By Natalie Monroe
Divorced after thirty years and unsure about my future, my confidence level was at an all-time low.
Alone for the first time in my life and living in Florida, I felt isolated, but too scared to get back into the dating scene. Luckily, I didn’t have to.
Only three months on my own, an old classmate through the high school website contacted me. I remembered him right away. “Daniel Weaver” (not his real name) one of the popular boys and someone who never had an interest in me. Taking a chance, I agreed to meet him in New York, on my next trip home.
Good-looking and charming, he said all the right words to make me fall for him. Intent on overcoming the difficulties of a long distance romance, we visited each other frequently.Daniel was the man who could turn my dreams into reality, and a second chance for love.
However, my happiness didn’t last. At first, his controlling ways were sexy and made me feel like he really loved me, but he soon used my love to get what he needed. He moved in with me, making it hard to refuse when he asked to borrow money. The more I spent, the more entangled I became.
Caught up in my hopes and dreams, and reluctant to believe he was evil, I couldn’t let go. Conflicted between rational thinking and emotional neediness, I ignored my suspicions, convinced that I could handle our relationship.
His vagueness left me with questions, but he had a knack for diverting my fears. Daniel had my love, my money, and my dreams tightly bound, and I found myself on an emotional roller coaster, trying to hold on without losing myself. This book is my personal journey with a sociopath—handsome, charming, and potentially lethal to my soul.
About a year ago, 20/20 did a segment on Ray Holycross, a good-looking, charming sociopath, who courted and seduced dozens of woman on online dating sites, then moved in, mooching and using until they were fed up.
Although arrested on a petty thief charge, what Ray did isn’t necessarily criminal. Every year, thousands of women find themselves entangled in a relationship with the wrong person and things just don’t work out. Sometimes, it’s not always black and white.
Unfortunately, I met someone like this three years ago. The shame of admitting I was a victim is not easy, but I suspect that other women have gone through something similar, and may benefit from this book.
The critical thinking skills and instincts he tried to erode ended up saving my life
Natalie – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from people who reconnected with someone from high school, only to learn the hard way that they were being victimized. Thank you for being willing to share your story.
Just the fact that they look you up…don’t trust people who do that
Sorry, errors of logic bug me. I just HAVE to play Devil’s Advocate to a remark like that.
Most people post their stories on this site BECAUSE they’ve been victimized by an abuser.
Some of those abusers targeted their victims by “looking up” someone they knew from high school (or their home town, or whatever) years or decades later, and “reconnecting” with that person.
In the instances recorded here, what followed for the victim was a disaster.
But it does NOT follow from this that ANYONE who reconnects with us years after leaving high school (or whatever) is necessarily an abuser!
I’ve heard some wonderful stories—mostly elsewhere, naturally!—of people who took the trouble to reconnect with someone from high school years later, with the happiest of consequences. One partner or the other may have had a failed marriage, an early widowhood or whatever; they got back together with an old flame from years ago, and the couple lived happily ever after!
What a great loss it would be if anyone turned down an opportunity for lifelong happiness solely because they were suspicious of anyone who “looked them up” from some time in the past!
Of course, those happier stories appear far less often on a site like this, which deals with predatory relationships! But let’s not forget, it’s CARING people as well as predators who “look up” and reconnect with old acquaintances, even though they’re doing it for quite opposite reasons.
Just because somebody looks up an old acquaintance from years ago, that in itself shouldn’t give cause for suspicion. The only lesson to be learned from this is that anyone at all who comes into our lives should be subject to careful scrutiny, no matter how we met them! Most people are all right! But there’s always the risk that some are not!
I re-connected with an old college flame whom I almost married. We had both been divorced, me from a probable narcissistic psychopath. What a difference this time to have someone truly caring in my life!
But initially, even though I had known him and his family well in the past, I did look for any signs of sociopathy. I knew I had a blind spot for sociopaths before learning so much more, including back when I knew him originally. Happily I have not seen worrisome signs, and have seen things sociopaths would never do.
So a happy situation arising from a “voice from the past” can happen.
Hey Donna! What happened to the EDIT function? It’s vanished—POOF!—into thin air.
Anyway what I’ve described above would be known in statistical terms as a “sampling error.” That kind of thing can give rise to many misconceptions, so I hope everyone gets the idea.
The edit function stopped working after we upgraded WordPress, which powers this blog. I’m trying to get another edit plugin, but it’s proving difficult.
I echo your thoughts, Redwald. I would not have taken from this story that all old high school friends who look you up are suspect. I have reconnected with several old friends from high school, college, and grad school on FB. None of them are predatory.
Ray Holycross spent time in prison for stealing a firearm and threatening to use it.
I don’t think I would call that a “petty” theft and was absolutely criminal.