In the public eye, Machiavellianism is the underdog of the dark triad as Narcissism and Psychopathy are much more widespread in media and everyday talk. Even though it isn’t always explicitly said that someone is Machiavellian, you can find a lot of examples of manipulative characters that are driven with the ends justifies the means policy such as Littlefinger and The Spider in the popular series Game of Thrones or Francis Underwood from the show House of Cards. Before we continue, it is important to note that “Machiavellian” refers to someone who is high on the trait of Machiavellianism. As with every personality trait, this one is a continuum as well, which means that everyone has a bit of those “dark” characteristics. Now that that’s cleared up, let’s get to the topic of dating.
Even though Machiavellian individuals are more prone to short-term relationships (and quite successful at that (Jonason, Li, Webster & Schmitt, 2009, as cited in Brewer & Abell, 2015)), here we're going to talk about how they manage in long-term relationships. Considering that Machiavellian individuals are highly manipulative social chameleons who are not highly trusting to others, which is basically more than enough to run the relationship into the ground, the question of how they keep their partners is more than an interesting one. That’s exactly what Brewer and Abell (2015) set out to do in their research. They surveyed 93 men and 141 women with a series of questionnaires to find connections between different mate retention strategies (a fancy way of saying “keeping your partner with you”) and Machiavellianism. Brewer and Abell (2015) found that Machiavellian individuals mostly employ strategies that are considered negative, such as intra-sexual competition and negative inducement, inter-sex negative inducement and direct guarding. Behind all those words lies a behaviour of monopolizing partner’s time, threatening to cheat and find another partner, punishing infidelity, inducing jealousy, talking down about other same-sex potential partners and so on. What’s worrying is that Machiavellianism wasn’t connected to any positive mate retention strategies such as showing appreciation, love, and care (Brewer & Abell, 2015). This sort of behaviour can be damaging not only to the relationship, but also to their partner as he or she is being emotionally manipulated. So, what can be done? Well, we have identified some of the negative behaviour that causes distress (and should be further identified) which we can use in therapy settings for treating relationship issues by correcting the negative patterns of behaviour and finding their causes. Machiavellianism features, as is true for almost every personality trait didn’t develop exclusively biologically but also as a result of personal defence and survival in an environment someone grew up in. So, if you find your partner agreeing with a lot of arguments in Machiavelli’s “Prince”, it’s not immediately a reason to break up.
References
Brewer, G., & Abell, L. (2015). Machiavellianism in long‐term relationships: Competition, mate retention and sexual coercion. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 56(3), 357-362.