Women who remain with psychopathic partners: findings and case analysis

¶ … Women Stay with Sociopaths

Finding out that one's husband does not care about anybody but themselves and is a psychopath, could be among the worse things for a wife to hear, but it has happened, and it continues to happen in hundreds of relationship. The question to answer, however, is not why is this guy a sociopath, but instead, why is this woman staying with this man who is clearly in need of mental health assistance. It can be hard to imagine how a woman, after finding out horrendous things about her husband could choose to stay with him despite who she knows he truly is. This was the case with Mary Jo Buttafuoco. After she found out her husband was cheating on her with Amy Fisher, a teenager at the time, her world came tumbling down on her. The picture perfect life that she for a very long time she thought she had, all ended the day that her husband was publicly denounced. Yet to many's disbelief, Mary Jo Buttafuoco continued that relationship with her husband even after discovering that her husband Joey was indeed a sociopath.

One must understand that from a woman's perspective, especially one that is in love, tends to only see the good in their significant other. They fall in love, and love unfortunately blinds all. This was the case with Mary Jo Buttafuoco. Knowing that the only way she would be able to financially survive was with her husband, it was that that hindered her from moving on for a very time, as is the case with all the others who have also been in her place. Not even knowing about the term sociopath, made Mary Jo Buttafuoco not truly comprehend was going on in her husband's head. Sociopaths love to keep things under their control, and they lack any sort of remorse knowing that a person will suffer because of him and because of the consequences to his actions (Buttafuoco, p. 3).

Just as Donna Anderson explains in her writing (2010), sociopaths disguise themselves as normal people, but that is all part of their sociopathic act. Both Anderson and Buttafuoco had to learn the hard way that in order for them to be able to leave their husbands, they had to first believe in themselves. Without that sense of self-worth and that definition of being their own person, they could not survive in a relationship without their sociopathic husbands. It was the only lifestyle that each of them knew, and they had been in it for so long, that the thought of not being defined by who their husbands were, despite that they were sociopaths, scared them more than their husband's sociopathic demeanor.