Toxic Power Couples: What Makes Them Tick?

With recent events, there has been a lot of focus on personality traits that can lead to toxic leadership. Many have conjectured about certain leaders and their cronies exhibiting traits of malignant narcissism, with dark triad features of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sociopathy. But people have not discussed as often a particular and everyday dyad that can affect a toxic leader’s rise to power: their choice of partner. There can be a complex interplay of traits with their choice of spouse (or second-in-command) that can sometimes enhance but other times undermine a person’s rise to power. There are frequent cases in which a toxic leader dominates and abuses their partner or expects an unconditional yes-person. But there are also times when both spouses link up and enhance each other’s darker traits. This “power couple” can be a daunting combination, but also sometimes a destructive one.

Fictional Examples

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth perhaps are one of the earliest and most famous of these sociopathic power couples outlined in literature. Macbeth starts out as a brave right-hand man to the Scottish King Duncan, when his thirst for power gets stirred by various influences, including a supernatural prophecy from a trio of witches, and then famous goading speeches from his wife Lady Macbeth when the King spends the night as a guest. He brutally murders the King and several others in his quest for the throne. Despite Lady Macbeth’s initial conspiring for power, after her husband ascends, she progressively deteriorates into guilt-ridden psychosis after his rival’s wife and children are also murdered; she eventually dies by suicide. She has epitomized since then a particular type of wife who, despite being constrained by aspects of patriarchy in terms of her societal role, still thirsts for power and wealth and achieves it through other psychological avenues, such as arguable manipulation of her spouse who commits the actual murders. Interestingly, she reverts to the conventional feminine trope of becoming more emotionally bound to her crimes, particularly surrounding guilt over the murder of another wife and mother, which is her downfall. But not all such women exhibit the capacity for such guilt.

Several recent fictional characters also exhibit this interesting dyad and play off the conventional expectations of what a heterosexual male–female couple should do as partners in crime. In the recent series "Ozark," Marty and Wendy Byrde start out as the stereotypical successful white-collar corporate couple, but it isn’t enough for their aspirations. Through various twisted circumstances, they are forced to establish ties with a seedy underworld of drug kingpins and local heroin dealers to survive, and they eventually find that they almost enjoy the dangerous chess game involved. Interestingly, Wendy becomes the more dominant and cutthroat of the pair, and more thirsty in her ambitions, which casts a dark light on modern feminism. What is the price of craving what sort of public or private achievements, and how far will you go in pursuit of that goal?

Similarly, the couple Fred and Serena on the show "The Handmaid’s Tale" (based on the noted Margaret Atwood novel) are also a disturbing commentary on these tropes of political ambition lurking under the overidealized image of familial normalcy. They are initially a zealous but idealistic religious couple, but the fruition of the dark vision of Gilead propels them into the upper echelons of an evil society. Through their obsession with wanting a child despite their infertility, they turn to the horrifying Handmaid rules; their entitlement leads them to justify rape, slavery, and torture just to achieve parenthood. Ironically the patriarchal rules of their conservatism are what eventually punish Serena’s conniving mix of intelligence and passivity. She tries to have it both ways and finds she always cannot. But she is still willing multiple times to sacrifice her own moral conscience to stand by her man and Gilead and to gain her precious child.

A more interesting and nuanced example is the lead couple from "Better Call Saul," Jimmy and Kim. Kim is charmed by Jimmy’s humor and impish manner; they get a thrill out of committing petty choreographed tricks together, in a low-level version of Bonnie and Clyde. However, despite some well-meaning moments, Jimmy’s moral barometer repeatedly leads him astray. They are bonded by their similar personalities and interests, but she has trouble extricating herself when she realizes he keeps getting in trouble and threatens her own success. Love blinds her to his fatal flaws that she repeatedly tries to fix because there is some goodness tragically still there like a honeytrap. It’s a heartfelt and more tragically broken pairing because they are a more complex mix of human failings.

Real-Life Examples

On the other hand, some real-life examples are brutally chilling and disturbingly lacking in any redemption. The recent conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime partner in crime, underscored the callous ways she fully aided his sickening sexual assault spree. She used her genteel appearance to trick and lure victims even more effectively and participated fully in the crimes. Why someone with her privileged background turned to this disturbed lifestyle remains somewhat mysterious, even with the reported story of her powerful father’s traumatic death. There are other reported examples of male criminals and cult leaders with close female accomplices who assist in such crimes to varying degrees and various levels of complicity versus abusive control. But some are full-fledged partners.

Overall, sociopathic behavior is disturbing, but even more so when an essentially self-centered enterprise is fueled by a willing and complicit partner, who may also be fueled by the same drive for power and cruelty in various forms in our society. It becomes a particular decrepit form of romantic intimacy when the shared goals of a pair are to harm others without conscience for their own gratification. Sometimes, the pair self-immolates through mutual lack of loyalty to each other, but other times they develop their own odd and isolated bond through their commitment to evil. We continue to watch these couples with a dark fascination at what it reflects in our own bonds and what we value within a dark and perverse form of love.