I wouldn’t have believed any warnings I received about my psychopath, especially if they came from one of his ‘crazy exes’. Who’s going to believe this sweet teddy-bear of a man is a psychopath? No one will without seeing behind the mask. He’s your psychopath now, and there are facts you should know and signs you shouldn’t ignore:

If you notice that he acts differently with you around his family, the difference is because he is a different person for you than he is with his family. He has several personas, and one is just for you.

If his mother tells you he is ‘bad with money’, it will be a huge understatement. His credit is bad but it won’t be his fault. He doesn’t save or manage his money and he only grudgingly honors his financial obligations, or is forced to honor them through the courts.

He doesn’t like to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, and if he says them at all it will not last. If you give him a gift and he tells other people he’s lucky, or blessed, or says ‘so-and-so’ gave me this awesome (whatever)’, that is not some weird way of expressing gratitude. It’s a way to seem appreciative while he’s bragging about what he’s gotten.

If he’s talking to you and his eyes are shifting side-to-side, he is not nervous. That is a sign that he is either scheming or testing you to see what you’ll tolerate.

If you ask about his past, he will be vague about the lengths of his employment and relationships, and also about their order. He won’t be interested in your past unless you make it very obvious you want him to be. If you start talking about your past, he won’t really be interested, and if you talk about past relationships you’ll see in his eyes he doesn’t want to hear any of it. He will only be concerned about what you are at present, because this is what he wants to control.

He’ll talk about himself a lot. Try talking about your childhood, or your family, or your car and see how fast it becomes a conversation about him. When he’s talking about himself, you’ll notice he’s bragging or he’s talking about how bad something was for him. Sometimes he’ll brag about how bad something was. When he talks about the future, pay attention to how he talks about it. He’ll use the words ‘we’ and ‘us’, but you’ll see he’s thinking more about material things than he is about your relationship.

When he talks about his exes, all the negative things he says about them are meant to tell you how he expects you to behave. If he talks about how they are friends or how one wants him back, it is his intent to make you feel jealous. If he talks about destroying his ex’s possessions and locking her out of the house, you should take that as a warning.

You should know he doesn’t want any more children. If he’s serious about you and thinks you want children, he’ll let you think it’s a possibility. He won’t tell you for certain until after your relationship is solid. When he says ‘two kids is enough for me’, that means the only children he wants are his own. He has one or two stories about what a great stepfather he was, but mostly you’ll hear about how the child that wasn’t his was spoiled and would not comply with what he wanted. If you have your own children, he will demand respect and compliance from them and view any interference from you as spoiling the child and undermining his authority. He will pretend affection for the child(ren) until he’s sure of you, and then he’ll pay as little attention to them as possible. He will expect you to buy gifts for his children and will be jealous of the time, attention, and money you spend on your own.

He’ll be mostly neutral when you first meet him. He’ll be friendly and smile, he’ll be polite and interested in you, but he won’t have much of a personality. When he starts to get to know you he’ll start to seem more like the kind of guy you’d like. By then he’s already decided you have something he wants, and he’ll develop his persona for you from what he learns about you. There will be some trial and error on his part. If you call him out on his flattery he’ll back it off. If you express pleasure in a nice gesture or a little gift, they’ll be repeated. He’ll have similar interests and similar beliefs. You’ll be so compatible, it’ll be great.

You’ll get plenty of attention, in person or by text message. You’ll hear from him regularly at first. Later, he’ll change the timing so you hear from him earlier or later. Sometimes it will be hours later than usual, but he’ll contact you eventually. If you ask why you didn’t hear from him he’ll give you some little excuse, and you’ll be letting him know you were thinking of him. He’ll like that. If you’re worth pursuing you’ll hear from him often and you’ll see a lot of him. You’ll have a lot of time with just the two of you, and you probably won’t realize he’s starting to isolate you.

He’ll pay for your food and buy your drinks and he’ll seem very generous. He might even turn down your offers to pay, for a while at least. Once he’s sure you like him well enough he’ll let you pay. Once you set that precedent you’ll pay regularly.

He’ll present himself as a nice guy, down on his luck but a hard worker, smart, generous, considerate, and a good father. He has plenty of people who believe that’s exactly what he is. He has a lot of Facebook friends and acquaintances, but most of those people don’t know him very well. That also includes his family, because he does what he can to control the information they receive. You’ll know if you say the wrong thing to them.

He can act nice and he can be nice, but he is not kind. Kindness does not demand gratitude or reciprocity. You should do a search, so you’ll understand the difference in a way that makes sense for you. Some other search terms for you to consider are ’emotional abuse’, with or without the word ‘covert’, ‘intermittent reinforcement’, ‘pathological lying’, and ‘passive aggressive’.

He’s interested in making money, but not very interested in actually working for it. You’ll notice that in all his jobs he was an excellent, though underpaid, employee. He was very good at his work and often played a crucial role. Some jobs he left due to other opportunities, while others he lost because of circumstances beyond his control. One or two of his employers treated him badly. These employers had poor management and/or unreasonable expectations, like being on time to work, or not sleeping on the job, or standards for performance. He’s quite lazy and rather inept.

His smartness is more of an act. He’ll be well informed on particular subjects, like baseball and NASCAR or duties he’s carried out in former jobs, and he’ll have some shallow knowledge of quite a few subjects. He’ll steer the conversation to the subjects he knows to conceal how shallow his knowledge is in other areas. He’ll be more interested in relating anecdotes about himself than in discussing other subjects in any depth. Subjects in which your knowledge surpasses his will be avoided as much as possible once he realizes what you know.

Sometimes he’ll express an opinion that seems ridiculous. Some are actually his and some he’s gotten from the media or social networking. He’ll seem open-minded and he’ll even alter his opinion to be more like yours if you appear to feel strongly about a subject. Later he’ll express the same ridiculous opinions for the sole purpose of irritating you. He won’t be able to argue his point because he isn’t at all informed, but he’ll keep repeating the same opinion.

Now let’s talk about you a little bit. He has a thing for fat women, but not because he likes them. He likes them because he thinks they are less attractive and therefore easier to keep. If you’re a chunky girl, he’s not going to be supportive of your weight loss, but he’ll pretend for a while. When devaluation starts he’ll start picking on you for food choices that aren’t like his.

If you’re a good cook, he’ll want you to cook for him. If you sew, he’ll want you to sew for him. He’ll like any nice or thoughtful thing you do for him, but you’ll eventually see that any hobby or activity that doesn’t benefit him will be deprecated. He’ll expect your spare time to be spent with him or for him.

If you do something special for him, and you will, because it makes him happy, he’ll be expecting it to be repeated. In order to keep him happy you’ll have to do something new, or something more, because the bar is always being raised. Once something you do for him becomes routine or normal you won’t get any sense of appreciation or approval, and you’ll have to try harder. He’ll let you know if he thinks you’re neglecting him in any way, so you won’t need to worry about that.

You might notice after a while that he’ll slack off with some of the things he did before, while you were busy keeping both of you happy. He’ll give you a glimpse of the old him until you feel better and before he goes back to slacking. This will continue as long are you are useful. You’ll feel happier if you don’t take a step back and compare how you’re being treated currently with how you were treated at the very beginning.

Chances are you have some very good qualities. You’ve probably got quite a bit of empathy, compassion, kindness, and love, and you’ve probably seen these qualities in him just as he’s seen them in you. This is really important for later on: The good qualities you saw in him are only a reflection of yours. He doesn’t have any of them. You fell for a work of fiction designed specifically for you, a mask worn by someone you really don’t want to know. It’s not your fault. I really do hope he doesn’t ruin your life, and I really do believe you deserve better.