Many, many people who were romantically involved with sociopaths have told me that the sex was amazing. Earth-moving. The best they ever had. At least, that’s how it was in the beginning, while the sociopath was still reeling them in.
The targets thought this amazing sex was proof of the real connection between themselves and the sociopath, proof that the two of them were wildly, deeply in love.
The truth is that sociopaths are incapable of love. Oh, they’re capable of feeling attraction. And they’re capable of proclaiming love, very convincingly (especially when they’re looking for sex). But they are not capable of genuine concern for another person’s welfare, which is a key component of real love.
So what do sociopaths really want from romantic relationships? Power, control and sex. Often, power and control are more important than sex.
What’s more, some sociopaths find power and control to be sexually exciting.
I experienced this with my sociopathic ex-husband, although I didn’t realize it until long after our marriage was over. When we disagreed, I generally lost, because he was much better at arguing than I was. Of course, he was not interested in coming to a mutually agreeable solution. He just wanted to win, but I didn’t know that at the time.
After the fight, when I had capitulated, my husband wanted sex. At the time, I thought we were making up after arguing. Now, I realize that he had gotten a charge out of exerting power and control over me, and it was a turn-on.
A Lovefraud reader told me that the sociopath she was involved with became sexually excited when she was angry. He demanded sex, and engaging in it when the woman didn’t really want to probably enhanced his sense of power.
Sex with a sociopath isn’t about sharing intimacy or building a connection. It’s about their personal physical release. Or, it’s a means to an end. Sociopaths know that if they can hook their targets sexually, they have a better chance of getting what they want—money, a place to live, or perhaps simply entertainment.
In the end, sex, for a sociopath, is just about domination.
This blog couldn’t be more true in regards to sociopaths. In my experience with a sociopath, I think somewhere within me I knew something was “off” but I just couldn’t pinpoint what “it” was…until later in the relationship. There truly is no intimacy with a sociopath…it is about the “act” vs. the connection when it comes to the sex part of a relationship with a sociopath. There is a disconnect and that disconnect is what I finally began to pick up on later in the relationship. I had been married for many yrs. and had a connection throughout my relationship with my deceased husband. In the relationship with the sociopath, in the beginning, I thought our connection was deeper and was an indication of the “depth” of our love for one another…I couldn’t have been more wrong. As in this blog…it was part of the bait on the hook…it was the best sex and I did look at it as part of being the right person for me. Later I would notice during “lovemaking” (I use that term lightly in ref. to this relationship cause he was incapable of love)…he had a glassed over look, like vacant…it was evident it was about the act for him and not an expression of our love/intimacy for one another. Later, long after I broke things off, it was discovered that he had many, many books on “techniques” to pleasure a woman…it clicked then that that was it….he could perform the techniques he had studied how to do but a book cannot teach anyone about the connection that he was incapable of having, not just with me but with anyone in his life. Thus the disconnect I was feeling, the vacant look, the preoccupation with the number of orgasms, and the fast pace he moved at in the beginning of the relationship. He had set the hook big time and was reeling in with all his might, once snagged, the disconnect and vacancy grew more and more.
I’m convinced that my son’s P father slept with half the women in his state.
He’s a good looking man. I met him in an Al-Anon meeting for adult children of alcoholics. It was a huge meeting. Women would be coming up to him all the time. More accurately, they were throwing themselves at him.
I kept my distance. I was attracted to what he shared at meetings, until I had been attending long enough that when a topic came up again, he said almost the exact same thing verbatim. (My memory is capable of remembering things like that.)
Anyway, over the course of two years, he was extremely polite and nice to me. Then, he would give me a little, tiny peck on the cheek when he greeted me. Slowly, the location of that kiss moved closer and closer to my mouth.
This took two years. He wasn’t throwing himself at me and I certainly wasn’t throwing myself at him. If anything, the length of time convinced me that a genuine, deep relationship was at hand.
Because I related so well to what he said (guess why? He was a P and I was coming from a P-dominated family of origin!) I asked him to be my sponsor.
That was against the unstated rules of Program, but I desperately needed to talk with somebody who understood me. (Stupid, stupid, stupid. And I was right, he understood me very well.) I also rationalized that the rule didn’t make sense because, after all, there are homosexuals relationships.
Eventually, after I got pregnant, a friend of mine who worked with him said that they used to talk all the time at work. He told her that nothing turns him on more than a woman who presents a challenge. She said she felt sick inside because she realized that he was telling her that I was a challenge for him.
This woman related a story he had told her how he had traveled across country with a woman who is now his current wife, and while she was in taking a shower, he was talking on the phone with one of his many flames. They were cooing away until he heard the water stop running and he got off the phone. He was Mr. Wonderful to her when she came out of bathroom.
Finally, my friend said that he confided that he thought he might have had a child with a married woman, but she never told her husband about her affair so he thinks the child is his. I suspect that she did have the child. I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t have told him. Why else would he “think” that he might have one?
I get all this information after the fact. If I had known before we had gotten involved, we wouldn’t have gotten involved.
Through the recovery network, a friend told one of the P’s ex-wives that my son existed. She contacted her former mother-in-law. Long story short, one night the phone range. The woman announced that she was the P’s mother, heard that she had a grandson, and wanted to know all about him.
The woman became “the best mother-in-law I never had.” She was my main supply of information about the P, often calling me to say that he had done this, he lied about that, look into that.
Getting back to the P’s second ex-wife, I eventually met her. She told me that she found out what he was like the day after New Year’s one year. Somebody called her and gave her the name of all the women he had been sleeping with and the names of the hotels where they had been meeting.
As far as the sex went, I didn’t think it was great. It felt very mechanical on his part, which made it disappointing for me.
I knew that he was married. I was kicking myself for not listening to the program rule about not having a sponsor of the opposite sex. Our affair was very short-lived. I wanted one more night with him, a poetic good-bye if you will, and that was going to be it, except I conceived our son.
In what I thought was an extremely candid and truthful moment, he told me once that no matter how many women told him that they loved him, it would never be enough for him. He didn’t know why. He simply couldn’t feel that love.
After hearing about his exploits and remembering that statement, I ended up thinking that he probably was a sex addict. I can’t say that for sure. I don’t know enough about the condition.
Program has another unofficial rule. There are 12-Steps. A 13th Stepper is someone who exploits the vulnerability and trust of a newcomer in order to bed that person. Members will warn others to stay away from someone for being a 13th Stepper.
A 13th Stepper can be of either sex and of either persuasion.
I know a gay AA man who hits on young men all the time when they enter Alcoholics Anonymous. This guy is held in very high esteem by the state’s AA members because he is so likable and charming. He can talk a very convincing blue streak when it comes to recovery. He used to be a middle school teacher. He told me about his preference for high school boys. He felt that was OK, because he wasn’t their teacher anymore.
Hi poetress
My experience is very similar to yours. Charming became almost trance like while making “love”…. The hypnotic stare…..he was performing…..and he wanted my sexual experiences to be unforgettable so that I would ruined for anyone else. It used it to control me. But as you said, my gut kept screaming something is off about him. I found myself looking into his vacant eyes trying to figure it out. He told me his last girlfriend would do the same thing. Now I know why…..just took me a while to figure it out
TRUE ARTICLE!!! I’ve also heard people say that the sociopath’s sexual prowess is based solely upon their source target – meaning that the sex is as good as the target’s ability.
Sex with the first exspath was SO frequently degrading and humiliating. Any pleasure that I experienced was quickly turned into a ridicule, “See? Now, you ENJOYED that, didn’t you?? Sex with the second exspath was solely my own responsibility – oh, he wanted sex, but he was a mediocre jackrabbit, at best.
The very thought of the second exspath’s fantasizations while we were intimate cause my stomach to flip-flop – HIS stare was not only predatory, but it was “Lights are ON – nobody is HOME.” Ick, ick, ick….
It sounds like we all have had the same experience. Truly unbelievable to me. There is no doubt…they are loveless, mechanical beings. Mine did everything that was said above in these posts. I also suspect mine has had a baby with a married woman and the woman’s husband has no idea. I don’t know this to be fact, but there are things that lead me to believe it could be true. They just never stop.
YES; THIS ARTICLE IS ABSOLUTELY 1,000% CORRECT.
IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ‘LOVE’ BUT EVERYTHING TO DO WITH CONTROL AND DOMINANCE.
IF YOU TAKE THEIR CONTROL AWAY, THEY SHRIVEL UP AND BACK UNDER THE ROCK FROM WHICH THEY CLIMBED OUT FROM UNDERNEATH.
Dupey
My sexual experience with the ex spath was a bit different.
He was not an incredible lover, he was merely fast and selfish, like a horny monkey. I never felt an intense sexual connection from the physical side of it. It was as if he knew he didn’t know how to please a woman so he used other devices to cover that fact, for instance perversion, saying things to emit emotion from me, the stupid stare which was quite funny actually, and juvenile attempts to project himself as completely turned on all the time by me and me alone. I faked quite often, if you know what I mean. I guess somehow I knew that connection was really and truly not there when we were ‘supposedly’ at our most intimate with each other.
I remember thinking, “How the hell does somebody have so much sex with so, SO many people and not really know what they’re doing?” I am sure he got so many people in the sack because he was very built up and pursued sex with anyone and everyone but that did not help him in bed.
I had come to the point early on in the relationship where I dreaded sex with him. It was just a bothersome chore to me and I tried being platonic to no avail. I had guy friends before so it took me by surprise that he could not just be friends.
I had known very good sex before and this just was not it.
The s-ex (Matt, thanks for that! Spath-ex), claimed to be a ‘tantric master’. Since I didn’t really know what that meant I thought all the ‘eye-gazing’ and contextual set ups (candles, oils, weird positions, yogic breathing) were part of the tantric/yogic ritual. And I suppose, superficially, they were.
But for all the theatrics he was a selfish and dismissive, though aggressive and dominant, sex partner. It wasn’t particularly satisfying. There was no intimate sweet talking, no interest in what I liked or wanted. It was a show, and he was the star.
Like many instances, I just went into my ‘fake and inauthentic’ self, to play with him. This wasn’t just with sex. I found myself in social situations acting like a different person, to fit in with his energy and agenda.
It was like getting morphed into a psuedospath.
Initially LOTS of sex. In whatever crazy fashion struck his fancy. Then, boom, NO sex. I figure that is when he got bored and started grooming some new targets. It created a weird withdrawl period for me; I felt like sex had become a drug I needed. Even though it wasn’t orgasmic the Oxytocin still kicked in.
He ‘believed’ that women were ‘responsible’ for their own pleasure. He believed, much to the perpetuation of his selfishness and lack of care for any woman, that women who couldn’t be pleasured by a man’s ‘direction’ and sexual preferences wasn’t ‘open’ and sexually enlightened.
Boy! How embarrassing that I tried to make something with this Kook. Where was Skylar’s book when I needed it?
I remember being angry at my first husband for something. I think it was first thing in the morning. He was up, and I was still in bed. Nakid. I don’t remember why I was mad, it was 35 years ago, but I was pretty passive back then, so I know I couldn’t have been too demanding. He had turned away from me and was walking out of the room, and I expressed some discontent. He wrirled around, stormed over to the side of the bed, and ripped the covers off me. That’s all he did, then stood there glaring at me as I scurried to cover myself as he stood over me. Then he turned and left the room. Now, if that isn’t sexual domination, humiliation and degradation I don’t know what is. He wanted me to feel sexually vulnerable. It wasn’t much over a year later that I wised up and left for good.
Second husband turned me into a sexual non being by becoming impotant as soon as we were married. I had a role to fill and that was housewife. Cook, clean and don’t make waves.
I eventually shoved all my unhappiness underground because I’d been so punished for voicing it. At one point he told me he should take me out in the back yard and shoot me…to put me out of my misery.
I was miserable because I was a non person, with no voice or power in the relationship, and he was F#@*&ing every young thing he could get his hands on, falling in love and treating me like an indebtured servant.
It took me two years to stop crying when I finally admitted the truth to myself and let my feelings surface.
But now I know I was “supply”, and when I no longer worshipped the ground he walked on, he had to diminish me, and find new (greener and more niave) supply.
I know that he fell in love with their “love” for him. Sigh.
What is skylars book???