Can a Psychopath feel love?

During a recent podcast interview with Teagan, a woman who’s in a long term relationship with a certified psychopath (Jackson) – a woman who herself has Borderline Personality Disorder – we got into a fascinating discussion on the nature of Love.

As both Teagan and Jackson’s “disorders” create some uncertainty about their emotional capability, and they are both prone to masking (pretending to feel something they don’t feel), the concept of love in their relationship is not as straightforward as it would be for neurotypical people.

Anyone in a relationship with a psychopath – a person supposedly incapable of the emotional state we call “love” – is always going to face questions about the truth of the relationship. Is it a “real” relationship if one or both of the partners cannot experience what we know as love?

(Side note: you’ll notice I use “quotation marks” a lot in this piece, perhaps to an annoying degree. This is to emphasize our need to question a lot of common terms that we frequently use yet perhaps barely understand. Please tolerate this abundance of grammar.)

During this discussion, two philosophical questions about love arose. I’d like to share these with you to consider in your own relationships. I hope to give some comfort to people who feel they are not capable of “pure” love, and also challenge those of you who think of yourselves as “loving” and yet behave in a contradictory way.

The two questions are:

Is love a feeling/emotion, or something more?

Can you say you “love” someone if you treat them poorly?

What prompted this discussion was a question I asked about how healthy Teagan thought her relationship was with Jackson. She said, “99% healthy”, stating that there have only been a couple of instances where she felt unsafe or unloved.

I work with a lot of couples as a coach, and very few would say their relationship was anywhere near 99% healthy. Most are lucky to top 50%. I consider 80% to be a roaring success.

So I was naturally intrigued: how could a relationship with a psychopath feel “healthier” than relationships with neurotypical people usually feel? Or more bluntly, how could someone supposedly incapable of feeling love make their partner feel more loved than “normal” people can?

Is love a feeling/emotion, or something more?

You’ll probably assume Jackson doesn’t feel “love” the way most of us perceive it. Take a moment to identify what that feeling is for you.

Maybe it’s butterflies in the stomach. Maybe it’s a warm glow through your chest. Maybe it’s an intense focus on someone, dedicating much mental bandwidth to them. Maybe it’s persistent empathy, feeling their emotions deeply, being hurt when they’re injured and feeling joy when they succeed.

These emotions are likely complemented with cognitive narratives. Stories consistently occur in your head that give meaning to these feelings, like “she’s my soulmate” or “I’d do anything for him” or “Family is the most important thing in the world”.

Take a moment to figure out what love means to you.

So, if one doesn’t feel or think any of these things (and there may be more you add to the list), can they claim to be in love with someone, or to be capable of loving? I think many people would say you don’t qualify as loving if you don’t feel these things.

But…

Notice something interesting here.

Notice how those thoughts and feelings you call “love” aren’t always present. Sometimes you’re busy working and simply forget about your loved ones for a while. Sometimes you’re even next to your loved ones but you’re angry or stressed or tired to such a degree where there’s no loving feelings currently present inside you.

Are you still in love? Do you still qualify as loving a person if those narratives and feelings are not currently occurring?

I think most of you would say Yes, you still love them. You’d claim you still love your children when you’re not thinking about them; you still love your dog when you’re angry with him; you still love your parents when you’re too depressed to feel anything.

But if that’s true, even temporarily, then “love” as a concept cannot depend on feelings.

If you consider yourself to love someone in the absence of these feelings, or in the absence of thinking about them consciously, then love must be something more than just emotions. It must be something that doesn’t even require conscious awareness of its existence.

Which opens up the possibility that someone who never has these feelings – or never has them to the intensity you have them – can still qualify as a loving person.

In other words, “love” is not a feeling but more of an idea, a set of beliefs that cause us to prioritize and value and organize ourselves around a person (or pet or vocation etc.). Feelings aren’t necessary for this kind of love to exist. Which brings us to the inevitable question…

Can you claim you “love” someone if you treat them poorly?

In other words, is love about feelings or behaviour, or both?

Nearly every one of you reading this has felt “unloved” by someone who claims to love you.

You’ve been betrayed by partners. You’ve been bullied by friends. You’ve been neglected and abused by family members. You’ve been abandoned by your leaders.

We all know someone claiming to love us isn’t a guarantee they’ll behave in a way that makes us feel loved. People who genuinely believe they love us are capable of great acts of cruelty, rejection and any other form of harm you can imagine.

In fact, many sociopathic people I’ve researched remember a specific incident in their childhood where a person who supposedly loved them behaved so horribly the sociopath decided then and there that love was an invalid and untrustworthy concept. In the nature vs nurture debate regarding psychopathy, the manifestation of anti-social traits often depends on how the person was treated by loved ones as a child.

If someone believes they love you but treat you so badly that you cannot believe love is present, then do they really love you, or are they deluding themselves?

During the interview, Teagan said that Jackson regularly anticipated and attended to her needs, protected her and made her feel safe, prioritised her, encouraged her to be her best self, and provided a lifestyle that she felt was meaningful and enjoyable. She feels “loved” by him. So much so, that what he “feels” is of little importance to her. Teagan is satisfied his actions speak louder than emotions ever have with her previous partners.

Teagan also noted that Jackson was a kind, thoughtful, protective, playful, engaged, attentive and dutiful father to his children. It’s clear to her they feel loved by him, and he is “one of the best fathers I’ve ever seen”.

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a dozen non-psychopathic neurotypical people I know personally who would consider themselves to be loving and yet treat their partners and children a damn sight worse than Jackson does.

So who’s truly loving here?

We might never know Jackson’s true motives for behaving this way, other than to assume he isn’t driven by strong “loving” feelings. And yet, if his hidden motivations drive him to behave consistently loving – even to the point of sacrificing his own joy and comfort –  should we not consider his motivation to be, by definition, Love itself?

One way to look at it is: what would you prefer? A father/partner who treats you well but feels very little, or one who treats you horribly but feels loving?

My views on this

For me personally, it was hardly compensation to hear from someone who’s abused or betrayed me that they love me. When my ex-girlfriend – who I am convinced truly felt loving feelings toward me – cheated on me and dumped me for another man, I wasn’t at all relieved by knowing she loved me. If anything, that compounded the injury. 

If an enemy who clearly hated me behaved this way, at least I’d understand it. When a loved one abuses us, we get the added suffering of confusion and discombobulation from trying to reconcile the love with the harm.

I believe too many people think of “love” as a feeling, and so when they have the feelings they consider the job to be finished, and will justify, excuse or ignore the horrible shit they do to their supposed “loved ones”. 

It’s like when a company says they appreciate and value you and yet make you redundant to save money. It feels like they must be lying.

With someone like Jackson, he’s forced to consider which behaviours would be “loving” because he doesn’t have a distracting set of emotions. He doesn’t assume he’s being a good partner or father just because he feels strongly attached to his girlfriend and kids. He has to reach deeper and carefully and consciously manage his actions toward them.

I’m not sure where this inquiry into love will take me, but this conversation has forced me to reconsider the definition of love. What I once thought of as feelings and thoughts, I’m now considering as demonstrations of behaviour. And frankly, I don’t care what the motives are (just so long as the behaviour isn’t a con leading to harm in the future, e.g. the love bombing of a narcissist).

I will no longer consider myself a loving husband, father, son, brother or friend if my behaviour doesn’t demonstrate respect, consideration, protection, attentiveness, duty, support, encouragement and patience. As far as I’m concerned, I must earn the title of “Loving” each and every day, and can lose that title any time I behave like an enemy might.

Maybe the world would be a much kinder place if people had a higher standard about what it meant to love someone; one that must be proven with actions. Maybe we could learn more about love from those who aren’t distracted by the feelings of affection, attraction and obsession, and the accompanying stories we tell ourselves to explain these sensations.