How Dating Apps Have Turned Us Into (pseudo)Psychologists
After living and dating in a big city like London, and having used dating apps to try and meet people, I can safely say that like many on Medium, I have by accident turned myself into a (pseudo)Psychologist, to survivev the levels of sociopathy I have been exposed to.
You might got get married after the Tinder via sacra but you surely will learn a thing or two about people. You will learn how relationships should never look like, ever, ever.
You will learn that there are good men, really good men. But not on dating apps. There is a reason why they are there. Because someone had enough and because of a very important factor not often discussed, how apps are built and where the first clients come from.
What causes this problem altogether?
Problem 1: Male psychology and how we are raising our men
I am raising an adorable little boy. Sometimes I have his friends over for play dates. I meet his friends at birthday parties, at a football.
As I observe their behaviour, I can safely say that men have the great capacity to become artists from a young age.
From lying to get themselves out of trouble or from getting themselves out of a task, they will tell you anything to buy themselves peace.
I can think of an episode, in my birthplace Lisbon, where we have a big community of Africans.
African mums have families of 3+ children and sometimes adopted nephews and what have you.
Their level of income doesn’t afford takeaways, microwaves, and laundry cleaning. They have to do all the work in the house, work outside the house, and manage all those kids. These women, still have to recur to a certain level of authority in the house, to keep their sanity.
In one particular case, I recall being about 10 years old and playing with a group of friends. One other group of African kids approached us.
Say his name is Willy, for the lack of a better name and privacy.
Willy starts poking one of my friends. Willy is taller and older (about 14) and we are all scared.
One of Willy’s friends, a boy of better morals ran back to warn his mother.
His mother shows up 5mn later, while we are arguing and things are escalating. Willy’s mother can see clearly from a distance what Willy is doing. She is quiet, walking down that ramp, while Willy cannot see her…
Willy turns around finally and can see his mother 5 meters away. His lower lip starts trembling and he becomes a 5-year-old. He is already winging.
By the time the mother parks herself in front of him and says ‘Willy…what have you been doing here?’ he is already sobbing and saying he didn’t do anything.
Willy was dragged back home, vexed in front of his friends and the 10-year-old group of midgets he had terrified.
Willy was going to have a tough evening at home. although the mother had power, I wonder if she ever got to change Willy and turn him into a good man.
I am sure that many of you have lived similar episodes with ex-partners, boyfriends, and husbands.
Men’s brains are so different from ours, that it is riddling.
Do we need to be more like Willy’s mother?
I think not. One thing I have learned. Vexing a man instead of cooperating with him, has not worked for me.
Listening, and collaborating, can go a long way. What women need to remember is men are pack animals and have a conscious of survival which relies on the pack working together and having each other’s back. Women have a lot more capacity to survive on their own. Men will rarely stop talking to a friend, while we will easily let go of someone who has hurt us as if they have committed a major crime.
However, women do need stronger boundaries. I live and work in the UK, where I am raising my son. It is very common in this country for women not to work and stay at home with the children. I think the impact that a mother who is 100% available to the child for every whim, is truly overlooked. I have seen mothers at school who are no longer mothers, they are servants. Their children have no respect for them and even tell them ‘your job is to cook for me’…
These children grow up to become entitled men, often misogynistic, and pair them with a woman who wants to have a career and you will face a recipe for disaster. You can meet them later in life, on a dating app.
How Dating Apps have been designed and built for…men
Dating apps have turned women into a commodity. The women who have strong boundaries can barely get a date on an app, because the men who go there are mostly looking for something easy, and quick, with no resistance.
From an evolutionary perspective, if we think that we mate to procreate and survive, the dating app has not helped much with our survival.
Dating apps have been built based on the logic of entertainment games and systems, such as poker. Yes, the AI that drives the apps is built on the same logic of poker probabilities and conditioned to show you, the people who are 60% compatible or less. If it would show you a minimum 80% compatibility (which I am sure it can) we would be married and apps would be out of business.
Hence you stay on the app forever and ever. Hence the number of people who find a relationship is not high, it’s minimal because they are likely exceptions, to be honest.
Apps need hungry men, that keep swiping and confused women who keep swiping because they think they have done something wrong, by being ghosted by a guy who couldn’t accept one of her boundaries.
Tinder is at least 20 years old and when it started, it could not advertise.
So where do you think Tinder found these hungry men, if it could not advertise using traditional methods?
It started by advertising on all sorts of porn sites and, sex forums. Men who spend their time on these sites were moved to the app with the promise of finding a woman to alleviate their tension. This is why the male fauna on Tinder looks like it dropped out of a sex party. It takes a strong liver to stomach and digest what you see on there.
And realistically, the other apps are not better. Because often, the other apps have the same people from Tinder, who are just trying to increase their probabilities of finding their next ‘victim’s.
How confused are we?
The biggest consequence of being on dating apps, for me, is not even the fact that it may lower your self-esteemin the end. It is the time wasted in chatting, trying to find someone, overthinking, and losing a notion of what I was looking for in the first place. The ‘hungry-men’ trying to pose as lambs will often groom and manipulate so much that you lose your north by being exposed to them.
We need to reset our relationship approach and standards. Women need to be empowered to understand that men think so differently that often we may think we are seeing a con artist or a psychopath.
Is he a narcissist or a psychopath?
So how do you know if you are dating more than a con artist or a loser but actually, a sociopath?
This is important to discuss because I can safely say, I didn’t realize how many narcissists and even psychopaths are out there. Psychopaths, in my view and after experiencing Tinder for a few years, are more common than we think and super hard to detect.
It is pointless that Psychotherapists tell us that we are overanalyzing and overdiagnosing. The fact is that many of us have developed Traumatic Disorder and even Complex Trauma from being on dating apps, from being ghosted, discarded, groomed, physically and mentally abused, and still, single after the promise of finding love through an algorithm.
The worst experience I have had was with a psychopath.
I dated many narcissists and they hurt like hell but, the psychopath was something to remember. I spent months reading and researching and this is how I got to conclusions. I knew it was bad because I developed an obsession with famous psychopaths, their history of origin and their motivation to commit their crimes. What I have learned is that a Psychopath has incredible control over their emotions, until they explode into anger. This is contrary to a narcissist, who will more easily exhibit meltdowns after a short period, into the relationship.
You will know that you are dating a Narcissist after date two or three days, if you are paying attention. They are very focused on how you look, and how you look with him. They always bring up their exes and complain endlessly about them. From the third or fourth date, they will start relaxing and events may trigger them to be frustrated, for example losing at bowling or tennis. Their reaction, like a 5-year-old, will say it all.
They cannot contain it, they cannot regulate their emotions, and they will ruin your day, dump the stress on you, and bounce back joyfully after a few hours. You will be feeling drained and not understand why it all happened and why you could not solve it.
The narcissists are very driven by shame. Shame is the glue of narcissistic co-dependant relationships (subject for another article really but, the key to recovery).
The keys to why we fall for narcissists and psychopaths are the shame we feel and the wanting to solve everything.
The woman’s shame doesn’t feel good enough: she finds her family of origin poor, she doesn’t feel tall enough, pretty enough, whatever. When this woman meets narcissists, she finds that keeping him is key to healing the shame. She becomes of service and a problem solver. In trying to solve all the problems of a dysfunctional person like a narcissist, they become drained and resentful.
The narcissist needs her because she is so (unconditionally) giving. He will use this type of woman, a doer a problem solver, as a therapist and discard her when she has nothing else to give.
The difference between the Narcissist and the Psychopath
A certain level of psychopathy is needed to perform. Doctors, surgeons, athletes, and mathematicians have produced great results by being able to abstract from their emotions to focus on a result. Psychopathy is very welcome in those situations. But not needed in dating.
The Psychopath has many of the traits of the narcissist. He will be very concerned about how you look, and how he looks, and is incredibly charismatic. The love bombing is also present.
However, the Psychopath is like a lawyer. They always know what to say and are masters of rhetoric.
The biggest and key differentiator is that the Psychopath has an incredible capacity to control his emotions. They will never have a meltdown. Their emotional behaviors and expressions had to be learned, as their empathy levels were incredibly weak from childhood.
However, when they hit their limit, they have monumental anger outbursts and can become incredibly dangerous.
The other thing you will notice is that they are highly performant. They are usually people with high-paid jobs, playing sports frequently and even to a competitive level while working a full-time job.
They are efficient, non-stop, and very focused. This almost seems exciting, right?
You will also notice this in bed. Sex with a psychopath is like Circus Sex, a term coined by a psychotherapist I found online, who described the behaviors I report here and have personally encountered.
It is so important to them that you consider them the best of the best they will put up an incredible performance. And they will likely do that with more than one woman at a time.
If you want to quickly screen a Narcissist or a Psychopath, ask them ‘How do you feel about…’ choose something emotional, painful.
They may even try to oblige, show some emotion and try and exhibit some morals but, their answer will always be empty. Their eyes will always be smilling because they feel nothing, in front of other people’s pain and misery, and that includes you.
You are never the only woman in the hands of a narcissist or a psychopath. They have no heart to store your love.
About the author
Carla is a mother, writer, HR technology expert with a crazy ambition to make humans more human, in a world of rising sociopathy
