Confessions of a Sociopath

by M. E. Thomas

  Most psychologists think that sociopaths cannot love, but that theory seems silly to me. Just because it is a different kind of love, more calculating and self-aware, doesn’t negate its existence. This misconception springs from some illusion that the capacity to love is a form of goodness—that one’s love constitutes an unadulterated gift that arises out of selflessness rather than selfishness. But I do not believe this is true.

  For example, most people do not have children for the benefit of those children. You cannot give to that which does not exist—that which would never risk torture, illness, or heartache had you not brought it into being. But when I see my sister unable to resist smiling in the company of her shiny-blond, rosy-cheeked toddler, I can imagine no greater love. I, too, am overrun with feelings of love for this tiny, just-formed being, knowing that there are genetic landscapes written into my heart that make it so. She’s endlessly charming to me. Her mere existence in the world pulls chemical levers and pushes enzymatic buttons that produce in me immense joy. Generosity and affection are simply its symptoms and side effects. Evolutionary biologists have long puzzled over the adaptation for love and its attendant expressions of generosity and kindness, theorizing that altruism ensures the survival of genes through one’s kin. So-called inclusive fitness theory basically holds that you are willing to be altruistic to another person in proportion to the advantage it will give your own genes in survival. In other words, you share half of your genes with your siblings, so you should be more willing to help them than, say, your cousin or even your nephew. This theory, however, has lately been the subject of much controversy, as some scientists have begun to challenge the theory on the basis that the math doesn’t add up. Still, for whatever reason it pleases me to promote my niece’s existence. It behooves me to give to her whatever I can to induce pleasure in her, which infects me with a glittering, light-filled happiness. Mirth, ecstasy, whatever you want to call it. We all want this for ourselves. Sociopaths, too.

  When I was in my early twenties, I learned to love a girl named Ann who had beautiful eyes and soft overgrown hair that covered her face. She was a musician. She played one of those unpopular nerdy instruments that never garner any glory or fame, but she played it beautifully. For a time in my life, my skin crawled and my body ached when I was away from her for any stretch of time: a few hours of not being able to lazily brush my fingers against her skin, a weekend of not feeling her even breath in my presence—unbearable. I felt like she was the first person who really saw me, and that allowed me to trust her in a way that I had never managed to trust a person before.

  We met on a music tour together, but she didn’t pay much attention to me until she noticed me messing with a damaged person in the group—another musician, with red hair, moderate skill, and clear psychological problems. Ann wasn’t mad, only curious. To me that was a sign that she was susceptible to me—reacting with curiosity where most would react with judgment. I asked her why we weren’t friends, knowing she would appreciate directness as a sign of honesty and courage. She was charmed. “There’s no reason why we aren’t friends.”

  We spent the next three and a half weeks together. This was in the midst of my ostracization, when the other students in my program had decided to have nothing to do with me after I had read that girl’s diary. I hadn’t realized how lonely I had been, how much I missed connecting with other people. I tried to be around her as much as I could, so much so that her friends got concerned, asking her if I was bothering her, wondering why such a good person as herself would allow such a bad person as me to keep her acquaintance. When we rode on buses together for long trips, I would sleep with my head in her lap. It was such peace. It was as if I had found a port in a storm that had been raging for so long I did not know what it felt like to sail in fair weather or to touch my feet on solid, unshaking ground. From the comfort of land, I could see how wet and cold I had been, how bereft of human contact, how sick—and I never wanted to be those things again. I cannot describe those first days and weeks with Ann without feeling an acute pain. Loneliness is never as awful as its immediate aftermath, because at the time, you are so occupied with enduring it that you can’t bear to comprehend its awfulness.

  Ann saw me as a broken thing, a thing to be fixed. And in a lot of ways, she did fix me. She taught me that there were more sustainable ways of meeting my needs and that self-control was a prerequisite to them. Before her, I had been so impulsive. I used to just leave and hope things worked out. I walked in front of cars to make them stop. I traveled with no money. I hit people. Things often didn’t work out. Watching Ann live her life, I realized that it was okay to consider the future—that living without thought of it ensured nothing but discomfort. And I wondered why I had lived in discomfort for so long.

  Part of it was that Ann sold me on forever. She said we would always love each other and that she would make sure of it. I had never heard anyone speak so certainly about something so inherently uncertain. I didn’t believe her, but she saw my thoughts and replied, “No, I mean it. Even if you killed my mother. I’m not saying that you should kill my mother, of course, because you really shouldn’t. But if you did kill my mother, I would be very angry and very sad, but I would still love you and I wouldn’t leave you.”

  It was so absurd that it seemed true. I trusted her, and I had never trusted anyone. Unlike anyone I had ever known, she told me she didn’t want to be shielded from my thoughts, listening for hours to my megalomaniacal rants about “ruining people” and other hobbies. It was so refreshing to not have to wear a mask, but I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Part of me wanted to test her tolerance, maybe even prove her wrong about always loving me. I kept confessing sin after sin, but she never recoiled. I was so used to the opposite reaction from people. I had, in fact, just been severely socially sanctioned for something as small as stealing a diary. Ann didn’t think I was a monster for these things, or perhaps she did but professed her love to me anyway.

  She taught me how easy it is to give. I gave her as much as I could think to. I bought her boots and made her things to eat and drove her to the airport. I helped her move, rubbed her shoulders, and ran her errands. I finally understood the Mexican kid’s compulsion to give me shiny pencils or why people bother keeping pets.

  It was a kind of puppy love. I was a kid and she was a kid, and we believed kid things. We reveled in finding each other, because our respective abilities to detect the specialness in each other made each of us feel all the more special. Ann loved seeing the good in someone so very bad. She loved loving someone whom the whole world wrongly thought was undeserving. Her earnest willingness to listen and to try to understand my honest ill will made me think that I wasn’t able to hurt her, but of course I was.

  Once we were in the car when we fought about something I forget now, and she began to cry. I got so angry at her. She knew that I do not respond to such emotional cues like crying. I felt betrayed, and something in me turned off. I pulled over and told her to get out. I remember reaching over her to unlock and open her door, feeling the precariousness of the city in the draft of outside air.

  She screamed at me, “What is wrong with you?!”

  This wounded me. I thought she knew.

  “You’re going to leave your friend in the middle of a strange city?” she asked accusingly.

  I didn’t understand what had happened. I didn’t understand what she was saying to me, but I understood that there was judgment in her voice. She was deciding whether I was a good or a bad person, and leaning toward bad. This was something I thought she would never do to me. I realized, after all, that she was not so different from everyone else. I could have left her there and hoped that she, too, would leave me forever so that I could throw away all of the feelings she had made me feel. As I looked blankly into her tear-stained face and she gasped for breath through her sobs, her clothes disheveled, as if her wretchedness had seeped into their fibers, it would have been easy to let her go.

  “No,
of course not. Can you close that door?” And she did.

  I saw that I could hurt her, that she had to be taken care of if she were to continue loving me. But I saw something else. That she was just like everyone else made her crossing the divide to my corner of the world all the more valuable to me. It was not until then that I began to regard Ann as a person, a human being, rather than just a thing that healed me. And if she was just a person, then maybe there were many other people whom I could learn to relate to as well as I did with Ann.

  After I finished college, I went to live with Ann in the Midwest, a place that seemed so characterless it was as if it had been fashioned out of cardboard. My parents had kicked me out of the house. I don’t know why really, but I suspect that they thought I was a bad influence on my younger siblings—I had not yet achieved my current level of self-control and at that point in my life most of my interactions were dripping with raw antagonism. I had given up pursuing music seriously, so I spent my days doing odd jobs.

  During this time I met a very sweet boy. His speaking voice was at least an octave lower than any other voice I had heard in my life, quietly rumbling below the din. Ann and I had an old dingy couch in our apartment, a dull rose color made duller by dust and wear. When I sat with him on it, his voice would vibrate through the cushions onto the skin on my back, touching me in an oddly corporeal way. I would have loved him less, maybe, if not for his voice. It was a sound that made me tremble.

  In many ways I responded to him the way that I responded to music, asking him only to fulfill me with the nuances and complexities specific to his medium. He was a working-class boy. His sturdy military build combined with a fair-haired, blue-eyed innocence fed into common American delusions about the honor and purity of soldiers fighting for God and country. He had never gone to college or learned very much in school. He wasn’t smart and couldn’t understand math or law or any of the things that I had spent so much of my life learning. But one night the power went out in our neighborhood, leaving us in the pitch-black. I don’t remember if he kissed me or if I kissed him, but we kissed each other in the dark.

  I was very happy then. I loved Ann because she understood me. And I loved him because I understood him. I could not have loved him if I had not found her first, if she had not illuminated for me what it meant to love another person, to have a stake in their existence in the world. I went from him to Ann and back again, with my only goal in life to be happy and to make them happy. I was spoiled, to be exposed to love in this way, having all of my needs met by two people who didn’t believe in labels or boundaries for relationships. Neither of them expected anything that I was incapable of giving.

  Ann is married now and has several children. We grew up together, and the friendship that began so desperately evolved into one of trusted consistency. The boy left me. I no longer yearn for either of them, having long been accustomed to their absence to the point where it is difficult for me now to remember how it was to feel that way about anybody. But both relationships were immensely rewarding—rewarding enough for me to finally see that long-term relationships could be worth the special effort I had to pay to cultivate and sustain them.

  Still, I am not used to long-term relationships. I still have not managed to keep a romantic relationship going for longer than eight months, which is a problem because I am supposed to get married. It’s not just about familial pressure. It’s a religious commandment, as important as getting baptized. I have known this and have kept it on my list of things to do. My parents don’t mention it really anymore. They got married at twenty and twenty-three respectively. They find it hard to imagine someone well into her early thirties not having a family. My mother was twenty-six when she had me. I thought she was so old when she had my last sibling, a little caboose that came along when she was thirty-seven.

  There have been instances in which I would have said yes to marriage. The intelligent Mormon sociopath lawyer, the ruthless Mormon investment banker, the intelligent but gentle non-Mormon lawyer who is generously still footing the bill for his ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s private school. The beautiful Aspie. There was the midwestern boy whom I loved, I thought. It’s hard to remember now what that love felt like.

  I might marry the current man. He has that sort of ambiguous attractiveness that seen from certain angles is Hollywood dreamy and from others reflects the usual sag of aging. His best look is four days of scruff, his hair a little longer than the high-and-tight he sports for his one weekend of National Guard service a month. (Military men are disproportionately attracted to me. Is it the perceived challenge? Or the promise of punishment if they aren’t diligent?)

  We met at church, of course. I wouldn’t preface him with intelligent, as I did my other hopefuls. He does not represent a source of genetic wealth to me, but I have also become less interested in raising a brood of supergeniuses. Even if I started now, I would probably only be able to eke out two or three children anyway, and so it’s not as important. He is clever, though, and handy. He is blue-collar in a middle-class way that seems to have gone extinct sometime in the late 1980s, the start of the diaspora of American manufacturing jobs. His hands are refreshingly rough in mine, in a way that most readers of this book will likely not have ever experienced. I like that we are from different classes, but it might bother him sometimes.

  Recently I have been thinking about the proper role of manipulation in a relationship. I have always said that everyone wants to be seduced. With this current relationship, I performed the seduction perfectly. To use a baseball analogy, it’s been my no-hitter. It was not easy and it was not always clear that it would turn out so well. (I almost think that, because I felt no expectations about the relationship, I felt no performance pressure, so I performed nearly perfectly.) I’d tell you about it, but like a baseball no-hitter, the story of a perfect seduction is actually sort of boring.

  But now that I have a relationship that seems like it could last, and I am interested in exploring that option, do I keep seducing him? I have already gotten more real, more true to myself, as the relationship has progressed. I wonder if I should step back in and “fix,” seduce, or manipulate when the situation warrants it. But sometimes it backfires: Some people would feel betrayed if they ever did find out that they were being “managed,” and I tend to respect people less in proportion to the amount that I manipulate them. Mutual understanding, however, usually means the other person is getting better at pleasing me. It is not clear to me how this relationship management is different from what people mean when they say love takes work. Why are my seductions and manipulations in the service of maintaining our good relationship seen as betrayal, but all the marriage therapists and self-help books teach people how to better communicate or get what they want out of a relationship? And yet there is something different to my paramours. Somehow they can just sense it and it bothers them in ways they can’t quite name. And eventually they all decide that there is something a little off about me, and they leave.

  Love always finds ways to disappoint. Or I find ways to disappoint love. You can kiss and touch and promise. You can give away all of your Matchbox cars and your metallic pencils, and it’s still not enough. At a point, there is nothing you can do to make someone love you, nothing you can do to make your love better or lasting, but you want it, search for it, and make every effort to sustain it regardless. There was nothing Morgan could do once I was done with her. And there was nothing I could do with the boy whom I loved in the Midwest, who played with guns, built houses, and barely knew how to use a checkbook. I wanted to marry him and make babies with him. I wanted to sit next to him for as long as I could for the rest of my life. I had little desire to manipulate him, because he gave me everything I wanted without my trying to wrestle it from him. I did not seek power over him, because I had all the power I wanted. I think he loved me. And I had no desire to break his heart. But I think I still might have.

  Chapter 9

  RAISING CAIN

  Though my drea
m of birthing a large brood of supergeniuses is no longer feasible, I still take seriously the Mormon doctrine to multiply and replenish the earth. I like children. They’re still figuring out the world, so they don’t have many expectations of me, and I’m able to behave more authentically around them; I don’t have to work on keeping my mask up the way I do with adults. As much as anyone else, I like the idea of raising little people whom I could influence and shape, though I rarely think of it in terms of producing “good” men and women. There will always be another generation of sociopaths. Children are being born every day with a genetic predisposition to feel no guilt, no remorse, no empathy. And is that really so bad?

  There is nothing keeping a young sociopath from being a great, high-achieving, functional member of society. I excel at many things, I have meaningful relationships with people, and I have a very full life. I also suffered a lot to get where I am, and most sociopaths have similar stories; as I was learning to manage my impulses and redirect my desires, I fought with family, alienated friends, and lost out on opportunities I should have pursued. Luckily for me, my parents managed to do a lot of things right in raising me, and I love them for that. It could have gone very badly, I think, and I appreciate the fact that it didn’t.