I’ve been told that no interpersonal relationship I will ever enter will be a “healthy” or “normal” relationship for both parties involved.  I agree with this to an extent, given the caveat that the relationship involved a neurotypical.  I am not concerned about the well-being of my friends or paramours.  If I am, it is because I want to make sure they have just enough of their needs met so that they stick around.  I respect few.  I care for even less.  I’ve let many friendships and relationships die because I simply do not want to waste my time or energy on meeting their wants and needs when mine are much more important.  Sometimes I simply disappear and other times I let them die from starvation.  Can you kill that which requires no light, though?

If this makes me a cold, heartless person, so be it.  Maybe I simply need to reframe others’ expectations of relationships with me.  I will not be that person that gets choked up as you recount your sob story of your brother’s grotesque death caused by being wrapped around a tree.  I will not be the person that takes off early to care for you when you are sick.  I will be the person that it is honest and that provides assistance so long as it benefits me.  Hell if I am going to wear a mask perpetually so that you feel cared for or loved.  It just is not going to happen. However, if we can gain mutual benefit and I can shed my mask, then maybe we have a shot at a long-term friendship or relationship.  I don’t mind drifting from one person to another in order to satisfy my needs, so really the onus is on the other in the interpersonal relationship.  Take me or leave me, I don’t care.

I do think such relationships are possible.  Maybe they aren’t the Hallmark relationships that everyone seems to pine over, but they can be wonderfully symbiotic.  I often wonder what it would be like to be friends, or even lovers, with another psychopath in “real life”.  I imagine that it would be a state of utmost respect even as we had our knives drawn when we greeted.  I know myself, so I would be slow to trust another like me.  However, I respect greatly the cunning and skill of such people.  That friendship could end in a murder-suicide or with someone in jail, but it could also reach a closeness that many neurotypicals simply cannot achieve.  I would love to stare into the void and see it smile back.  Whether this could happen, I don’t know.

An interpersonal relationship between psychopaths would be the ultimate in symbiosis.  I would not expect, nor desire, compassion or love from another like me.  However, the expectations for such would have never been laid.  Even as we are prone to deceit, there would be a pure honesty as we realized that there was an acquaintanceship between equals; between two that saw the world through logic’s eyes.  Two engaged in such a relationship could take from each other, knowing that the other was doing the same – and it would not be taken personally.

Image by Wikipedia user Challiyan, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Use of this image does not imply endorsement by the image author.