It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by metamagic
I had a friend once who seemed like a totally sane and reasonable chap. He owned a small retail business, was intelligent and well spoken and was known for always acting in a calm and rational manner.
He was in his late thirties and had never married. He had dated several women in our circle of friends but they all were puzzled by the fact that, while he had been charming and romantic, he would drop them cold once the relationship became sexual.
One night we were having dinner and he was quite depressed over his single life. After seeming to reject my suggestions of how to meet more women, he broke down and told me why he had to remain single.
He was convinced that his ejaculations were so powerful that if he ever made love to a woman, his orgasm would literally rip her apart like a close range shotgun blast. I at first thought that he was trying to have me on, but as the conversation continued, his intense emotional agitation convinced me that he really believed this to be the case.
All attempts at trying to convince him otherwise (and for the record, I drew the line at asking him to prove it with a demonstration) failed and he swore me to secrecy about his unusual condition.
A mutual friend of ours is a psychiatrist, and I spoke to him about this odd belief that our friend had and he explained to me that our friend was suffering from a delusional state.
In this case, he held a delusion (that his ejaculations would kill) to be true and was unable to see that it was a delusion. But aside from that one delusion, our friend was totally grounded in reality and everything that he did and believed followed logically and rationally from that delusion. Since he was a moral and kind man, he never had sex anyone because he believed that doing so would harm them. Totally reasonable.
I was quite surprised to find out that this is a lot more common than one would suspect (delusions that is, not killer orgasms). In many cases, because the people who have the delusion (and it is usually a single idea like "The post office has been taken over by zombies.") are otherwise sane, they keep the delusion hidden and private. These delusions are often only discovered when one traces back to find the underlying cause of a pattern of unusual behaviors, although in some cases, these delusions are discovered only after a person's death as his relatives read his diaries or journals where the delusion is chronicled.
The original delusion is often buttressed with elaborate back stories and rationalizations to logically justify why they delusion is real.
Vampiro? A very real possibility is that your friend is suffering from a delusional state. But I would carry some garlic just in case he is not.
[edit on 23-9-2009 by metamagic]