was difficult to believe there was no love.
Here are the facts: Sociopaths are not capable of love. Sociopaths are, however, convincing liars, and they know that if they say the words “I love you,” they’ll probably get more sex.
Furthermore, when a sociopath seduces his or her target, it’s a way of establishing control. Along with getting the physical desires of the moment met, the sociopath may also be getting money and a free place to live. All for whispering a few sweet nothings—and to the sociopath, they truly mean nothing.
Diagnosing the disorder
The most accurate tool for diagnosing whether someone is a sociopath (also called a psychopath) is the Psychopathy Check List-Revised (PCL-R), developed by Dr. Robert Hare. The tool, administered by a trained professional, rates the person on 20 items to determine an overall psychopathy score.
One of the items evaluated is “promiscuous sexual behavior.” This is defined as impersonal sexual relationships, frequent one-night stands, cheating, frequent casual sex, several sexual relationships at the same time, deception to convince others to engage in sexual activity, and possible charges for sexual assault. (Believe me, sociopaths are capable of all of it.)
Another item on the check list is “many short-term marital relationships.” This means the person has frequent unstable interpersonal relationships and/or multiple marriages.
Irresponsible and casual sex, therefore, is one of the hallmarks of sociopathic behavior. Some sociopaths are also capable of truly frightening sexual violence—but that’s a topic for another post.
When my xhusb and I went to a top notch counselor a month before the final divorce, he told me that he is incapable of loving, has no conscience..and I need to stay far away from him. I asked him if he thought he was “dangerous”. He said…”maybe not physically”.
My recent xbf told me that he told me something he was going to his grave with..never told anyone. It was a story…and I didn’t understand the ending…the guy “missing and never found”. I couldn’t imagine he meant that HE killed him. omg. Well, when we broke up and went back,( and I had texted him something about “the truth will be revealed”…meaning I found out about some of his lies…being on online dating sites)…he panicked and thought I was talking about what he told me about the “missing” guy. I wondered…did he really kill this man? I never found out…but, thinking about it now gives me the chills!! Could he have killed someone? And, I was sleeping with this man??? OMG.
I wouldn’t put it past anyone who has “no conscience” to kill someone. I felt that my xhusb and xbf socios were “killing me” by driving me crazy and putting me through so much confusion and stress!
I think thats why we get PTSD from the relationships. Its CONFUSING. They are SO conniving, convincing and good at it…that we want to believe their WORDS…but their actions are SO contrary!!
If I took the words…(said to me, texted to me) away from the whole experience…and just look at the “actions”….there really WAS no relationship!!
The most DANGEROUS person….is a LIAR.
Wow tobehappy, How incredibly true, what you have said at the end of your post regarding the words being taken out of the quotient/experience and only looking at the actions, there was really No relationship… Those few words truly sum it up.
OMG to be.
What an incredibly powerful post.
The most DANGEROUS person…is a LIAR….
Something that keeps coming to mind for me each time I go into what I will forever refer to as pretzel mode about him in my head…lying, manipulating, cheating, secretive, raging, lack of empathy, lack of guilt/remorse, personal responsibility. Financially impulsive. Alcoholic, accusatory, blaming, projecting…I wish I knew what all of this meant when I met POS. 🙁
And the words were VERY convincing….
He said things like:
I bet no man ever loved you like I do
I bet you never loved a man like you do me
I would kill for you
No woman ever made love to me like you
I’m so in love with you
I think about you 24/7
You know you can’t leave me
We need to be married
I want to marry you
(yet he never asked me to..lol)
You are my best friend
You are an angel
There’s no woman like you
And the list goes on…..
It was brainwashing. He also SAID…”we are going to do this…go there…I’m going to buy you this or than…”
NEVER DID!
He is pathetic and I know that now that he is out of my life, I can concentrate on ME…acheive my own personal goals to take care of my health issues..get in shape…and that someday I will meet a good man. If not…I’m happy with my life……and plan to enjoy the rest of it.
Eden
I’d like to hear more about your experience. The things he did to hook you. This interests me, not only for personal info regarding love bombing, but an ongoing discussion in here on another thread about whether or not the victim comes from an abusive background, that may or may not make someone more susceptible to a psychopath.
Thank you.
to be.
I hope to be where you are someday soon. This has really destroyed me inside.
.
My art teacher once said to me….when I was younger and upset about being mistreated by a man…
“WHO WANTS SOMEONE THAT ISN’T DEVOTED TO YOU?”
I don’t know if you have to come from an “abusive” childhood to be more susceptible to being fooled or abused….but, I know people and some of my friends who would never settle for what I did…forgive lies…and allow someone treat them less than the best…..because they feel worthy of nothing but the best. Are they smarter? tougher? Have higher self esteem?
I know that if I was thinner and less stressed and didn’t feel that I couldn’t get better….I would never have settled for my x’s.
With me,…it was all about self esteem. It was low at the time.
Self esteem changes…and I’ve build myself up in the last year …..I will never “settle” again.
I’m going to just jump in here & interrupt the discussion [sorry for butting in, ladies!], but this article, “Sociopaths & Sex” is the one I was looking for yesterday because this is the perfect place for me to tell yall what I found this week.
OMG
I was moving some books around that J had left on the top of the shelf above the closet when I noticed a plastic bag filled with writing on yellow legal pads. That wasn’t an unusual thing for me to find that he’d left behind because, as I think I’ve mentioned, he had written a graphic horror/hacker novel while in prison, & so there had been a number of these plastic bags filled with stacks & stacks of yellow pads. He wrote that novel & most of another & had started on another, & he wrote in long hand, top to bottom, page after page after page. (I can’t imagine how he even made enuf money—writing legal brief for other inmates—to pay for all his pens & tablets!!)
Sure enough, this huge stack of pages was another in the several revisions of these novels. But there was a ragged manilla envelope stuck in the middle of all these pages, with another separate stack of legal pages in it. So, of course, I just *had* to investigate it.
He had written “JW Short Stories” on the back of the envelope, &—typical of his constantly hyperactive, intensely brilliant thinking—a list of all the events, people, places, etc that he was writing about. Like a very loose “outline”. There were all these women’s names. One I recognized as being his first wife, & several other names below it, with the note written to the side of it, “hot, wet, & slippery.” Then another section of women’s names. And another column with several suggested titles for this collection of *short stories*, like “Rainbow Ladies”, & beneath it a numbered list of the “stories” (including even the # of pages in each.) And these were more women’s names.
To make a short story of his short stories….you got it: they were all GRAPHIC PORN stories about all his sexual encounters with all of these women…..every detail about their looks, personalities, & BODIES [Every Detail] & EveryThing they did together……beginning with the first time he had sex with a woman: with the 17yo babysitter when he was 12.
Now, bear in mind that he was married to his late wife for 25 yrs. There were accounts of affairs that he had that he kept secret from her, accounts of sex that they shared with other men & women—including THEIR babysitter, from the time she was 17 into her 20s—& of the affairs he had with her permission while she was involved in her own affairs with her LIVE-IN lesbian lovers. And yes, this was all in the same house where they were raising their 2 children.
There were stories of weeks of wild parties with coke whores, with actual hookers, & even with a friend of his & 3 girls who turned out to be on furlough from a mental hospital. (Those were prior to his wife with children, or when he had gone on “business trips” while he was married to her.) There was one really repugnant, graphic-to-the-last-detail, about an encounter with “Dawn, The Fat Chick” in which he described how repulsed he was by her body & nauseated by the whole experience which lasted for an entire day & night. He talked about how disgusted he was with her the whole time she allowed him to “abuse her.”
And there was even the story which told me that he hadn’t had 2 wives, but THREE. One who he’d started the affair with while he was married to the first.
Earlier I said that the first time he’d had sex “with a woman” was when he was 12. There was also mention of his childhood experiences with “the barnsman”: the old black man who performed fellatio on him frequently while he was 7-10 yrs old.
“Sociopaths & Sex.” This is the man I lived with for 8 yrs. (except for the 2 yrs he was in prison.) I had long suspected that the reason we’d almost completely stopped having sex in the last 2-3 yrs was because his fantasy sex life was what fulfilled him. I had walked in on him jerking off several times. And I had confronted him at the time about his having made the excuse that he “just didn’t think about sex anymore….low testosterone from being in prison at his age.” And you know, I accepted his protestations that he was “just trying to see if he could get it up.”
Since finding out that he’d had the concurrent 4yr relationship with the younger Wealthy Woman he married shortly after walking out without a word in May & not coming back, I’d been telling myself that the reason he hadn’t been interested in sex with me was because of her…..but now I completely realize. OH, Yeah. He’s a SOCIOPATH. He can’t bond emotionally sexually. There is no long-term, loving, caring, love-making with one woman that is satisfying to him. And now I completely realize what everyone has been telling me all along: he will do—& probably already is/has been doing—what he’s always done. As others have said above, that part of him will not/can not change. He will (& has I know) “change for her”—as in molding himself to mirror her—but EVIL is EVIL. It does not change.
I know there’s more I need to add to this, but I’ve written enough here to give you the whole UGLY PICTURE, & I’ve run out of time for now. But I do have to say that, after spending an hour or more reading thru his “short stories”, I felt like the little boy (I saw on the news) who’d drowned in a manure pit this week.
LL…You just have to make up your mind that you don’t want to be “broken”. I was walking around saying that to people…”He destroyed me”.
Then, I met this woman at the library, at a Law of Attraction meeting…and told her how I felt. I asked her how to stop feeling this way.
She said…Tell yourself your’e NOT…just like that! She poked my forehead.
I said…”Wow, she’s right. Its all perspective”. I wasn’t “BROKEN>>DESTROYED”….I was smarter now…wiser now…and stronger now. He didn’t destroy me….he hurt me…but now I am stronger for it.
I said to myself…”2b..you can let this kill you , or you can heal and move on and change your life. You still have your health…so you can keep it moving”.
You will get there…just keep journalling, posting your feelings…reading…validating…and then, eventually, you will be ready to live again….find new interests, new people…and start a new …better life!
I was really BAD, LL…My neighbor/psuedo mom was worried about me. She was the only one I could talk to. She watched me numb…I couldn’t even cry. I was in shock when I realized he might be cheating on me and lying to me.
But, in time…I got stronger and stronger and started worrying about one person…ME …and my children, of course.
You have to go through the stages of healing…
Just know, that you will be ok…in time.