Toxic Personalities in Dating: The Taker

Cameron has a pretty cool post up on his blog about a certain “Toxic Personality” type you should learn to spot and avoid if possible.

TheOne writes:

Continuing in this series of toxic personality traits, we come to the examine the value taker. This is a trait exhibited by individuals who have a great propensity towards self-absorption and a lack of willingness to want to contribute.

To compound the above mentioned issues, these individuals also may display a bewildering sense of entitlement. I’ll explain that a bit later.

Like the complainer, the value-taker can become just as easy to spot, if you learn to know what to look for. To start identifying this trait, you just have to be aware of super basic tell-tale signs that give them away.

The most noticeable trait that is rather self evident is their complete disregard towards other people’s lives. You’ll quickly note their tendency to not ask any questions about you. When they do, it’s related to what they can siphon off for themselves. It’s not about showing any actual interest in you.

So let’s assume you’re at a party, and you run to such types. They’ll come into basic general varieties.

Type 1 : The Proverbial Gold-Digger who will dig for information: What do you drive? Do you own or rent? What kind of a job? They may not ask explicitly and blatantly, but they’ll try to investigate to discover this info.

Type II: Talk about themselves constantly. Sometimes it’s the gold digger trying to impress you. Having established you’re someone of value, she is going to want to make a good impression. The most fascinating part this is that her own gold-digging prowess is limited by her lack of social skills.

It’ll sound like this: “Oh, I just moved her from Chicago, ya know I just love Chicago, but I moved out here, then when I got here, blah, blah, blah,… (2 min later) then 3 weeks later when I was on this job, I heard that…. Blah, blah, blah…”

Their story is not anecdotal, nor does it have a point. It’s not meant to entertain you, (because that’d be actually contributing something to the interaction), nor is it in the spirit of sharing and establishing rapport between two individuals.

It’s just a person talking. It’s not whimsical, insightful, educational, anecdotal, humorous, or entertaining. Just random words thrown in the air that follow enough of a format where they seem to make somewhat coherent sentences in the English language. (or a foreign language for that matter.)

To go a step deeper, individuals with this toxic personality trait often display a sense of entitlement. For some reason, unbeknownst to the rest of humanity, these people feel that they’re entitled to certain things. For this reason, they’re the worst to deal with in any sort of relationship, be it friendships, business, or romantic.

You could easily gather a handful of various businessmen in a variety of industries and they could easily tell you the common behavioral patterns amongst problem customers who suffer from a sense of entitlement.

Let’s say you had some sort of a consulting service, and you’re one of the best at what you do. Your rates for services rendered are an even $100 per hour.

A healthy person would enjoy your services, thank you for a job well done, and refer many clients towards word of mouth.

A toxic “Entitled” person would stay a half hour over time squeezing more of your services and time, (now up to 90 minutes instead of 60), and then at the end of all that, try to negotiate to pay less than the usual 100-Dollar rate.

Worst case scenario: He wasted an extra half hour of your time, paid you less than your current rates, and then may still want a refund 3 weeks later. I have no respect for these types of people. They pull douchebag moves that are driven by their self-absorption and sense of entitlement.

As usual, this is not specific to gender. Both men and women can possess this toxic trait.

What you can do about it: Get the f*** away from such people.

Sometimes, just the questions they ask you reveal enough insight that enables you to distinguish the toxicity within their personalities. In business, it’s the difference between, “Wow, your rates are too steep man” versus “I can’t afford all of that right now. Is there something else I can do or offer to make up for it?”

The latter person wants to contribute. This in fact reminds me of a friend of mine who is a fantastic kickboxer. He charges a good rate for his hourly services, but then, every so often I’d find random dudes helping him in various endeavor.

Upon being asked regarding a guy helping him build a fence in his backyard, he responded, “Oh, that’s ‘John’. He can’t afford to pay me so I told him I’d teach him and he could help me build that fence.”

I told him it sounded like the Karate Kid movie all over again! He laughed and agreed.

The point is, “John” was willing to contribute but the dude simply couldn’t afford to pay the cash required. Was building a fence exact compensation? Nope, but it was enough of an effort that was worthy.

Will everyone be willing to do what my kickboxing teacher friend did? No, but you’ll find enough people who will help you if you are willing to CONTRIBUTE in whatever way you can.

The article is pretty good.  I suggest you check out the full thing here.  I guess its part of a series of people with “Toxic Personalities.”  It can be hard to spot people who are “takers” sometimes because a skilled one will fool you into thinking they’re nice and cool, and you don’t realize they’re a complete douche until they’ve successfully screwed you over.

I’ve found the best way to deal with “Takers” is to have immense self respect.  The more confident you are in yourself, the more you respect your own time and contributions to others, the harder it is for people to take advantage of you.