Ability to Love refers to an individual’s capacity to feel affection and empathy for another person (as in a loving relationship) and to assume a care-giving role (as in parenting). When a person has an ability to love, he or she wants to engage in prosocial (as opposed to antisocial) behavior.
In order to form a loving relationship with another person, an attachment must first be formed between the two people. Attachments are strong desires to be with specific other people. You might have an attachment with your mother or boyfriend, for example. When they are not around, you tend to miss them and look forward to when you will get to see them again. Attachments develop through intimacy (both sexual and emotional) and serve to cognitively signify that person as special to us. An attachment is the bare minimum needed for a love relationship to grow, the foundation, if you will. Sociopaths are impaired in this regard. The sociopath lacks the ability to form deep, intimate attachments and is only able to form very weak and conditional ones. Without the ability to properly attach with another person, true loving relationships can never be formed, and the sociopath goes about life exploiting those who care for him.
Sociopaths do not view the other people in their lives are autonomous individuals. Rather, sociopaths view significant people in their lives as possessions. The sociopath may even superficially appear to be involved in long term, loving relationships with the people they “possess.” It is helpful to try and see through this veil of affection and to understand if for what it is, an opportunistic and exploitative relationship that will only be maintained so long as it meets the sociopaths conditions and does not impose anything onto him.
Which conditions are these? The sociopath uses others, all under the guise of love, to gratify his overblown entertainment, dominance and sex drives, or to provide for him and prop up his parasitic lifestyle. Far too often people make the mistake of witnessing a sociopath act sweet and loving to another person and assume, “That person must be normal, he looks like he cares very much for her.” Unfortunately, this “care” is best seen as a social ruse to keep his true nature out of scrutiny. Sociopaths are very good actors. Since they have likely never experienced a true loving relationship as an adult and thus do not know how it really feels, they will generally imitate the true loving relationships they have seen around them.
Does all of this mean that a sociopath is simply a hollow shell who experiences absolutely no legitimate enjoyment of other people? Not necessarily. Socioapaths do seem to legitimately enjoy some normal social pleasures when it is to their benefit to do so. If the sociopath has chosen you a possession for the moment, they may enjoy a good joke or a back-rub from you. As we mentioned earlier in this overview, sociopathy exists on a spectrum, not as a category. Not all sociopaths are completely devoid of any ability at all to experience love. Rather, some sociopaths display a very small minuscule love capacity, to more or less degrees. However these love capacity are far below the average person’s, and since their drive for social dominance is so completely overblown, we may never see more than a fleeting glimpse of it.
