Geez. That’s scary. Thanks for the enlightenment!
I will say, however, that I know a few anxious, empathic women who would not fall for a sociopath. I feel like there has to be something added, no? Like an absence of street smarts. And maybe also an attraction to money, appearance, etc? Because I think it would become clear pretty quickly that someone’s core is not deep or loving. I feel like you can tell fairly quickly by remarks they make, how they treat others in business, what they’re interested in (like accumulation, appearance, money and “winning” over achievement, art, nature, animals, the lives of other humans, being there for family, etc.).
In fact, I heard of a statement by a psychologist to a family member of mine that people you date will reveal who they are on the very first date. I found that interesting and thought about it in relation to my life and what friends and family have told me about dates and relationships. Sounds true. We all drop heavy clues.
I was eating lunch a couple days ago and this horrid young woman was chatting loudly next to me with a guy she was on a date with. Ugh. It was hard to tune them out. She mocked him for being a Pisces after asking him his sign, “ew! Just kidding!” said she has a “dark side” and told him “I used to be a bad person in high school.”
Based on things she was saying (“I don’t feel sorry for people who bring it on themselves”, etc.) I thought man, you still are. But she surrounded those statements with charming things about how healthy she is, how much she cares for children, what a hard worker she is.
I feel like people like FD reveal themselves if you’re paying attention.
I posted earlier a brief VF article that gives some insight into how JD (referred to as Farber in the article) got entangled with FD. By the time she realized that he could be a threat to her life, she was already deep in with kids and the outward, at least, vision of that dollhouse NYT wedding page mirage of married life, which may have blinded her to the downward spiral she was on earlier.
Plus, JD was very empathetic, gaslighted by FD, and FD was so violent that he was willing and able to kill (her as well as himself) which isn't really the norm (though all too common), but clearly it took some time for her to realize it was this serious. She knew early on they were different in that he loved those blood and guts violent movies and she couldn't take it, but even at that point, it's easy to just attribute that to personal difference, after all theaters are filled with people taking that in yet they don't all go out and kill people close to them.
I think the small suggestions in this article gives an idea of how women are socialized to overlook the kinds of warning signs that present earlier on, in favor of the view of the "perfect married life" which we know is not so perfect underneath, even if it doesn't stoop so low as to murder. There are so many women in JDs position who "settle" or overlook problems, sometimes even warning signs, because societal indicators (as well as the perpetrators themselves) direct them to, and they think it is their problem, not the other person. And then there are the kids, which makes escape all the more difficult and again social norms push against this.
Here's the article, aptly titled "Window shopping for a life":
With Accused Wife-Murderer Fotis Dulos on Life Support, the Grim End of a Perfect Couple
"Farber soon tired of the Manhattan scene, craving light, air, and solitude, and took off for Aspen and Los Angeles. When she married Dulos, she was in search of a solid future with a husband she loved, and badly wanted to be a mom. Both she and Dulos were athletes: He was a water-skier, and she was a nationally ranked junior squash player when she went to Saint Ann’s. She kept writing a bit but basically took care of the kids. Many years earlier, she had written in an essay—extremely semi-ironically, in the Gen X style—that this was the life she wanted. “The
New York Times wedding pages held a hypnotic sway over me since I discovered them at age 11. Entering the structured, ambitious black-and-white world at the back of the Sunday paper, I was window-shopping for a life. My young eyes filled with photo images of correctly poised supergirls, well educated, accomplished, thoroughbred.”
In many ways the story of Farber’s demise is an old one: Dulos reportedly began an affair with a Venezuelan woman, Michelle Troconis, and the couple later began divorce proceedings. Because Farber’s family was a primary source of Dulos’s funds to run his development business—her parents gave him many loans—he also considered the dissolution of the marriage the beginning of the end of his financial freedom. Their divorce documents include Farber explaining that Dulos had threatened to take the children to Greece and that she was afraid he would harm her.
The perfect life they had created together was no more. As a child, Farber played with dollhouses, she wrote, making her mother take her to the Museum of the City of New York to gaze at the ones there. “Huge houses, lit up, from the Edith Wharton age of New York society, when little rich girls played and were bedazzled by swank ’20s parties, maids being pinched by the master of the house at the top of the servants’ stairway.” She imagined a time when she “could write plays, live on Park Avenue in the ’60s in a ‘perfect eight’ with a fireplace and service entrance, and supervise our New York calendars” for her family."
