Kanika Batra says she'd encourage her future children to date a sociopath

Kanika Batra would not warn her hypothetical children away from a sociopath. She’d tell them to vet hard, then maybe date one, because in her telling a loyal sociopath is less boyfriend, more emotionally unavailable attack dog.

That is the line from Batra’s appearance on Modern Wisdom that sticks because it turns the whole self-help industrial machine inside out. Most dating coaches sell safety, softness, attachment styles, maybe a PDF with too many beige fonts. Kanika Batra, who says she has been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, sells something colder: if you understand the predator, maybe you can hire the predator.

Because I’m lifting the mask. Okay? I’m lifting the mask.

Chris Williamson opens by asking the correct question, which is basically, why should anyone believe the person who has just advertised herself as a world-class liar? Batra’s answer is that she’s exposing the mechanism. The mask comes off, she says. Fine. But the problem with a mask-off performance is that it can become its own mask, sleeker, more monetizable, better lit.

The girlfriend as private security

The wildest version of Batra’s pitch arrives when Williamson asks whether she would encourage neurotypical children to date a sociopath. Most people would answer that like the question contained a live raccoon. Batra says yes.

if they are genuinely on your team, you have someone who is willing to harm people for you. They are ride or die for you.

There it is, the whole romance novel rewritten by a claims adjuster from hell. Love is not chemistry. Love is not kindness. Love is someone who has the capacity for damage and has decided, for now, not to point it at you.

Batra’s case is not totally random. She describes her husband as an anchor, someone around whom she doesn’t have to perform quite so much. She says he sleeps on the floor during her blood transfusions. She says she didn’t feel the usual contempt after three months. Those details are more persuasive than the supervillain monologues, because they sound less like branding and more like the boring miracle of a relationship that actually works.

But then comes the catch, and it is not a small catch. The same guest who says sociopaths can be fiercely loyal also describes revenge schemes, pleasure in others’ distress and the usefulness of leaving people emotionally unresolved. This is not a Hallmark movie with better cheekbones. This is psychopathy being repackaged as devotion.

The Andrew Tate test

Williamson’s best move is to make Batra look at her own advice with the pronouns swapped. If a male influencer told men to love bomb, withdraw, test vulnerabilities and create dependency, we would all know what corner of the internet we were standing in. Batra’s defense is basically that women are less dangerous.

So, I feel like women can’t do as much damage as men most of the time.

That is the weak beam holding up a lot of the building. Batra argues she teaches women to reclaim power from manipulative men, not to become monsters. She says women usually won’t go as far as she tells them to. This is not exactly reassuring. It is the dating-advice equivalent of handing someone a flamethrower and saying, don’t worry, most people lack follow-through.

The contradiction is the useful part. Batra says she has a soft spot for women escaping abuse, but she also says she has contempt for much of her audience. She says she teaches freedom, but talks openly about control. She says she wants Christianity and forgiveness, then admits revenge is one of the hardest things to give up. That doesn’t make her uninteresting. It makes her advice radioactive, which is different.

And to be fair, Batra is unusually clear about the machinery. A lot of dating advice already runs on manipulation while calling it standards, polarity or feminine energy. Batra just removes the throw pillows. She tells women to turn off activity status, avoid false intimacy through texting and test whether a man will inconvenience himself. Some of that is ordinary boundary-setting. Some of it slides into psychological combat cosplay.

The useful warning inside the bad sales pitch

The claim that you should date a sociopath if they’re loyal is not good advice. It is a good warning. It reveals how seductive pure loyalty can sound when it’s stripped of empathy, reciprocity and ordinary moral brakes. Who wouldn’t want someone ferociously in their corner? The trouble is that relationships are not supposed to require a blast shield.

Batra’s most chilling admissions aren’t the ones about famous killers or revenge fantasies. They’re the practical ones, where emotional harm becomes a tool, a lever, a craft. She sounds less like a monster from fiction than like the logical endpoint of an internet dating culture that has decided vulnerability is for suckers.

I will never give that person closure because I know then I’ll have control over them for the rest of their lives.