Why the Most Loving People Are Attracted to the Most Heartless People
The cliche says that opposites attract, but what's really going on?
I used to wonder what made someone as loving and emotionally porous as a person with Borderline Personality Disorder fall for people who were so empty, cruel, and sadistic — people who moved through the world like apex predators instead of humans.
For a long time, in my early years of therapy in college, I assumed I must be exceptionally dumb. I also believed my love was a weakness.
Over time, I was given new reasons to replace the self hate my parents taught me, but the usual answers never fully satisfied me.
Trauma bonding. Family repetition. Low self-worth. Former golden children being attracted to former scapegoat children. The living dead needing to feed on the living.
Those are true, but they’re shallow truths. They don’t reach the bone marrow where the real virus hides.
I’d already rejected my family by the time I was barely grown, and I got custody of my sister as a teenager to rescue her from more abuse as well. I didn’t cling to sociopaths, narcissists, or people like them, out of familiarity, misplaced loyalty, or blind, brainwashed obedience.
I escaped, and unlike Eurydice, I had no desire to look back upon the underworld of my childhood.
My childhood was nonsensical and horrific: I wanted only for a chance — for the first time in my life — to be free and seen as human. I deeply wanted to experience love for the first time and to prove my value through my labor.
I’ve loved almost everyone I met since childhood. Politics, race, gender, religion, disability — I didn’t care. I sought to understand every person’s struggle and beliefs the ways mine weren’t understood or tended to.
I saw every single human as a chance to prove that the love my parents’ rejected in me had purpose and worth.
It’s still a bad habit: I have to consciously shut my love down. I have to remind myself it’s not my job to tend to all people’s emotions and that many people will use my empathy and spit me out like chewed up tabbacco.
But I still love so hard it’s like I’m a walking open wound. To watch the things humans do to each other in war, racism, sexism, envy, and fear feels like people are dismembering me slowly.
So it was never about staying loyal to the original wound. I’m not one of those people who stayed in denial over my family. Even when I didn’t have words for their disorders, I knew there was a lot of rot within them — even my father, who I loved deeply — and I knew I never wanted to live with anyone like them ever again.
But I did end up living with and loving people just like them, and I paid the ultimate price for my love.
I was nearly murdered more than once. I was stalked, raped, and terrorized.