That’s one of the questions that needs to be answered. My psychopath didn’t pick me out of a group and he didn’t know me before. I met him through his mother. Meeting him made me a potential target, it took a couple weeks to become an actual target. In that couple weeks he figured out what he might gain from a relationship, while I thought we were just getting to know each other.

I had a house, a rental property, three cars, and credit cards. I had a good job and the potential to get him a job there as well. I believe he saw me as the means to live somewhere other than his parents’ basement as well. These things are all highly in my favor as a potential target. As for being an actual target, it turns out I’m an excellent choice. Lovefraud.com has a quiz you can take to see what kind of a target you are. It says I’m the perfect prey.

It’s not just insecurities or loneliness that makes for being a good target; it’s also the things that make you a good person, the good qualities that come from love and conscience, like empathy, sympathy, kindness, generosity, and trust. What we value in ourselves and others can be used against us. We don’t consider that the good qualities we have might be absent in others or that those good qualities can be pretended convincingly. People who are incapable of love, without conscience, look just like everybody else. We can observe their words and actions, but if a psychopath is on his/her best behavior in the early stages of a relationship, we’re likely to have suspicions without the means to prove them.

Intellectually I knew there were people without conscience, just like I knew there were criminals. I was under the impression that they were rare. Until I recognized mine as a psychopath I had no clue that up to four percent of the population was basically just like him. I’d been presented all my life with information about how to protect myself from an array of hazards, from strangers with candy to hazardous roads. There wasn’t anything about psychopaths, and even if there was, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have been taken in by one. Psychopaths are good actors and each one has a bag of tricks.

Intelligent, educated people have been the victims of psychopaths, and even clinicians have been fooled by them. There’s some little consolation in knowing that even people with training, education, and experience can be taken in by a psychopath.  Knowing that doesn’t change what’s happened, but it alleviates a fraction of the ‘how could I have been so stupid’ feelings.