Page 7 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“Some of them have been married before; some have physical disabilities; others have children,” she elaborated.

“What they all have in common is that they’re tired of dating the way that it exists today.

We do two things at Better Love. We assist people in presenting the best version of themselves, the one most capable of receiving love, and we help match them with their person.

The role that you would be filling—well, that’s for our clients who have certain personality traits. ”

“Psychopaths,” Oliver confirmed later. “You’re working with psychopaths.”

Oliver was the LGBTQ+ specialist, and the keeper of Better Love lore.

The story that Serena told of the founding was this: her son was having difficulty finding a girlfriend using dating apps.

He would message with someone for a couple of weeks, only for her to disappear when he suggested meeting up in person; or she’d go on a date, expect him to pay for the meal, and then never talk to him again.

Serena didn’t get it. Her son was educated, good-looking, and well-dressed.

She decided that the apps were the problem.

The algorithms couldn’t predict what he wanted or needed out of a partner, not the way that she could.

On paper, Serena was a stay-at-home mom.

In practice, she was the genius behind her husband’s successful businesses.

Starting a matchmaking company was a no-brainer.

She would find her son the love of his life and, in the process, make some money.

She hadn’t anticipated how large the need would be.

There were so many people who were fed up with dating in the modern world.

They were tired of people who didn’t look like their pictures, or who were attractive without any personality behind the pretty face.

They were exhausted from all the dates they’d gone on, all the times that they’d been ghosted, and felt guilty about the times that they’d ghosted others themselves. Surely there was an easier way.

The part of the story that Serena left out, the portion that was later filled in by Oliver, was the origin of the intake questionnaire, and with it, my specialty.

Though she disliked the format of dating apps, she saw the value of getting to know clients before they ever walked through the door, and thus, she devised the intake questionnaire.

Serena wasn’t a psychologist. She was a businesswoman and mom, and the questionnaire, like much of the operation, was built from her intuition.

She borrowed language from various personality quizzes, and somewhere along the line she came across the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Things like Do you frequently lie?

and Did you frequently get into trouble as a child?

were scattered among queries such as Do you prefer dogs or cats?

Serena’s son was one of her test subjects for the intake questionnaire.

When she first saw the results and realized how closely his answers aligned with psychopathy, her first reaction was denial.

It was difficult to accept that the person she’d birthed, whom she cherished above everyone else, might reside in a different kind of emotional reality.

The more she thought about it, the more it made sense.

Her son, though very bright, struggled to hold down jobs for long periods of time.

He made friends easily and lost them just as fast. On several occasions, she’d overheard him making the kinds of cutting remarks that could destroy a person, with seemingly no understanding of how they were hurtful.

Suddenly, his difficulties in dating made more sense.

Because he was her son, and because she loved him, Serena refused to see the questionnaire results as a reason why her son shouldn’t have a relationship.

Many psychopaths had successful relationships, or so she assumed.

From her research, she learned that a lot of professionals ranked highly on the psychopathy scale.

She decided that rather than rejecting clients with these traits, it was simply a matter of tailoring her services to such people. That was where I came in.

“I’m looking for someone strong, someone who isn’t easily manipulated,” she told me during the interview.

I described my previous work experience, the corporate bros, my psychology minor, how for many years I’d thought I was going to become a therapist. I told her about watching romantic comedies with my mother.

Saying the words was a pointless exercise.

We both knew that she was going to hire me.

Every experience of my life up until that point had been leading to that moment.

Serena was all about gut instinct, and her gut told her that I was right for the job.

Three years in, my specialty had proved to be in high demand.

That was the thing about psychopaths: they were everywhere.

In every racial and ethnic group, sexual orientation, and gender.

There was no single identity that could inoculate a person against that brain chemistry.

I even helped her match her son, and he’d since married, in a lavish ceremony.

I didn’t explain all that to the handsome man and his friends. I just smiled as they looked at me with rapt attention, like I was a guest on a podcast.

“Are there a lot of psychopaths out there looking for love?” asked a man across the hot tub. I couldn’t quite tell beneath the bubbles, but I was pretty sure that he wasn’t wearing a swimsuit.

I leaned forward, and everyone else mimicked my movement, so that our heads gathered in the middle of the tub in a meeting of the minds.

“There are some estimates that as much as twenty-five percent of the population could be categorized as psychopaths.”

One of the women snorted.

“I think I’ve dated a few of your clients,” she said.

The other woman nodded knowingly. That was a common reaction.

Men were constantly calling women crazy, hysterical, criticizing them for their outsized emotions; whereas men were described as psychopaths for their seeming lack of feeling, for the games that they played to woo sexual conquests.

Little did they know that women were just as likely to be psychopaths as men; they were just better at masking it.

Men were so scared of women with too many feelings that they never stopped to consider what happened when there were none at all.

“That’s so interesting. You’re so interesting,” the handsome man said.

He kissed my neck. He had soft lips, and a body that made me want to relent, but he wasn’t Noah. I pushed him away and took another shot of tequila.

Somehow, I found myself in the back of a car. The crowd had been reduced to just me and the handsome man. There was a map loaded on the driver’s GPS. I didn’t recognize the destination. I wasn’t afraid, though maybe I should’ve been.

“You know, this isn’t the worst birthday I’ve ever had,” I told him.

“What was the worst birthday you’ve ever had?” he asked.

We weren’t wearing seat belts. I was so deep into liquor and riding in a car with a near stranger that safety precautions seemed ridiculous.

“I was nine. My parents forgot. I spent the whole day waiting for them to give me a cake, presents, anything at all. They didn’t come home that night.

They did that a lot—left me by myself. They only realized what had happened when I told them a few days later.

They gave me a puppy as an apology, and then gave the puppy away when they decided it was too much work to take care of it.

They made it up to me the next year though. ”

“I can’t believe you’ve had people forget your birthday on more than one occasion,” he said. “You’re such an unforgettable person, Lexie.”

He was so good-looking that I almost disliked him, because I felt manipulated by his face. There was a kind of pleasure in knowing that no matter what he said or did, he couldn’t have me. I was already reserved for someone else, even if that person had temporarily left me for my best friend.

Somehow, we ended up in a hotel room. I didn’t remember checking in or walking down the hallway. Extreme intoxication was the closest I got to teleporting. We weren’t having sex. All of our clothes were still on and we were sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I had a really messed-up childhood,” I told him.

He laughed.

“Who didn’t? No one makes it to adulthood unscathed.”

“No, it was really, really bad,” I insisted.

“What happened?” he asked. His eyes roved my face, traced the shape of my lips.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll look at me differently, and I want you to keep looking at me exactly as you are right now.”

“What if I tell you my secret?” he asked.

He had a face that was difficult to resist, and as much as I knew there were no trauma Olympics, I couldn’t help but make childhood trauma into a competition.

“Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

I told him stuff then that even Noah didn’t know.

The thing about heartbreak is that it reveals the ways in which all tragedy is connected.

I was wounded as a child, and those wounds, though long stitched shut, continued to impact the way that I moved through the world.

Damaged tissue wasn’t the same as healthy skin.

The final girl in a horror movie could never be the same thing as a romantic-comedy protagonist.

At that point I blacked out. It was the alcohol or it was the honesty.

I didn’t remember what he’d told me or what I’d said after that.

There were things people knew, things that had been reported to the public, stories that I’d told Molly, and then there were things that were buried so deep that a shovel was needed even to penetrate the surface of my trauma.

My memory understood what reality television did, which was that life required some editing in order to be palatable.

There was no suspense or mystery when viewers were given all the information at once.

If only I’d understood the consequences of what we’d said, how our utterances were incantations of death, then I might’ve just fucked him and been done with it.