Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

Chapter 8 LOVE ME NOT

When I was eighteen years old, I was an exchange student in Brazil. There I was enthralled by a new way of thinking of love. Naturally, I saw love as something to be achieved, because achievement was the lens through which I viewed everything. This meant that my study of love would be a study in seduction.

Watching the endless string of B-movies on Brazilian TV gave me a rough blueprint of what love was, and of course, I was a quick study. You really can learn almost all you need to know on television. Love is not a hard kind of con; it doesn’t require all that much subtlety. People are so starved for love that the usual manipulations really do work—the fleeting touches, the vague statements of feeling and devotion, the powerful embraces as passionate in parting as in their initial entanglement. Any soap opera could show you that love is most tantalizing in its evanescence. Its nature is to shift constantly through states of being—condensing into dense beads of sweat on hot skin only to disappear into the air, thick with promises of something more, of something better simply because it has yet to come.

Brazil was the perfect place to learn about love and touching. By the time I arrived there, I had forgotten—or never really knew—what it felt like to be touched tenderly. The sense memories of the kisses my mother must have given me in my childhood were eclipsed by the sensations of playground fisticuffs I regularly experienced as I grew older. But those knocks were replaced in my adolescence by the constancy of hardly ever being touched at all. And I didn’t like any extreme shows of emotion—not the stumbling, ogre arms of my grandparents reaching out to wrap me up in their old-person auras, nor the ugly contortions of anger or sadness or incipient tears that would regularly crumple the faces of my family members through our various sagas of dysfunction. It felt like people were manipulating or even bullying me to react in some way of which I was uncertain, as if they were pushing me to the edge of an emotional precipice. I rarely jumped.

That was the life I had left behind. But thousands of miles away from home, touching and physical displays of emotion were a part of the intrigue of love. And love was such a thrill—a page turner—that I knew I wanted to play. Brazilians kissed and embraced upon every meeting and departure. They played with each other’s feelings like it was nothing or everything at once, at turns feigning sympathetic outrage or passionate emotional bruising. Their hips were sexually possessed: At the time, a popular dance was hitting the clubs of Rio called the bottle dance, in which a woman or man would gyrate over an open beer bottle placed on the floor. Sensuality was everywhere. I was not prepared for the three-year-olds I would see dancing the samba in the middle of the street on workday afternoons.

Brazilians were beautiful or very ugly in interesting ways. The young people were shiny, slender, and flexible, like willow switches in shades of pale amber and dark coffee. The old and the infirm were wretchedly dehydrated, hardened in the heels of their feet and in their lower backs like petrified wood. There was a smile, or a hint of a smile, or a memory of a smile on every face I encountered. Set against such apparent despair and abject squalor, you could not help but notice a strong corporeality in the way people lived that you simply do not see in the States. Bodies—and the stuff of bodies—so saturated every molecule around you that oftentimes you felt like you were living in a baroque fantasy, except that instead of Italian marble you got tons of haphazardly poured cement, and instead of St. Theresa in ecstasy you had seminaked strangers copulating in the street. It was a wonder that people did not cry or laugh or scream or sing all day and all at once.

Part of the freedom of Brazil, besides knowing or being accountable to hardly anyone, was being immersed in a culture of ambiguities. There were not white or black people, but people of varying shades from so many generations of mixed race and ethnicity that you could not define them if you tried. I came across many transgendered people, who defied the gender norms and conventions by which I had so long felt entrapped. Some people had penises and breasts; some had neither. Having either/or was not a condition of being human. As a person who felt ambivalent about her gender, I felt kinship with these people. They offered me possibilities that I had hitherto not considered.

I had never seen such an array of human life, and it made me interested in people in a new way. Brazilians were much more than just mirrors for me to try on different personas in front of, as everyone else had been back at home. They were so different from me, viewed the world through such a foreign lens and daily engaged in such strange behaviors, that I was forced to put away the lazy, naïve thought that I had already learned all there was to know about people.

They were their own species and I was a scientist embarking on a mission to discover their secrets. The most beautiful people were always the ones who seemed happiest and most satisfied with their lives. And the most attractive ones were the ones who carried around with them a cushion of humor and goodwill, so that the particles in the air around them floated a little lighter and danced with a little more joy than anywhere else. I wanted to be like this.

I understood so much, and I practiced a lot. I was in a place filled with people I would never have to see again, so I could do whatever I wanted without any real consequences. It’s why American students abroad are often so well liked (girls) and so despised (boys). I could hardly be blamed. In the cultura de ficar, I was young and unattached and therefore expected to share my body with other young people as part of a communion of bodies, a celebration of sexuality and sensuality and intimacy. At the end of the night, individuals would become couples locked in deep, exploring kisses, and I was one of them. I learned all kinds of things in these experiments—how to suck on a person’s tongue, how to let your own tongue be licked and sucked, how to tickle the roof of a person’s mouth so that it is almost irresistible for them not to lap up more of you. I came to understand kissing as a conversation. Sometimes, it can be small talk or playful banter between goodwilled strangers. Other times, it feels like you are forging an intimate connection with another human being, reaching as far as you can inside them.

I treated love like it was something to be mastered, like becoming fluent in Portuguese. Just as I developed my language skills, I devised milestones and challenges for seduction. I would go to clubs with goals in mind, testing how close I could get to a person without saying a single word, or how frustrated I could make them without touching. I practiced on sweet high school boys and jaded exchange students, old men and transvestites.

The first person I kissed was a man in drag. He was magnificent, his body bronze from glitter and paint. He wore a golden, ornate breastplate and thong, and there were vibrantly colored feathers and gemstones in his long, black hair. It was natural for me to want to touch his red-stained lips with mine, to be attracted by his peacock confidence because it made me want to take possession of him. It was like winning a prize or a trophy, and an uncommon one, like me.

In my short life I had not met a man so magnificently adorned. I imagined him in a tiny, run-down apartment, carefully orchestrating his appearance by placing each rhinestone just so, applying each shade of eye shadow to complement the others. My attraction had nothing to do with his masculinity or femininity—it was his attention to beauty that screamed for appreciation. There was a kind of seamless courage in him that I admired and a trembling vulnerability that I wanted to exploit.

Perhaps in some way, I envied his ability to embrace his strangeness and to display it to the world, or even to know what and who he was in order to do so. I did not have this ownership of myself, not yet. Outwardly I was all confidence and openness; inwardly I was spiteful and lonely and unaware of how to relate to the world. I wanted so much to be good but only knew how to appear that way by being bad. I knew no other way to live but to dissemble and to violate. So in kissing him, I momentarily captured his earnest effort, his honest beauty, the phantasmagoria made human by his mere existence in the world. All that good intention and energy cast out into the world—I wanted to taste it in my mouth and swallow as much as I could.

It wasn’t the kind of possession that needed to be enduring. I only wanted a moment with him, to gain the feeling that I could understand or comprehend him in a certain physical way. It would not have mattered to me in the slightest if he had dropped dead the moment we stopped kissing. If a gang of teenagers had appeared that night to kick in his organs and slash his throat, I would have stood by to watch in order to enjoy the enthralling violence of it. If I had not been a young girl with a future to lose, I might have joined them so that I too could feel the satisfaction of his bones cracking and muscles bruising from my blows, these human parts I had caressed only moments ago.

After that first drag queen, I moved on to others, practicing physical affection with strangers so that I could use what I learned to cultivate emotional love with my few acquaintances. I could not even experience a kiss without making it contribute to some kind of agenda I formulated having to do with gaining power over other people. I was a calculating, ruthless animal, after all.

I now realized that love and sex had everything to do with the kinetic energy that I had admired and tried to understand in my drag queen. All I had ever read or heard or saw (not least of which were the soap operas and movies I watched day in and day out) told me that love could not be bad, that it made everything worthwhile, that it was the greatest thing in the world. And sex, though it had so long been stained in my mind with the bad, I now understood was a vital part of love. It wasn’t just the stuff of perverts and male oppression, but a means of singular connection. And all of this, wonderfully, was a means to awesome, delicious, euphoric power—for which I had a knack. Formulated in this way, the pleasure I had in the manipulation and exploitation of others—the principal stuff that made my life worthwhile—could be described in a narrative of love. What could be more redemptive and human than this?

It was such an amazing discovery. I found that I had spent almost two decades overlooking a vital entry point into the inner worlds of other people—the universal Achilles’ heel. I finally understood what it meant to kill people with kindness. People are so hungry for love; they die a little every day for want of it—for want of touch and acceptance. And to become someone’s narcotic I found immensely satisfying.

Love was an addiction for me too. I loved being adored; I loved to admire. I did not understand why people didn’t rip their hearts out and shout declarations of love in the streets, why they did not write pages and pages of love letters every day. It was so easy. It cost me nothing and gave me such thrilling satisfaction. The deeper I went with my love interests, the more they relied on me for their daily happiness, and the drunker I became with power. I generated their smiles and sighs, as if fashioning their moods from clay—I did this to them! The ecstasy of that thought was incredible.

I discovered that you could love almost anyone, really, and make them your reason for living at least for a time—whether it is an evening or a week or a few weeks. It wasn’t just that you could have more power over someone through love than through any other means, but you could have access to more parts of them. There were more levers to pull and buttons to push, endless modalities. I could bring relief to pain of which I was the direct and sole cause. I thought nothing of deceiving or manipulating them.

My love interests disappeared from my thoughts immediately upon my return to the United States. Back home, I had to do a few things. I didn’t want to have what I learned in Brazil corrupted by contrary American sensibilities. I wanted to expand and deepen my Brazilian operations, including trying to form relationships with real people in my life.

I realized I had thus far been blind. I had unknowingly denied myself the pleasures of really leaping into and consuming the emotional inner worlds of others. Why did I ever think that it was sufficient simply to make people do things for me when I could make them want to do things for me? Now that my eyes and mind were opened, I wanted to keep them open forever. Love was the newest thing to add to the long list of things I wanted to be so good at that people would cry.

I did become pretty good at it. But when you are back in your home country, you can’t start shoving your tongue into the mouth of every person you come across, especially when you attend a religious university with strict rules about that kind of stuff. On the flip side, however, because everyone around me was starved for sex, people were almost too easy to snare, especially the boys.

I remember a date with one especially innocent boy. He had all-American quarterback good looks—a dimpled wide smile showing straight rows of white teeth and fluffy blond hair bleached by the sun. After a movie, we sat in my car for a long time, because he wanted an invitation into my apartment and for access to my body (in particular, my breasts). It was long past the university-imposed curfew and against several moral code rules, and I had no real interest in him. About fifteen minutes into the date, I’d known that I had him, so I was really only going along for the ride, taking the opportunity to observe him and therefore collect information for later use. I was in it more for the chase, and he was too sick a gazelle to provide any real challenge.

As he sat there across from me, I wondered what he fantasized about in the shower and what kinds of girls he’d kissed. He was almost too generic, like he was acting out youthful boyish nervousness for a television show. With people like that, you’ve got to wonder if they have inner lives at all, or if the extent of their consciousness ends when the television writers shut off the office lights and go home.

I unsettled him. He couldn’t understand why I was so confident or why he was so attracted to me. On the surface of things, I was nothing special. I wasn’t particularly striking, nor did I have any real popularity to speak of; I in fact was odd enough that I could see flits of doubt flutter across the surface of his skin as he tried to decide if he even regarded me as a worthwhile person. With his traditional good looks, he could have attracted the attention and affections of many a blond coed, his female counterparts, so the fact that he felt so disarmed by me bred a lot of insecurity in him.

Just like the junior associate version of me had Jane, the nineteen-year-old me could have had the all-American quarterback if I’d wanted him. I could have made him do my homework, buy me things, and marry me. But I didn’t want him. That night outside my apartment, after a long while of patiently humoring him, I began to wish he would get out of my car so that I could go home to sleep. He tried to contact me many times after that date, but it was too late for him. He had already vanished from my thoughts halfway through the night.

That’s the trouble with seduction as a game played for the thrill of it. You can innocently go about seducing people, even enjoy the attention and affection for a time, and then suddenly, when you’re ready to move on, you’re left with this dependent besotted person who can hardly stand to live without you.

Typically when I set out to seduce someone, I cut the target loose as soon as I know I have won. My rationale is to treat it like sport fishing: the fun is in catching the fish, not in gutting, cleaning, and cooking the fish afterward, so why not throw the fish back to be caught another day?

I try to cultivate a persona that makes seduction easy. People are attracted to my confidence, but the thing that really hooks people is how I don’t seem like anyone else they’ve ever met, and in deliciously exotic ways. My accent is unplaceable. I am darker than most white people, but not in a way that would clearly indicate “other.” My natural style is androgynous, but I don’t care to have my clothing reflect my personality too closely so I rarely choose it myself. Consequently I frequently wear the soft, flowing dresses and structured heels that are more my friend’s taste, a fashion-forward woman who is happy to select most of my clothing. Underneath the lush material, it’s clear that I am firm, even muscular. I have remarkably beautiful breasts. But I have always been acutely sensitive to the beauty of things—in bodies and faces, and in numbers and landscapes and logic, too. Pleasure to me is paramount and I am always looking for new sources of it. The pleasure of a seduction conquest lies in both the physical satisfaction and the mental challenge of completely occupying a space in a person’s mind until it’s yours, like a squatter. The one caveat is, you may find that the space you’re occupying is more trouble than it’s worth.

When I met Morgan, I didn’t know she would be so much trouble. She had the same name as me, which constituted 90 percent of my interest in her at the beginning. It amused me to think that I could be making love with myself. She was a senior trial attorney in an office in which I was very junior, and her apparent abilities, as viewed from a casual distance, were pretty sexy.

The first time we actually had a conversation was when we ran into each other leaving the office early on a Friday afternoon, like being caught red-handed by someone you know could never tell on you without revealing her own misdeed. I knew we would take the elevator together, then walk through our building’s maze of halls for at least five minutes more, and then walk in the same direction toward the parking garage. Because I had already begun to admire her, I was a little nervous making so much small talk. I had nothing to worry about, because she instantly shared her life story with me in the time it took to get to our cars. I just listened. It’s amazing how much more effective listening is in seduction than anything else. It helped that her life had been tantalizing in a way that fed into my desire to know people’s vulnerabilities—abusive relationships, crimes, gender identity disorder, and so on.

The infatuation between us quickly became mutual. Mine was firmly rooted in my own narcissism and a desire to exploit the weaknesses in someone I had initially admired, hers in an apparent attraction to people who enjoyed hurting her. I’ve never had someone react so strongly to me as Morgan. Her growing attachment to me even warped her appearance. Her once-firm jaw began to appear weakly skeletal, and her steady brown eyes now flitted about in avoidance of mine, hesitant to rest on any one thing. I think her hair even began to fall out.

It was puzzling because she had seemed such a strong and confident person in doing her job, facing judges, juries, and some pretty tough lawyers with self-possession. Morgan had a social power at work of which I wanted to have a piece, and in particular, an outsider’s hard-won respect that I in many ways wanted to emulate. At first, I really relished the power I had over her. I got sick from enjoyment every time I noticed a crack in her voice or a nonsensical sentence escape from her lips. In those moments my breath would catch, my eyes half-lidded. My pleasure in her discomfort was very visceral, my tongue instinctively running over the jagged edges of my teeth the same way one might salivate and even become overwhelmed a little at the smell of a succulent slab of meat. I think I ran away with it a little.

Morgan couldn’t recover. I was winning by too great a margin for her to remain interested in playing the game. I tried to alleviate her nervousness in the same way you’d try to calm an overexcited animal or child—making slow movements, explaining what you are doing, assuring her that there’s nothing to worry about and no harm will come. There was a certain amount of condescension in it, an active effort to shame her into seeing how ridiculous it was to be scared of little ole me. The whole thing was a lot of work. I made things worse by getting increasingly disgusted by how weak and afraid she was. One afternoon, she canceled her dinner plans with me, and I could see that it was for no other reason than that I made her nervous. I sat in her office, staring at her with motionless judgment, unable to let myself let her off the hook. It was too satisfying for me to feed her masochism. I pushed the shame tactic too hard, and she stopped speaking to me. I can’t remember what in particular I did that ended it. Maybe I implied that she was worthless and teased her about the poor quality of her skin. I was genuinely surprised that she wanted to end things, but I shouldn’t have been—I had inadvertently made it more appealing to forfeit than to surrender.

I knew I had only one chance to get her back, so I let things cool off for a couple of months before I sent her a seemingly heartfelt but factually insincere e-mail confessing my love and apologies. The apologies were profuse but vague, so that she could apply them to whatever thing she perceived I had done to wrong her. The love was dripping with honey-hued affirmation. I named all the things that I admired about her, or rather, the things that she hoped to have admired. I was sure to include confessions of my own “vulnerabilities,” that I thought about her every day—though I thought about her almost every day as a lost object I needed to reclaim. In the e-mail, I said that I loved her several times and made sure to use the past tense, because I wanted her to feel regret for something she didn’t even know she had. There isn’t anything more crushing than lost love, and there are few more compelling motives than to recapture it. Because she never knew I loved her, and because I didn’t, she never even got to savor it. At the end, I threw in a few mild recriminations disguised as insecurities (she made me feel abandoned and bereft) and suggestions that things would be different were we to reunite (though I claimed I had no reason to believe or hope that we would). It was an effective e-mail.

A few weeks later, I heard back from her. She had received my e-mail while on an island vacation with a new girlfriend, the arrival and discussion of which precipitated a minor spat and then a breakup. It gave me satisfaction to know that thoughts of me plagued her while she lay on the beach with her lover. When she came back, we took up again. Her self-devouring weakness hadn’t gone away but seemed to have grown exponentially. She wanted more and more hurt from me, and because I was sufficiently disgusted with her and wanted to oblige her wishes, I was happy to deliver.

After a few months we drifted apart. Morgan quit or was fired from her job and fell into an abyss of eating disorders and substance abuse. I was shocked by how quickly she fell from excelling in her career as a successful trial attorney to jobless dysfunction—it was really only a matter of months. It’s a wonder that she’s still alive. I cannot take all of the credit for this extreme decline. It was inevitable in her life, due to her desire to be abused. She has almost managed to kill herself so many times you would think she would have succeeded by now if she really set her mind to it. But I guess if she died she would lose any further opportunities to suffer, and the prospect of experiencing more vast and varying shades of pain is what keeps her alive. I guess that made our relationship mutually positive: She wanted to be hurt and I liked to hurt and watch her sink further into depravity. I was only sated when she hit absolute bottom.

I still see her sometimes, but the thrill of the chase disappeared a long time ago. I never loved her of course, but she loves me in her twisted way. I made her believe that I understood needs and desires that she had kept hidden from most everyone else out of fear and shame, that I looked at everything about her and wasn’t scared of what I found. It’s true that I did. People always say to be careful not to confuse sex and love, but I think they should be more wary of confusing love and understanding. I can read every word of your soul, become deeply engrossed in the study of it until I’ve comprehended every nuance and detail. But then when I’m done, I’ll discard it as easily as if it were a newspaper, shaking my head at how the ink has stained my fingers gray. My desire to know every layer of you isn’t feigned, but interest isn’t love, and I make no promises of forever. Perhaps I do every so often, but you have no business believing me.

One of the manifestations of sociopathy in me is an ambivalence in regards to sex and sexual orientation. Sociopaths are unusually impressionable, very flexible with their own sense of self. Because we don’t have a rigid self-image or worldview, we don’t observe social norms, we don’t have a moral compass, and we have a fluid definition of right and wrong. We can also be shape-shifters, smooth-talking and charming. We do not have an established default position on anything. We do not have anything that we would call conviction. This extends, at least in some degree, to our sexuality.

Indeed, the characteristic of asexuality or sexual ambiguity is noted as one of the symptoms of sociopathy under many of the diagnostic criteria. For example, Cleckley’s criteria for psychopathy include sex lives that are “impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated.” I would say that this accurately describes mine. But I feel pretty okay about it.

A friend tells me that what she dislikes the most about my religious values is the ban on premarital sex. Of course I still manage to do a lot of things, but she worries that because sex is so much fun, it’s a shame for me to be missing out on any of it. She’s a deeply emotional person, though, and I am not at all. I can’t help but think the emotional component of sex for her is what makes it so great, whereas the emotional connection I have from physical intimacy is roughly the same as I have while eating junk food (cheeseburgers are great, too!). This is true even when I am in a serious relationship. And because it’s that way with me, being physical with someone is pretty fun, but it doesn’t mean anything to me in the way it means things to other people, and it never leads to tears (for me). This is also why seduction for me is more about the chase and less about the final act.

My lovers, if you can call them that, can sometimes be put off by this nonchalant attitude. I am shockingly comfortable with my body, which I think is a turn-on for a lot of people. I try not to be too reckless, but my indiscretion with things like nude photos must seem unusual since I’m neither a stupid teenager nor a drug-addled stripper. But then again, I have always related better to people who feel they have nothing to lose. Once it becomes clear that I just have no sense of shame or emotional attachment to physical intimacy, though, I suspect I just seem damaged, in the way of teenagers and strippers, or women with sexual hang-ups or abuse in their background. If anything, you would think that my religious beliefs would have encouraged me to think of sex as a special communion of souls, rather than the emotional equivalent of a massage.

My cavalier attitude toward sex extends to my choice of gender in partners. I was not always sexually attracted to women. I was always open to it, always was attracted to certain people for their strength or for their unique worldview, but I didn’t feel much of a sexual pull to members of my own sex—not at first. As an adult I realized that there was such pleasure to be had in expanding my horizons, so to speak, and certainly no point in making fine distinctions based on the equipment people were born with. So I trained myself. I started incorporating members of the same sex into my fantasies, substituting women for men gradually more and more until I could have a completely same-sex fantasy. Now same-sex attraction is second nature to me, and I am very satisfied with the expansion of my opportunities.

As a sociopath, I feel I have no particular sexual identity. Even the term bisexual is misleading as it implies some sort of preference. I think equal opportunity is a more apt label in that I see no reason to discriminate. In fact, I like to think of the sociopath as the bonobo of the human world—engaging in frequent, casual, utilitarian sex. I believe that ambiguous sexuality is one of the best identifying traits of a sociopath.

In fact, early in its history as a psychological disorder, sociopathy was thought to be connected to homosexuality or other “abnormal” sexual behaviors. The original Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), released by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952, listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance. By the second DSM, the link between sociopathy and homosexuality was abandoned, and homosexuality was removed completely as a mental disorder from the third DSM.

In later editions of his book, Cleckley criticized this early association of psychopathy with homosexuality, arguing that homosexual tendencies, “though of course occurring in psychopaths, are not sufficiently common to be regarded as characteristic.” However, he also acknowledged that “[t]he real homosexual seeking an outlet for his own impulses often finds it possible to engage the psychopath in deviated activities, sometimes for petty rewards, sometimes for what might best be called just the hell of it.” Cleckley related several stories of sociopaths engaged in homosexual acts, like Anna, and the story of this wealthy young scion, for whom “any idea that he might be a homosexual seemed absurd”:

Upon being confronted with his crime, the young man laughed it off, remarking, “boys will be boys.”

Even though ambiguous sexuality doesn’t appear in any of the diagnostic criteria, I find it is much more useful as a litmus test for sociopathy than some of the more publicized traits. I have met many sociopaths, in person and from my blog, who all seem to swing both (or any number of) ways: anarchist ex-cons acquitted on a technicality; big macho, married black guys; ruthless Asian American entrepreneurs; fellow academics; impoverished soldiers. In fact, I can’t think of a single sociopath I have met in person or online who has denied having same-sex experiences. This leads me to believe that this is one of sociopathy’s most consistently present traits. In fact, I rely on it more than any other one trait in making my own opinion about who is and is not a sociopath.

Surprisingly, there are a good number of sociopath wannabes who frequent my blog. I guess it is because sociopaths are often portrayed as ruthless, efficient, and powerful—all desirable attributes to a great number of people both ordinary and deviant. Visitors to my blog sometimes write to me asking whether I think they are sociopathic. I often probe the sexuality issue. I make fun of them a bit. Maybe I ask them how many same-sex partners they have had, as if I was just waiting to insult them. If they turn squeamish or defensive, I usually discount all of the other evidence indicating that they are sociopathic. Usually a sociopath wouldn’t be offended about a challenge to his masculinity or her femininity, since he or she isn’t particularly invested in the cultural norms that draw bright lines around gender roles.

Sexual ambidexterity, although not indicated often in clinical literature, is frequently a feature of fictional sociopaths. The very talented Tom Ripley is bisexual, as is the Joker from Batman (depending on who writes him). Real-life examples of murderous bisexuals are Leopold and Loeb, lovers famous for attempting to adopt the Nietzschean concept of Übermensch morality in committing the senseless murder of a young boy, immortalized in the Hitchcock thriller Rope. Fictional depictions of vampires, those allegorical sociopaths, often contain prominent allusions to a flexible sexuality, with lesbian vampires being so common that it is almost canonical for mythic vampirism.

An interesting example of a celebrity whose sex life seems to fit the sociopathic mold is Sir Laurence Olivier, who, although married three times, also had many male interests. One of his male lovers explained: “He’s like a blank page and he’ll be whatever you want him to be. He’ll wait for you to give him a cue, and then he’ll try to be that sort of person.” Olivier may not have been a sociopath, but he illustrates well how a person with a weak sense of self, fully occupied with the stunningly accurate enactment of many other selves, could himself have an amorphous sexual identity.

So it was easy to want to seduce Morgan, who resembled me enough that she could have been a role I had played in another life. But although I love myself, I would never have considered the possibility of loving Morgan. She was always a target for me. Seduction is about reminding myself of my own desirability, not about increasing my acquisitions. It is the fuel I feed my own self-love.

I see relationships with people in terms of possessions or exploits. Like the Greeks and their many words for love, I have my own brand of feelings and behaviors for both groups. The former is typically reserved for my family or people whom I call friends. For these people—possessions—I have a sensation of ownership. Also gratitude.

The latter—exploits—is for my seduction or other romantic interests. Seduction has traditionally been an all-or-nothing endeavor; at least I can’t really control it. Seductions are like wildfires: I only get to choose the beginnings and then they take on a life of their own or flame out. So I don’t typically do them with people I hope to keep around for longer than a few months. For the exploits, the pleasure is in gaining and exercising influence over them. I am never infatuated with my possessions, but I am with my exploits. And I can feel possessive of my exploits. I pursue them because they give me a thrill. Will I win them over? What might that look like? Success is valuable only to the extent that it is evidence of my power. As one blog reader said, “There really is nothing more amusing or exciting or fun than turning a smart, beautiful, resourceful person into a personal plaything.” It is a game, but I am not necessarily interested in the spoils so much as the maneuvering.

The distinction is well illustrated by the literary character Estella, from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Miss Havisham raises Estella to break men’s hearts in a form of vengeance for being jilted at the altar, and Estella willingly does so with everyone but the protagonist, Pip, who is in love with Estella. Pip notices that Estella does not actively attempt to seduce him like she does with other men. He complains, and she reprimands him:

Like Estella, I do not seduce my possessions because I don’t want to lose respect for them and because that would be unsustainable long-term. As one blog reader wrote:

I have had a few relationships that have begun as seductions and morphed into something more serious. My last boyfriend was like that, but due to the way the relationship started, he never could be satisfied that he knew the “real” me.

Both possessions and exploits get to see a special side of me that I do not bother to show others. Sociopaths often have a genius for adoring. Not all sociopaths care to use their talents so generously, and even when they do they can be possessive and fickle—devoting themselves to a relationship as long as they feel in control or benefited, but once they get bored or annoyed they’re gone. Still, when we’re trying, our understanding of your wants and needs matched with our charm and flexible personality means that we can and will literally become the man or woman of your dreams. In fact, when I love, my first step is to gather as much information as possible about every aspect of the person’s life in order to more closely resemble their ideal mate. As one blog reader noted, it can become an addiction:

The closest analogue to a sociopath’s love is probably the love of a child: intense, accepting, selfish. And finally, like a child, the sociopath will be extremely loyal. A sociopath will never put you above himself, but if you’re worth it to him he will readily put you above all others. I confirmed this with my friend, that with regard to being friends with a sociopath, “the pros outweigh the cons.”

This is not to say that my loved ones do not know who I am; most of them know me intimately and are well aware of the particular attributes that set me apart from them and most of humanity. In fact, many of the people dearest to me are extreme empaths, individuals who—with full knowledge of the tiny blackness of my heart—cannot help but place their soft, fragile hearts in my care. I reciprocate with my own brand of acceptance and devotion. I’ve learned how to do the things that constitute being generous and kind. It’s the ones I love most who are able to see how hard I try.

There’s nothing wrong with the way I approach romantic relationships, but there’s something not quite right about it either. But I guess it also depends on whom you ask. One night, I strangled my “date” in my car. We were returning from dinner, parked on the street outside of my apartment. It was late, and I remember the quiet darkness, punctuated by the brilliant headlights of passing cars. We had talked before about sexual domination, and so by then I felt I had implicit permission to bruise and strike, which is to say that I was reasonably certain that there would be no retaliation for my violence. But I had waited to act. Waited until the time was right, until that moment when I turned off the engine and hesitated. She had reached immediately for her door handle but stopped at my hesitation. I turned toward her and could see the question in her eyes; were we about to kiss?

I slapped first—hard across her face so that I could feel the memory of high, sharp cheekbone on the palm of my hand for several seconds afterward. I could see the shock flash across her face, then turn into fear, finally settling into a soft understanding, and then an open and hungry desire. She later told me that she did not feel out of control until I wrapped my hands around her neck and began to squeeze, because she knew that I was strong enough to really hurt or kill her. She said though that she trusted I wouldn’t hurt her and therefore felt adored. I wonder if this is the kind of thing that all masochistic empaths feel. If it is, a great number of people would live in silent dissatisfaction if there were no sociopaths to smack them around once in a while. She seemed to enjoy the experience even more than I did.

Her neck is beautifully long, narrow, and muscular, and especially with her short hair, I could get my hands around it with amazing ease. I might have killed her if I thought there would have been no consequences, but there were a myriad of reasons for not hurting her that had nothing to do with my feelings of adoration, not least of which was her prohibiting me from doing it again. I wanted to do it again, and I would several times after that night. I have strong arms, but more important, strong fingers from years of musical training. They are adept at applying equal amounts of steadily increasing pressure, so that the sensation one has under their grasp is of an unstoppable mechanism without regard for the thing inside it.

Erotic asphyxiation is such a sitcom punch line, but people shouldn’t knock it until they’ve tried it. The man I am currently seeing chokes me from time to time. It causes a sensation of even, measured pressure—a kind of touch that is full, solid, and constant. A gradual lightheadedness descends, fluttering sensations emerge from your depths to float up to your surfaces, and there is something like euphoria.

Dating him helps me to appear normal and socially well adjusted. He is of average height and has a respectable middle-class profession. He is handsome and well built, because I would never stand to have someone with whom I am so intimately associated be otherwise. Also, I enjoy his beauty immensely. His smile appears almost as sincere as mine, and he carries himself with a physical strength and self-competence similar to that which I have always admired in myself. We see each other several days a week, and whenever we go out, he opens doors and pays for meals and does all of the things that a gentleman would do for his lady.

In a lot of ways he looks and speaks and behaves like many of the men I have dated in the past, because I chose them to serve the same function in my life. I do not love him the way that he loves me, but that is not to say that I do not or cannot love him in my way, or that I did not love some of the men who came before him. For the most part, I treat him with kindness and generosity.

I occasionally have liaisons with men or women outside of my principal relationship. Not all of the time or as a matter of course but just when a person happens into my life whom I feel a desire to possess. I do not view these relationships as cheating, but I keep them a secret anyway to avoid drama. In my mind, any extracurricular activities would be classified as exploits, not possessions, so there’s no concern that I’ll become emotionally attached. Because they’re by their nature temporary, I don’t feel like my paramours need concern themselves with them. I understand that not everyone feels this way about relationships, so I just keep quiet. And in return for their devotion, I provide my romantic partners something they can’t seem to get from anyone else; to see a person’s hidden need and to answer it must be some form of public service. In return, they give me whatever I want—attention, adoration, money, good advice, the pleasure of their body, access to more potential targets (their friends and family), or even just someone to carry bulk food items from my car into my apartment. It’s not quite an even quid pro quo, but remarkably, no one has seemed to mind too much.

My first memory of using someone who was romantically interested in me is from kindergarten. I gained the acquaintance of a Mexican-national kid who spoke almost no English. He had a very serious crush on me and expressed his devotion through daily gifts. My favorite gifts were shiny, decorative pencils that could be purchased out of a machine for twenty-five cents.

After he presumably ran out of quarters, he would give me little Matchbox race cars that must have come from his own toy stash. I would give them to my brothers in exchange for favors or the more desirable items out of their lunch bags. It had been weeks of this when my brother Jim told me that I should tell the Mexican kid I didn’t like him, but I didn’t see why. What kindness would that have been? I would likely lose the steady supply of toy cars and pencils and whatever else he had in store for me. And he would lose whatever mysterious thing it was that he got from me, the hope of reciprocal love or the opportunity to admire me—it was not at all clear to me. Either way, I liked his love. I liked being loved, just like anyone else.

I get something different out of everyone I am involved with, and I have a remarkable tolerance for people’s idiosyncrasies. Many years later, in the twilight of my high-powered job, I met a man whose devotion reminded me of the Mexican-national kid. He was beautiful—chiseled body and features with penetrating blue eyes and short blond curls swept forward like there should have been a laurel wreath framing them. He lived with his brother in a one-bedroom apartment with two twin beds, Ernie-and-Bert style, and had been unemployed for approximately six years. At every meal every day he ate two plain cheeseburgers from the McDonald’s half a block away from his brother’s apartment. As a result, or so he guessed, his hair was falling out, so that when we made out it would regularly end up in my mouth. He spent his days playing first-person shooter games and listening to action movie soundtracks. He liked that I wasn’t put off by his quirks, although I did once tell him that there were only so many times I could listen to a complete summary of the plot of K-PAX.

I sent him a book on confronting life with Asperger’s. He had never been diagnosed, although he readily accepted my armchair diagnosis. To me it was obvious. He would talk about his frustration that relationships were “not logical or patterned” and that it would be impossible to see all of love’s “angles and perimeters.” In some ways he was my damaged twin, and that’s why I had hoped that it would work out.

Like the Mexican boy, he wore his heart on his sleeve. Unlike with the Mexican boy, I was willing to consider the possibility of a long-term relationship with him. He satisfied all of my criteria: beautiful, easygoing, nonjudgmental, malleable. But he was needy, demanding. I needed him to accept me and my needs the way I accepted him and his. Even after I was officially unemployed and didn’t have much going on, I still thought he wanted too much of my time. It was such a small point of contention, but it made all the difference in terms of keeping me happy. And I really wanted to be happy with him. He was the first person I dated seriously after fully embracing the sociopathic label. I’d had so many relationships recently fail and I wanted to believe that I could make a relationship work if I really wanted it. But I had no clue how to go about a sincere romantic relationship.

I finally decided that maybe the best way for us to understand each other was to speak our common language of rationality. I explained to him that our incentives for spending time together were misaligned. He had nothing going on in his life so he always wanted to spend time together. I didn’t feel the same way. In order for him to see my perspective on the value of my time, I told him that he should spend one hour doing something he wouldn’t otherwise do for every hour he spent with me. I even took the time to devise an eighty-item list of optional activities, which included reading specific books I had selected for him, taking up photography, or listening to NPR. I didn’t really want him to do those things, I just wanted him to see my point of view, which was that my time was roughly twice as valuable as his.

I was surprised that he didn’t take my offer. In retrospect, I gather that his feelings were hurt by my spreadsheet. I guess I had hoped that, as a high-functioning autistic, he would regard it as an effort at saving the relationship rather than an insult to his personhood. I had hoped that the trade-off to dating an Aspie was that his feelings would not be the veritable minefield that empaths’ emotions are. I had hoped that I would be able to have the stable relationship with him that I had been unable to find with empaths. I still wonder whether it is possible to have a normal, long-term relationship with someone. Will I ever be married? For longer than a few years? It seems like all I ever end up with is a string of bad breakups.

I am terrible about breaking up with people. Once I lose interest in someone, I usually prefer to string them along until they leave me alone of their own accord. I would rather have the inconvenience of this than the possibility of an emotional scene. I don’t really understand when people get emotional about things, and I can’t stand it when people cry in response to something I have said or done. I feel like it is such a cheap shot, particularly since if they know me at all, they should understand that I am not going to be able to deal with those emotions. It’s like expecting someone confined to a wheelchair to walk up the stairs, or maybe being mad at your child for not being the gender you wanted him or her to be. As one of my blog readers put it, “All emotionally stunted people get frustrated with overly emotional people. It’s like being yelled at in a language you don’t understand.” In fact, one of the only surefire ways to make me upset/angry is to cry when in a confrontation with me. So, because I want to avoid the loss of control and damage that can be done when I am upset or angry, along with wanting generally to avoid unnecessary unpleasantness, I try to avoid an emotionally charged dissolution to a relationship.

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.