Introduction:
You’re in love! Congratulations. You know a person deep down to their quirks and anxieties, their gorgeous, yummy little flaws. No one understands your Baby Cakes the way you do. You have overlain their behavioral patterns onto a map of their life experience, and you can link any of their idiosyncrasies to a facet of their personal history. Never seen their bare feet? They’re still healing from a years-long, untreated fungal foot infection. Caught them eating a cotton ball? Be patient: they are recovering from trauma the best way they know how. They’ll show you their scars when the time is right. In the meantime, you love them, without question.
It all just feels so comfy and warm: the promise of affection, of being contemplated by another. Anyone who has fallen in love will know exactly what I’m talking about. These feelings are a right of passage. A long, winding journey into adulthood. And most importantly, a condition that can turn any one of us into the target of a criminal scam.
Sure, love can be healthy. Sometimes, people find partners that aren’t scamming them. But other times we are tricked into unconditionally loving someone who is way worse than us. These unworthy recipients of our affection are what I like to call love bandits. Like us, they crave affection. But tragically, their true, authentic selves are not enough to earn them the devotion of another. Thus, they prey on good people, endlessly suckling on the empath’s teet of unwavering acceptance. Love bandits can be cruel, harmful, and even dangerous to their scamees. But in so many tragic cases, the love bandit’s lack of empathy is, incredibly, the least disturbing thing about them.
This is not to say that the discovery of a love bandit’s bad character won’t bring you to your knees. Realizing they lack the capacity to respect you will indeed make you question everything you believe in. But the pain of this revelation is nothing compared to what you’ll feel when you subsequently discover that your loved one is also remarkably cringe. Because it’s one thing to be filled with righteous anger at someone who hurt you. But it’s another thing to look at yourself in the mirror and say, “For years, I dated a white man wearing a chain on his belt loop.” Or, “I married someone who is passionate about the Middle Ages.” Or, “I started a family with a collector of novelty swords.” This moment of bemused disappointment at oneself is the real harm done by a love bandit. And it can become a horrifying reality for any one of us—even you. Trust me, no one ever plans to fall in love with someone cringe. You just wake up one day in their arms and realize: you’ve been swindled.
By now, you’re likely wondering if this sort of unrecognized, chronic lapse in judgment could affect you or someone you care about. Or maybe you fear it already has. How does a person become the target of a love scam? How does a love bandit make themself so appealing to someone so distantly out of their league? How do you know if you’ve already fallen into the swindler’s sticky web? And what should you do when you identify your lover as a cringe individual? Stay calm, dear ones. I have fallen for the sick trickery of a love bandit once or twice in my life, and I certainly would never keep my findings private from my readers. In what follows, I’m going to help you understand, identify, and protect against love bandits. Together, we will learn to reject those suitors who are, frankly, undeserving of our love.
Love Bandits: The Basics
As I mentioned before, love bandits tend to be people who cannot authentically earn the respect and attention that they feel they deserve from those around them. As emotionally complete people, we tend to develop an increasingly realistic self-concept as we grow and endure life’s challenges. For some, this means breaking subconscious cycles of undue self-criticism. For others, it means fostering a more stable connection with reality through the development of humility and self awareness. For most, the emotional transition into adulthood involves some combination of these two processes. But for humanity’s most unfortunate few, this emotional growth comes to a screeching halt after high school graduation. As a consequence, the stunted individuals have a diminished capacity to understand themselves and others. The consequences of this failure to grow up are twofold.
First of all, an emotionally underdeveloped individual will have difficulty creating and maintaining healthy, non-toxic relationships with others. Now, I am no psychologist, but my parents have hired one named Janet to be my close personal friend and consultant, and she has taught me that the key to a healthy relationship is a sustained, reciprocal demonstration of empathy. Without the capacity to understand the perspectives of people in your life, you can say goodbye to mutual understanding and unconditional love. A non-empathetic person will love you only insofar as you meet their needs. And these needs, by the way, are not likely to be appropriate in the context of your partnership. For example, your lover may express a need for you to wear their high school varsity letterman jacket, in public, as a sophomore in college. And if you refuse to meet this need by, for example, saying you don’t want to wear the jacket because it’s embarrassing, they may withhold affection and accuse you of falling short in the relationship. Obviously, this sort of conditional love and respect can cause a lot of damage to the individual on the receiving end. As such, the emotionally stunted lover is not likely to win you over with sensitivity and kindness.
Second of all, the emotionally stunted individual will also be so terrifically cringe, that you will likely tarnish your own reputation by mere association with them. Why, you ask, does a person’s inability to reach emotional adulthood result in their tragically embarrassing personal interests, aesthetic tastes, and mannerisms? Let’s return to the example of the high school varsity athlete. Perhaps this individual was popular in high school, and this explains their attachment to their status-bearing, zip-up leather hoodie. During their senior year of high school, they were not behind in terms of their personal growth. They shared a culture with a bunch of other kids who were all essentially on the same page. But then, the student body forming the basis of their popularity dispersed, and each graduate went on to try new things and experience new environments. Having left their old high school stomping grounds behind to exist in new, unfamiliar settings, the emotionally intelligent students would go on to learn that stability comes from within: we must figure out who we are, independent of contextual factors, so as to be consistently ourselves across a variety of different circumstances. But the emotionally stunted high school athlete (for example) is done learning and growing. They are and always will be a high school varsity athlete, and they will not adapt a context-independent, stable identity once they move on from high school. Instead, they will bring their letterman jacket with them to college, and what was once considered a traditional flex will become the marker of a has-been. It is their lack of ability to grow up that destines them to a lifetime of inappropriate tastes, interests, and style. And to make matters worse, they’ll be just as proud of who they are now as they were on the night of their football team’s homecoming game in 2017. The point is, the emotionally stunted are unfortunately destined to confidently present their loserness to the world with the expectation that they will be embraced as a cultural pioneer.
All this is important just to make the following point. Without empathy, a person will be both manipulative and cringe. And just to hammer in a crucially important message, manipulativeness and cringe-ness are the two main ingredients in the making of a love bandit. Read on to learn how they get you, yes, you.
How They Get You:
They get you by being so vocal about their alleged redeeming qualities that you believe them despite any and all evidence of their embarrassing true selves. They tell you who they think they are and why they think they deserve your adoration. The lucky assholes who enter adult life with well-formed, healthy egos will see through this facade, and reject the bandit on sight. But those of us who are thrown into adulthood with little self confidence or trust in our own instincts will likely take anything and everything we hear seriously, even if it’s coming straight from the mouth of the cringest member of society themself. I’ll spare you the lengthy explanation of how a love scammer manipulates and swindles an empath into a committed relationship, and just say this. If you value others as highly (or higher) than you value yourself, you are a primary target for a love bandit’s illusion of worthiness. They will be attracted to your low standards, naturally high capacity for understanding, and tendency to doubt yourself when faced with contradictory information. And you will be attracted to their confidence, completely unaware of its unreasonable potence.
Of course, it’s not always easy to recognize yourself as vulnerable to the love bandit’s antics. In fact, it is the empath that is totally in the dark that suffers the most at the hands of a bandit. And the more highly you value others, the less likely you are to recognize someone as harmful to you, cringe, or generally unimpressive. So, for all you self-loathing, docile empaths out there, I’ve compiled a few brief lists to help you determine whether you are vulnerable to, or the subject of a love scam.
Risk Factors:
-You have low self-esteem
-You have high empathy
-You need extra assurance from others
-You are new to love
-You have not been to counseling or therapy
-You have an unhealthy attachment style
-You have no qualms about the way you were raised (you have yet to open your eyes to the parenting mistakes that gave way to your unhealthy attachment style)
-You have an addictive personality
-You have unresolved emotional trauma (big one)
Red Flags:
-Shameless self aggrandizing remarks
-They dress like a character from Lazy Town
-Their proudest accomplishments are outdated by at least a few years
-Tendency to shut down in unfamiliar group settings
-They show you home videos they made with their high school friends
-The home videos are set in the Middle Ages
-They encourage vulnerability but fail to be vulnerable
-They fall silent or leave the room when upset, without communicating
-Punching drywall, trees, or the ground
-You feel addicted to their attention
-They get upset when you do stuff without them
-They see similar people as competition
-They hate women
-They have a motorized scooter
-They say things that embarrass you in front of your friends
-They see their failure to assimilate to social norms as a sign of creativity and superiority
-They cannot adapt to new circumstances
-They can’t make any food except for fried eggs
-Everyone makes them angry
-They will eat anything for a few laughs
Conclusion:
Well folks, whether you’re newly aware of the cringe status of your long-term lover, or you’re feeling like you might just be in the clear, I hope you have learned something from today’s post. Specifically, I hope you’ve learned never to fall in love without noting the signs of cringeness or manipulation. Of course, today we have learned that these two character traits are intricately intertwined. So if the love of your life embarrasses you, if you can’t take them anywhere, if your friends don’t get why you’re together, if they have even one sword, dump them. Dump them now. Get out of the relationship before you get hurt, and go the fuck to therapy. Revisit the concept of romance once you’ve resolved a little bit of trauma, or at least identified yourself as susceptible to a love scam. Trust me, red flags are there for a reason. And they don’t have to be signs of manipulation or dishonesty. Don’t be the fool that gets stuck with someone worse than you. Opt instead for distrust and solitude. And most importantly, learn to recognize poor taste as an indication of danger. Stay away from cringe individuals and you won’t get hurt by a skinny-jean wearing swindler ever again. Bye