We were sitting in VIP seats at a Dodgers game. I wasn’t much of a baseball fan but came for the drinks, hot dogs, and sunshine. A man squeezed his way down the row in front of us with his wife, who was shouting at him to hurry up. He sat down, and for at least half the game, she nagged, complained, and wouldn’t let up. He looked defeated.
“Easy prey,” my friend said.
It was like a lioness describing which gazelle in the herd was limping.
She was single and divorced, and had dated several married men. When I asked her what the draw was, she didn’t hesitate.
The same two words as before. Easy prey.
Then she laid out the blueprint, and I recognized the logic because my father taught me a version of it years earlier. Find someone’s weakness and you can control them. He learned that lesson from the mob. She’d learned her version of it somewhere else.
I need to be clear that this story isn’t about women; its about a type of person. I’ve watched women run this on men, men run it on women, and a man run it on another man in a friendship that had nothing romantic in it at all. Different targets, different settings, with an identical playbook. Manipulation isn’t about gender, but opportunity.
It all starts with vulnerability. If you can find a person’s vulnerability and conduct an inventory of their weaknesses, you can make your move. What comes next is what psychologists call love bombing, though predators would never use that term. They’d just call it knowing what someone needs and being the one who provides it. They become a version of themselves calibrated to fill whatever hole is there.
Disney gave us a pretty clear picture of this when they created Ursula the sea witch in The Little Mermaid. She doesn’t go looking for the confident, secure, or the well-loved. She searches for whoever’s desperate enough to trade away the one thing they can’t get back for a taste of what they think they need. A poor, unfortunate soul.
Hollywood has been telling this story for decades without ever calling it what it is. Think of Cosmo Castorini in Moonstruck. He’s aging, and one day he realizes his whole life amounts to nothing, so he cheats on his wife Rose with Mona, a ditzy redhead who does just one thing: tells him how smart he is. "You have such a head for knowing. You know everything,” she tells him. The seduction isn’t chemistry or romance, it’s finding the empty spot where his or her ego lives and filling it.
Once they’ve sunk their teeth in comes the second target: the people who might pull them back out. Friends get recast as jealous or as people who “don’t get it.” Family gets painted as controlling or as not knowing what’s best for them. My father called this the old divide and conquer, straight out of ancient Roman times. They don’t just find the weakness, they cut off every route back to solid ground.
Take our family member, a man who lost his wife. He was gutted and left unable to function in the smallest of ways. He didn’t know how to buy himself a shirt for an event because she had always done that for him, or how to dress his own salad at dinner, because she always reached for the oil and vinegar and handled it. These weren’t failures; they were fingerprints of a marriage. So he started online dating and met a woman who was waiting, listening, and coding all of it. First, she showed up with a shirt. Then she reached over and dressed his salad, replacing his wife’s rituals gesture by gesture until he couldn’t feel the difference between memory and her. Within months of the wedding, he’d rewritten his will, leaving everything to her. He died a few years later and the mess that followed is still in progress.
In Jewish communities, there’s a term for what often descends on a widower before he’s even finished grieving: The Brisket Brigade. Women arrive at the shiva with food, warmth, casseroles, and low-key availability, circling a man whose loss has made him exactly the thing my friend described.
Not every woman who shows up with food is calculating. Italians are famous for it, and the kindness is real, but so is the instinct, for some, to move toward a man whose defenses are down, whose future suddenly has an empty space in it shaped exactly like a person.
Brisket delivered during the shiva week isn’t evidence of a plan, but watch if it keeps arriving after the casserole dish should have been returned. Janice Soprano cooked up a scheme to replace Bobby Baccalieri’s beloved dead wife. She manipulated him into eating the last thing his wife left him, baked ziti in the freezer, telling him it would help him move past his grief. She was soon running his kitchen and his life.
Grief (and food) was his vulnerability. For the next man, it was something less obvious. He was in an unhappy marriage and decided to finally talk about it out loud within the earshot of a predator. A different wound, same hunter’s instinct for finding it.
This man was trying to get himself out of a long-term, unhappy marriage to a woman who had isolated him from everyone he loved: his family, his friends, his colleagues. So what did he do? He found himself a predator who convinced him he deserved better and needed to leave. “You are too good for this,” she said. So he left and was soon involved with someone threatening a lawsuit if he tried to leave her. He got out of both situations, but with little dignity, a damaged reputation, and less than half of the money he’d worked years for. He didn’t escape the pattern, he just changed hands.
And then there’s the one who fell prey to the Catholic woman, a religious narcissist. He couldn’t see the manipulation because she went to Mass every day, which apparently makes you a good person. She hid behind a house full of crosses and holy water and family photographs that she rotated on her shelves like she was working her way through a rosary. She swapped new faces in frames whenever someone was no longer useful. He fell for it, and eventually found himself without one member of his immediate family left in his life. She convinced him that his family were the bad guys, but made sure he knew she was "praying for them."Only a good Christian would disown an entire family and cover up her sins with prayer and daily Mass.
Or take our friend, financially secure and sharp, yet unable to see past the love bombing he's been subjected to. Every time he tries to pull away, she reels him back in, telling him how much she loves him and that loving him is all she's ever done. And then she pivots to a list of his deepest weaknesses, the ones that hit hardest. She'll say how sorry she feels for him for carrying these flaws, but that she loves him anyway despite them. He's left feeling like nothing even though he’s a something.
Money is part of this too. What a lot of these men and women have in common is financial security, and that’s not a coincidence. Predators don’t hunt where there’s nothing to take. The vulnerability gets them in the door; the money is why they stay.
And of course, the sex, at least for the ones in it romantically. In the beginning, they were all fucking like rabbits. Sex isn’t separate from the strategy; it is the strategy. It’s an offering in flesh, and the one thing that makes a person believe this is real and not rehearsed. One of these women looked one of these men in the eyes during sex and told him he was the only one who had ever given her an orgasm. Sure. Billy Crystal’s character, Harry Burns in When Harry Met Sally believed it too, but as fast as the ink dries on the newly written will or the marriage license, the sex dries up right along with it. Just ask our poor unfortunate friend who hasn’t gotten laid in six years.
I know that I’m making this sound like the predator always shows up in lingerie with a rewritten will in her handbag. They don’t. Male predators are just at good hunting.
There’s a woman I know whose predator never bothered with money or a marriage license, because he wasn’t after either. He told her constantly how beautiful she was, and that he’d get to “I love you” eventually. He happily came over for the home-cooked dinners she made, and he always brought the good wine, but never once took her anywhere in public. He wouldn’t introduce her to a single person in his life. He was good in bed but never stayed the night. He was jealous of her mind, and he showed that jealousy in the same breath as his praise, building her up and then slicing a small and precise cut that was just close enough that she could never tell which version of him to believe. She had the kind of body that came from daily Pilates, and mentioned once that she was lucky to have no stretch marks, even after having kids. That night, right after they finished having sex, he traced one faint line on her naked breast and said, “stretchy stretchy.” He took that physical thing she was proud of and turned it into a verbal observation meant to knock her off the pedestal. It worked.
Friendships with predators are no exception. It happens often.
A young, good-looking guy found himself in what wasn’t a romance but a friendship. The friend told him constantly how much he believed in him, how he’d always have his back. He also knew this guy struggled with depression, and he used that knowledge the way a surgeon uses a map of the body: to find exactly where to cut. In the same conversation, the praise would curdle into cruelty, the worst things he could say, delivered right alongside the warmth, so his target could never fully brace for it. He later learned it wasn’t a one-time cruelty but a pattern run on girlfriends and guy friends alike, on nearly everyone who got close enough to be useful.
Every person in these stories is smart, talented, and successful. None of them are fools in any other part of their lives, and yet every one of them walked straight into it, eyes wide open. If intelligence were any kind of vaccine against this, none of these people would have gotten anywhere near it. They’re not the exception to the pattern; they’re the target.
That whiplash between devotion and cruelty has a name clinicians who treat survivors of narcissistic abuse use often: the idealize, devalue, discard cycle, a pattern that’s drawn growing clinical attention in narcissistic and psychopathic relational abuse. Idealize is the love bombing. Devaluation is the insults and the withdrawal, delivered close enough to the affection that you can’t tell which version is real. Discard comes once you’re no longer useful, sometimes with cruelty, because you were never really a person to them, just a supply.
That’s why this happens even without money or marriage on the table. For some people, the supply isn’t financial, it’s the power itself, watching someone orbit them, doubt themselves, and keep coming back.
It works because intermittent reinforcement, warmth then cruelty then warmth again, is one of the strongest conditioning mechanisms psychology has documented. B.F. Skinner’s research on reinforcement schedules found that rewards delivered unpredictably produce behavior far more resistant than rewards delivered every time. Vegas figured this out long before psychology gave it a name. It’s the same principle a slot machine runs on. Applied to relationships, it’s more addictive than steady kindness or steady cruelty alone, because the brain keeps chasing the return of the good version.
Sadly, the person on the receiving end of this behavior usually plays some role in their own undoing.
Hunger that goes unspoken becomes hunger that gets exploited. If you’re not getting what you need and you say nothing, you’re a door left open. But the door being open doesn’t make the break-in legal. The predator didn’t stumble into these situations. They identified the need and executed the plan.
These people are narcissists who move through the wreckage they leave with an absence of guilt. It doesn’t register the way it would for someone who was ever really in it for the other person, because they weren’t. They were in it for what that person represented: a need they could fill, a life or a role they could step into, a person they could, in my father’s words, control.
Underneath it all, most of these individuals are lesser than. They’re jealous of what they can never have honestly: the talent, the success, the advanced degree, the status, the whole and functioning person, because building any of that themselves takes years they were never willing to put in. It’s easier to walk into a life somebody else worked for and take it. Or to find the most talented person in the room and take them apart for sport, not because they hate that person, but because that person’s existence is a mirror, and the reflection is unbearable.
We’re much more comfortable calling these people complicated, or damaged, or misunderstood. Maybe some of them are all of those things, but damage doesn’t excuse predation. Complicated doesn’t explain a detailed set of weaknesses and a rewritten will. There was a plan, a target, and an execution. That isn’t complicated.
None of this is an attack. It’s an observation I keep making again and again, with people who never see it coming. I was raised by an Italian mobster whose playbook came right out of The Godfather, so I learned early how to spot a predator before they’d finished sizing me up. I’m not angry when I write this. I’m just tired of watching these vultures circle the people I care about, picking away at whatever’s left unguarded.
The only thing about this sick pattern of abuse that offers any comfort is that most of these people end up where they deserve to be: alone. Or they move on to whoever’s next, because that’s what a predator does when the hunt is over, and there’s nothing left to take. My father was right. Find a person’s weakness, and you can control them. What he left out was that knowing your weakness is the only way to protect yourself, and there’s nothing weak about that.
Stay tuned for my new book: Love Bombing for Dummies: How to Spot It Before They Rewrite Your Will (just kidding).
Very astute and describes, in some ways, what my stepson is going through, with a wife who holds no financial power at all, but seems to have "svengalied" him into an extreme way of life that harmed their daughter. Even after the consequences, no one can understand why he's still with her.