I agree. I have a friend who seems to be a sociopath magnet, as she always winds up with them. Her situations are much like you said. I think the key for those people is to somehow see a counselor or therapist. They need to be told by an impartial outsider how harmful and self-destructive their relationships are.

The saddest thing is that the years wasted on a sociopath are irreplaceable. Same is true of many problems that people wait too long to solve or never solve. That’s why it’s best to establish this type of mindset early in hopes that sociopaths or other problematic people won’t be able to “woo” you in.

When it comes to women who are in abusive relationships, there a couple of very real factors that could keep them from easily leaving. The part of the Brain that decides whether we like someone or not is actually different from the part of your brain that forms an attachment to someone. This is why you often see old couples that clearly hate each other but are still together for 30+ years.

All female batterers are sociopaths, and in the first phase of a sociopathic relationship, the sociopath engages in “wooing” in which he makes himself out to be the man of her dreams. He will learn from her what she wants in her perfect man and will then go above and beyond that, leading to very fast emotional and mental attachment. They even go to the length of overly impressing the girls entire family so that when he begins his control game, the woman’s family will have a hard time believing her.

Then, somewhere around 6 months to a year later, the true colors come out, and by that point the woman may be so mentally attached that she begins to think she cannot leave because this is the man of her dreams and she just has to deal with it. Many times even when she eventually realizes she needs to leave, she cannot because he has control over ever part of her life including financial, housing, transportation, children, etc.

However we rarely hear of the prince charming he once was, we only hear the woman lament about the monster he currently is. These people are monsters, the worst kind that exist.