Her message was long and rambling, covering a multiplicity of topics with unusual openness and candor. The email ended with a sentence that gave the rest a deeper context in just a few short words:
“O’ and when is your birthday, time & place? Astrology is important to me.”
That was the moment when I knew that the conversation was going to take a turn toward strange-yet-familiar territory.
Sane, Crazy, Clever, or Other?
An unexpectedly common scenario occurs in online dating, in which a woman portrays herself as the standard of “sanity”. Any guy she meets, therefore, must live up to her standard. This is particularly pervasive among women who have been told that they are unusually attractive-looking; the self-reinforcing validation of others’ unearned admiration gives her the license to exercise an equally unearned-yet-irresistible sense of authority in the world. This is similar to celebrities giving “normal” people advice on life for which there is no reason to expect that they would know better than anyone else, aside from being famous.
It almost seems as if beautiful women tend to take one of two roads: either she becomes an egotistically-driven social dominant (or “picky” sexual bully), or she retracts into herself and becomes enraptured by some kind of superstitious ideology. The ideological bent allows her to isolate herself from other people in a way that doesn’t seem “crazy” to her as long as it fits her needs. Superstitious beliefs, like any fundamentalistic religious mentality, allows a person to control the symbols that represent her reality — without the troublesome burden of empirical evidence to substantiate or refute them. Where facts support her beliefs, they serve as “proof” that she was right all along (i.e. every guy really does just want sex from her, after all). Where facts run counter to her ideas (being pretty doesn’t excuse her from having to make sense), she takes the defiant stance of the persecuted victim whom the cruel world “just doesn’t understand”.
In this case, the woman gave various indications that she had suffered some kind of trauma in her past, specifically around sex/love relationships. The easily recognizable signs included:
– repeated attempts to assert ideas about the “purity” of being “chaste” and having a “spiritual” relationship that was beyond the “mere physical level” — this leads either to demands of “chivalry” (kowtowing by the man) or “friends first” (although friendship almost never leads to sex);
– immediate attempts at mind-reading and “soul-seeing” — projecting her own ideals onto the other person (in this case, me);
– attempts at stereotyping my personality based on assumptions of class and status that were absent except for the profile photos (which, of course, as you’ve read in the most recent entries, are intentionally faked as a way of testing for exactly this kind of reaction, among other reasons).
She’s Not Kidding: Beware the Mind-Reader
In her case, the mind-reading was literal: after exchanging only two emails, she was gushing on about how she was attracted to my “energy” as the “dark side” of herself, a part that still “needed to be healed”, a “reflection” of her own deepest self. She wasn’t prejudging or challenging me, she wrote; instead, she simply knew me and was acknowledging the obvious based on her infallible intuition.
As it happens, I do understand mind-reading. I also know how to spot it when I see it — and it’s always amusing to see people who actually believe the vague banalities put forth as emotionally compelling “psychic insights”. I’ve never met a person who could accomplish the feat of reading minds beyond the level of a well-practiced parlour trick. The only person a “real” psychic is tricking is herself (and anyone gullible enough to believe her).
She even guessed my star sign, since I don’t offer up my vital statistics (age, birth date, etc.) to random people on the Internet — and guessed wrong. Did that deter her? No, of course not. It spurred her to explain even more about why she was actually right.
Mind-reading is common even among non-“psychics”. Many women will often try to “read” you psychologically and force you into a “type” of guy, or maybe even into the same role that her ex-boyfriend or husband played in the past. Some women are paranoid to the extent of accusing you of being their ex-, the personification of evil who has somehow tracked her down and is anonymously tormenting her online. Often at the beginning of an interaction, you will have to explicitly remind the woman that you are neither her ex-, her clever friend from real life, or some other guy on the dating site who she has met before. The weirdest part is that sometimes she won’t believe you, regardless of what you say.
Another ancillary sign: every time she would assert a belief that I would then take apart (for example, she repeatedly expressed paranoia that I could be some kind of “agent” who was “gathering intel” or “doing research”), she would claim that she was “just joking”. This is a typical tactic among people who are testing your boundaries — make an assertion or request that is strange or outlandish, then if the person rejects it, laugh it off as if you were “just kidding!” The more extraordinary the belief, the better your sense of “humour” when the other person rejects the assertion.
False Archetypes: Woman as Queen, Goddess, or Other Celestial Being
Very early on in our email conversation, the themes that underlie the “beautiful damaged woman” archetype became clear. She wasn’t some pristine, innocent dreamer or a sparkling celestial being. She was a lonely, fearful, sexually repressed human.
So what’s the point in even writing to someone who was clearly operating from a completely different reality orientation?
The purpose is to be one more reference point for her to see that her beliefs are hurting her on two levels:
– the moral level: the more she curls inward and builds a citadel of convoluted superstitious beliefs around herself, the less capable she is of connecting to another person who doesn’t exactly match her expectations. This leads everyone around her into a dysfunctional reality distortion field that results in co-dependent and abusive relationships.
– the personal level: the more she fortifies her own psyche with self-justifying non-answers to her problems, the less likely she is to ever find a functional solution to those problems that will lead to flexible, adaptive thoughts, emotions and actions.
Two key points:
Point 1. Unless you actually sense real psychological illness (which could be a wrongly false-positive impression in any case), she probably isn’t any more “crazy” than you are a “sociopath”;
Point 2. Her beliefs, to her, are completely real, and are most likely a reaction to some aspect of her life that drove her into her own imagination as a coping mechanism. She may also simply be fantasy-prone, but rarely will a “dreamy” person defy reality to the point of constructing a superstitious fantasyland of obsessive astrological predictions and compulsive religious ritualization. Many women do this in more subtle ways as you’ve seen in previous entries.
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She will most likely have extreme, absolutistic beliefs due to her past, and due to the knee-jerk reactions of others. If other people constantly told you that you’re “crazy”, you would probably retract deeper into your shell rather than hear the words and take heed of them. In the example of the woman above, she made frequent reference to her “socially inexcusable humor” and that after a sordid past of “sex, drugs & rock n’ roll”, her exterior had transformed to be “modest, conservative and a bit homey even, but my true nature is highly sensual, affectionate, sexual and passionate”.
Her dichotomous, black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking led to terror of anything sexual that also didn’t have an ironclad obligation of marriage attached. Anything less was “trashy” or “unclean” to her. In today’s fractious and commitment-phobic society, it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to understand that demanding marriage from someone you’ve never met probably isn’t the wisest approach. The man will either lie in order to get sex, reject her unrealistic demands, or maybe the two of them will have a shorter relationship that naturally ends. Make her aware of this set of commonsense alternatives upfront and pay careful attention to how she intelligently responds — or more likely, emotionally reacts.
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Given the two key points above, the only option that a man has in dealing with such a woman is to provide one more contact with a different approach to reality. The contact will most likely be brief (don’t make the mistake of trying to “save” or “change” her), but reality is already trying to tell her that she is making the same mistakes over and over every day. All you can do is provide one more exposure to the chorus of voices that are trying to offer her a guidepost to a different path.
Believe Her
Due to the prevalence of profit-driven self-help books and sensationalistic pop psychology, even the most bizarre beliefs can take on the sheen of scientific fact. The only question is which item on the shelf suits a person’s already-established, often-neurotic and self-defeating belief system. In this case, she wrote:
“I enjoy science very much so: Astronomy, Biology, Ecology, Chemistry, Anthropology, Archeology, Quantum Physics…believe it or not I’m not an airhead new age mystic, at one point in my life I excelled in science academically. I still enjoy the occasional science magazine & lecture. My… studies are science based (anatomy, medical).”
Notice that there is usually a telltale sign there, too. Can you spot it? The sign is “quantum physics” — a science so abstract that it has absolutely no use for the average person except as a quasi-religious set of mystical metaphors about a “deeper reality”, one so tiny that we cannot comprehend it in any meaningful way to guide our actions in daily life. Practically every quack, “new-age mystic”, or person with internally consistent belifs that defy empirical reality, will try to clothe their ideas in the appearance of scientific validity. An intelligent woman who is trying to assert her worldview will usually do the same — some will offer critique, others give amateur psychoanalysis or armchair psychological “diagnosis”; some proffer condescendingly superior prejudgment under the banner of fake empathy or “compassion”, and others will use some brand of religious/spiritual scripture-quoting, mind-reading and even deity invocation to claim transcendant authority and moral high ground. In that regard, pseudoscience and mysticism aspire to the same goal.
She also mentioned that she was looking for “interdependence”. This is a tactic that I’ve seen before as well — a woman who is emotionally damaged will try to find someone to “grow with” as a person. If she’s smart and understands how to portray herself using convincing-sounding psychojargon, she won’t use the word “co-dependent” to describe her ideal relationship. Instead, she’ll frame it as an opportunity for “mutual personal growth”. Notice that she will also have issues that are not best served by leaning on someone else for support, but rather are the province of goal-oriented psychotherapeutic intervention. One way to know this is if she mentions needing to “heal” in some way or another. Walk into that trap at your own risk.
The key is to believe every word she says, without buying into it yourself. Recognize what she is actually telling you. She is not a pure, celestial being, and she may actually not be crazy at all. She may be a sane person reacting to a chaotic and uncertain world by trying to impose a comforting illusion of order and regularity. In this case, it was a sad reminder than for many people you’ll meet online, their “Alpha female” facade is actually a coat of armor crudely designed to shield and protect still-unhealed wounds.
Sacrifice Yourself
In other words, when dealing with such a person (whether she is the socially dominant jerk or a sexually repressed introvert), you might have no other choice but to sacrifice yourself.
You won’t save her from herself, but you can give her one more glimpse of a different way to live. That in itself might be worth the trouble, as long as you don’t fall into the trap of condescendingly trying to “help” people who never asked for it, nor are prepared to change in any case. Maybe the next guy down the line will tip the scale and she’ll realize on her own that it’s time to change. Maybe not. Each of us is just one more voice to add to the background, until the chorus becomes too hard to ignore. Don’t fight against her or condescend to her, no matter how hard she might try to do the same to you. Believe what she tells you without buying into it, and offer her an alternative. The choice to change is hers. If she doesn’t make the choice, you’ve done all you can, or could ever be expected to do. There are always more fish in the sea.
DSR401. 