Mallory can seduce a married man for gifts and money. She will use her sexual triggers to create an all-consuming dependency in the man. It’s all the more potent when the man is in a marriage where the romance is long gone. This is banal. Sometimes, Mallory will make friends with the wife. She will convince her there is no cause for worry. She will become her best friend, without a twinge of fear or regret.
It’s harder for Mallory-the-male to hack into families like this. He may pull Bob into money-making schemes that end in disaster and loss. This is how the Mallorys of Wall Street empty many savings accounts. Or, he may seduce Bob’s wife Alice, and convince her to steal for him.
Conclusions
Mallory is insatiable, always hungry and thinking about her next meal. When she finds plausible opportunities, she approaches and shifts her manners and behavior. Here, she appears timid and modest. There, she looks dominant and arrogant. She shows astonishing range. She shifts voice and body language, posture and accent. She becomes whomever she must to move in closer to her prey.
Beneath her shape-shifting masks, Mallory does have a real and consistent personality and character. You will almost never see it, and even if you do, it is hardly recognizable as human. Psychologist Kathleen Vohs[35] has shown how priming people to think about money makes them anti-social, unempathic, and more likely to cheat. In other words, more like Mallory.
This is how Mallory sees the world the whole time. She is not like other people, in her own mind. And other people are not like her. Others are paper-thin shapes with a simple set of properties. Some are tasty, some are boring, some are useful, some are dangerous. She see a world of prey, and herself as a natural-born predator.
Attack and Capture
The Careful Nurse
She likes old people, she says, because they talk so much. The old men and women in the home seem to like her too. "She’s always in a good mood," they tell each other. "Such a good listener!"
She’s worked hard for her nursing degree. Endless books, studying, writing, exams. The other students get better marks, and she guesses they all cheat. They’ve got people helping them, and they bribe the teachers. Well, that’s easy. She can do that too. She can’t use the computer, it’s so difficult! Oh, could you check my work for me? Pretty please?
Finally, the torture is over and she gets that magical piece of paper. "Qualified nurse," she repeats to herself. "Qualified nurse!" That afternoon she’s already sending emails around, looking for work. Soon she has a gig lined up. She’ll join a team looking after a wealthy man who has cancer.
She dresses for work. Hair tied back, and the neat outfits she learned from the nursing home. Black and blue, white cap, long skirt, dark shoes. Expensive dark shoes. She has three colleagues, and they take shifts. Their patient is in his seventies and spends most of his time in bed. Before lunch they get him up, dress him, and take him for a walk in his gardens. He returns tired, and sleeps. Her colleagues prefer the evening and night shifts, as they have less to do. Despite the extra work, she prefers the morning shift, when he’s awake and talkative.
He’s an interesting man, who’s built several large businesses. They get close, always talking. She asks him once, laughing, "so how much are you worth?" He laughs back, "that’s one thing I regret. I never quite made a billion." She raises one eyebrow and tuts. "Silly man, I’m sure you have more regrets than that!"
He does. Hard work is good for you, he tells her. Yet it’s no replacement for family. He married, his wife died in a car crash twenty years before. He has a son, forty-five now. The son hates his father and visits once a week, like it’s a chore. They talk about nothing. He leaves as soon as he can, in his black Mercedes. She finds out he divorced his wife, and refused to help his father in his businesses.
It takes her almost six months to reconcile them. In the end, they hug, and she smiles to herself. The old man is getting stronger. He’s promoted her to head of the nursing team. She replaces the other team members with her own people. Now she’s the only woman. One evening, as the son is leaving, she goes with him. They have a meal in a restaurant close by, and she stays overnight at his house.
When they marry, soon after, they both know it’s the right time. Why wait longer? Destiny makes its own plans. They buy a ranch, high in the hills, and plan their dream home. The father dies in his sleep a few months later. They name their baby after him. It is a boy.
Slow Violence
We’ve seen a little of how Mallory operates, when she is out on the prowl. She preys on the most ruthless of apex predators: other humans. "The Most Dangerous Game", a short story by Richard Connell has entered part of popular culture[36]. And yet by selecting the weakest, most vulnerable people, Mallory tends to escape unscathed. Most of the damage falls on her victims. Just now and then, Mallory chooses a target that fights back, and she gets hurt.
This is how it is in a classic predator-prey relationship. The predators cull the most vulnerable individuals. This drives the evolution of the prey species towards ever greater resistance. It is not the sole evolutionary driver yet it can be a significant one for both sets of genes.
After identifying Bob, Mallory attacks and tries to capture him. We might imagine a lion chasing, and then bringing down a zebra. The zebra dodges left and right. The lion leaps, and strikes. What we actually see is a lot of talk, and then sudden and unusual decisions. The violence is rarely overt, yet it is always present in one shape or another. For as Mallory attacks, Bob fights back with all his strength.
The core of the psychopathic relationship is an "idealize-devalue-discard" (IDD) cycle. Many authors describe this cycle[37]. Anyone who has tangled with a psychopath will recognize it. The IDD cycle starts with Mallory putting Bob on a pedestal. She rains down praise and affection. A while later, she does an about-face and turns indifferent and cold. And then she breaks it off, and walks away.
The IDD cycle can run in a few hours, or over decades. Most authors see the cycle as a sign of failure. Mallory cannot create real relationships, they explain. She needs admiration to feed her narcissism, then she gets bored, goes the story. This explanation seems bogus for several reasons. It assumes there is a normative model for relationships, which Mallory fails to achieve. It draws narcissism as a kind of mental demon, with wants and needs. And above all it ignores the many psychopaths who build relationships spanning years.
It is more useful to see the IDD cycle as one of Mallory’s many tools. She is not a broken person. She is as successful on average as anyone else. Her relationships are as "normal" as anyone’s. It is just a different normality, based on the dynamics of predator and prey.
The Wikipedia article on predation[38] says:
The act of predation can be broken down into four stages: Detection of prey, attack, capture and finally consumption.
There is a stage before detection, which is hiding. Mallory must remain invisible to her prey as long as possible. If Bob sees her true colors, he walks or runs away. Exposure is crippling. Only by packing up and moving elsewhere can Mallory hunt again.
37
https://www.google.be/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=idealize-devalue-discard