To the single person, the
institution of online dating should
be one of the most opportune uses of technology ever designed: matchmaking
without the bullshit or bar-hopping; a perfect meeting of technological
opportunity and a human need. Indeed, for single baby-boomers, online dating’s
popularity is now second only to classic matchmaking by mutual friends. But
there are some ominous clouds on the digital horizon.
Glitches are appearing in the machinery: A recent
class-action lawsuit against online dating site Match.com claims that 60% of
the user profiles are fraudulent. And the problem this highlights is not simply
that people tend to fib about their weight when there’s no way to catch them
out; it’s that the system by which we tell each other about ourselves online is
fatally flawed. The very structure and technology of online dating makes it a
perfect home to the pathologically amoral predator—the sociopath.
According
to the best estimates of social scientists in the field, the prevalence in
society of the pathologically amoral—people of no conscience who chronically
lie and exploit others for their own ends—amounts to about one person in 100.
When you factor out Parliament, this means that there are about 350,000
Canadian sociopaths lurking around out there.
And the anonymity of the online dating site is
a perfect medium for sociopaths on the prowl: They have no reputation to
precede them; the only story you read is the one they themselves tell. The
now-old joke is that on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog; but on a dating
site—especially a free service relying exclusively on user-generated
content—nobody knows that you’re a mad dog either
What’s
the lonely online single to do? Sociopaths are usually quite attractive,
charismatic people, so identifying the liar and the opportunist behind the mask
is a subtle, lengthy process—typically, only their long-term victims know that
anything is not as it seems. Within a business, a police force, an armed
service, or a male-dominated religion, sociopathic behavior is often accepted
as normal—or in that context is at least a lot harder to distinguish.
Worse,
romance is the very home of self-delusion and compromise, where we willingly
suspend disbelief, and where by design, hope triumphs over reality and
self-knowledge. So, how do we unmask the sociopath online,
before we’ve become subject to Stockholm Syndrome?
On
the theory that you should always reach for the most industrial-strength tool
you can get your hands on to do the job, let us consider Canadian
Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist—Revised. Developed
over several decades, the PCL-R has
become the classic, go-to tool of the corrections industry to distinguish the
mere criminal from the sociopath. Using something like the PCL-R to screen your online dates may feel like overkill—like
taking morphine for a headache. On the other hand, it’s probably better to have
the Club of Hercules and not need it, than to need the Club of Hercules and not
have it.
According to the PCL-R, the visible identifying
characteristics of the sociopath are that they are: emotionally shallow; glib
but superficial; deceitful and manipulative; egocentric with a grandiose
self-image; promiscuous; impulsive excitement seekers unable to show restraint
or take responsibility; and people who above all show a lack of empathy
bordering on solipsism. They are strangers to fellow-sentiment; people for whom
solidarity is a matter of phonetics, not feeling.
How
might you tease out this profile in a dating situation or conversation? After
all, it’s one thing for a prison psychiatrist to be doing a Q&A with a
tattooed somebody on the other side of a wire mesh; quite another when you’re
sharing a carafe of pinot noir with your date in the local wine-bar. So consider
the following questionnaire as more of a PCL-R
Home Edition.
Did your date give
you groundless generic complements—as if from a checklist, but having little to
do with real knowledge of you?
1)
No (0 points)
2)
A couple (1
point)
3)
Frequently (3
points)
4)
He started with
“you have nice eyes” and went on ad
nausium from there (5 points)
You ask “have you
ever been married? S/he replies
1)
No. (Or once.) (0
points)
2)
“Once or twice”
(2 points)
3)
4 or 5 times (3
points)
4)
“My last wife
left me because she just couldn’t take a punch.” (5 points)
At any point in the
conversation, did it ever seem your date was opportunistically taking multiple
and contradictory points of view?
1)
No, all the talk
seemed to come from a unified personality (0 points)
2)
There were a
couple of inconsistent positions I noticed (1 point)
3)
S/he seemed to be
able to switch ideological loyalties like turning on a dime (3 points)
4)
I felt like a
facilitator at an Ayn Rand / Hells Angels convention (5 points)
You tell a story
about a minor personal tragedy. Your date responds by
1)
Turning pale and
gulping out “...but that’s awful!” (0
points)
2)
Giving advice (1
point)
3)
Telling you what
s/he would have done to prevail in that situation (3 points)
4)
Looking past you
with glazed-over eyes, shrugging and saying “life’s a struggle” (5 points)
Did you get the odd,
fleeting feeling that you were being probed for weaknesses?
1)
No, s/he
confessed to far more personal faults than I did (0 points)
2)
I noticed that
s/he let me do most of the personal talking (1 point)
3)
There were a couple
of times I thought “why’d s/he want to know that?”
(3 points)
4)
There were long
stretches when I felt like a replicant being interviewed in Blade Runner (5 points)
Did any of his/her
personal claims strain credibility or seem to have been created ad hoc?
1)
No, all the diverse
bits of biography seemed to hang together reasonably (0 points)
2)
There were times
when it felt like the story was being made up as it went along (2 points)
3)
Every time s/he
flirted with self-contradiction s/he changed the subject (3 points)
4)
This person’s
self-description felt like a copy of the Weekly
World News that had been torn up and taped back together all wrong (5
points)
For a while, the conversation
turns to employment. Your date
1)
Seems pretty
happy and secure with his/her job (0 points)
2)
Seems to have had
a lot of jobs (1 points)
3)
Seems to have
left a lot of jobs without giving notice (3 points)
4)
Seems to have
left so many jobs for dubious-sounding reasons that chronically being fired is
the only way to make sense of any of it (5 points)
You ask: “Do you
have a personal code?”
1)
“No more than the
usual—the golden rule, ‘don’t be evil’, that kind of stuff.” (0 points)
2)
“You have to look
out for yourself, because nobody else is going to.” (2 points)
3)
“I follow my own
laws—after all, the Übermensch makes his own tools.” (3 points)
4)
“I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to
live for the sake of me.” (5 points)
You ask: “How was
your childhood? How was school for you?”
1)
“Show me the man
who enjoyed his schooldays and I’ll show you a bully and a bore.” (0 points)
2)
“It was okay, I
guess—I don’t remember too much of it.” (1 point)
3)
“I was a rebel—it
got me into trouble, but the people running things were real morons.” (3
points)
4)
“Reform school
was the happiest 14 years of my life.” (5 points)
You ask: “Where do
you see yourself in a few years?”
1)
“I really enjoy
what I’m doing right now” (0 points)
2)
“Oh, I don’t
know—I try not to think about that too much” (1 point)
3)
“I’ve got big
plans. In five years I’m going to be light-years from here” (3 points)
4)
“I’ve already
copyrighted the title of my autobiography” (5 points)
Score
0—10 Moral
and sane; maybe even slightly prosaic
11—20 Largely
normal; not without character faults, but faults likely not clinical
21—30 Borderline
risky; even if not pathological likely to be a pain in the ass
31—40 Many
warning bells should be going off in your head by the time date is finished;
likely best to change email addresses when you get home
41—50 By
now, you should already have excused yourself to go to the washroom, sneaked
out the restaurant’s back door, and run home to upgrade the locks on your doors
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