I Fell In Love With A Fraud. How Do I Get Over Him?

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Hey Doc,

I saw someone else’s post about how to get over a person who lied about how they are. I’m currently experiencing that right now, the person tricked me into loving them, they are actually really evil, so the person I loved is most certainly dead – they never existed, and I was simply used for three years. How do I move on?

Because I was manipulated to love this person, because they stole so much from me, for so long, how can I be okay again? Everyone tells me I’ll be okay eventually, I’ll find someone real who makes me feel better than I ever did. The problem is, I thought HE was real, I thought HE was the best I could find, and it was all a lie. I still want the person I thought he was back. Now I have all these memories of it/him, and I know none of it was real, and it hurts.

I know it wasn’t my fault and wasn’t even about me, he just did it to me because I was there. But…How do I move forward and heal, how do I be okay? He, looking back, controlled everything about me, had me lying about the fact I loved him, lying about us being together. He never cared about me, never loved me, and every single thing I thought I knew was a lie.

He was truthful about one thing though; he’s an asshole.

What do I do?

Just An Empty Space

There’s a phrase that comes to mind when I hear stories like yours, JAES: “I am one who loved not wisely but too well”. It’s something that comes to mind when I hear from folks who, like you, fell for someone that they shouldn’t have. 

There’re a lot of people who’ve had similar experiences. They fell in love with liars who hid families or other lovers. They found love under false pretenses, when someone was willing to use their love to get what they wanted. Others fell for people who were unavailable, people  who put on false faces to be whatever their victims wanted them to be, or even who just saw people’s hearts and emotions as playthings. 

Each and every one of them felt very much as you do. They felt shame, remorse and humiliation for being someone who could be fooled like that. They felt anger at their betrayer for using their emotions against them. But more than anything, they felt… lost. Because while the person they fell in love with was fake, what they felt for those people was very, very real. And it’s very hard to reconcile feeling real love for someone when everything about them was a lie.

At least if their lover had died, they could mourn and move on. But how do you mourn someone who never existed in the first place, when the person you loved was a fiction? 

But that’s actually part of how you recover, eventually: you mourn them. Not the con, the fraudster, the liar or the manipulator – that’s not who you fell for, nor is that who you lost. You mourn the person who you fell in love with, the person you were lead to believe – or were allowed to believe – you were in a relationship with. You treat it as though they died, because in a very real way, they had. It may be the death of a dream of a person, rather than an individual, but it’s still a death none the less, with all of the pain and the emptiness that this entails. 

The way you feel now and the way it hits you now is much the same as losing someone to death. You have to relearn who you are, now that you’re no longer a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. You have to unlearn the little habits and behaviors that you developed over your time with them, those unconscious gestures and actions that formed around the idea that they were always there with you, a part of your day to day life. And like losing someone dear to you, you’ll think you catch glimpses of them in the corner of your eye, but you’ll turn and they won’t be where you always expected them to be. 

And its those empty spaces where they used to be that will haunt you the most. Those little betrayals of muscle memory, those unconscious expectations that will hit you when you least expect it; you stumble across another lover-shaped hole in a place so mundane, so banal that you never even realized that they took up space there in the first place.

As the wise man once said: that absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. And that’s ok. You’re not mourning the liar, you’re mourning the lie, the person they pretended to be.

But as you mourn, you also have to do the hardest thing possible: you have to forgive. Not the liar or the fraud. You have to forgive yourself. You have to forgive yourself for loving not wisely, but too well. You have to forgive yourself for wanting to believe in the pretty lie, for missing the warning signs or all the times you turned a blind eye. You have to forgive yourself for not wanting to believe that someone who you cared for so deeply could use you so casually, so cruelly, with so little regard for the pain they cause. 

It’s very easy, after the fact to say “you should’ve known better” or “you should have seen the signs” or “It was so obvious”. Except, it wasn’t. Not when you’re in love. Love makes us willing accomplices in part because we see our lovers with golden eyes, we polish them to a high sheen and highlight the best of them. It’s very easy to overlook or rationalize away or explain the flaws. It’s very easy to get swept up in the emotion, and how can someone who goes into a relationship in good faith expect or believe that the person they love would hurt them like that? How can you let yourself go that fully if you think they’re trying to use you and discard you?

But you made the best decisions you could with the information you had at the time. Now you know differently. You have different facts to hand and if you were given the opportunity to do it all again, you’d do it differently, knowing what you know. You couldn’t know what you didn’t know back then; you get angry at yourself because you don’t have that big blue box to take you and show you what would happen. You get angry because you can’t see the future, can’t read the threads of fate… you get angry because you’re only human, not a god. 

So you mourn. You forgive yourself. And you accept that this happened, so that you can move forward, a little sadder, but wiser for it. You give yourself that closure, turning the page on this and letting the past be prologue. You accept the hammer blows of grief, knowing that the hits will happen less and less over time, the impact will soften and not stagger you the way they did at first. And before long… you’ll realize just how long it’d been since the last time you felt that now-unfamiliar pang.  

And now that you know better, you know more about what to look for. You’ll be more discerning, more cautious, more judicious about who you give your whole heart to. You can’t make yourself immune to lies – nobody can, and liars work best when their targets think that they can spot any lie or deception. But you can, at the very least, not make the same mistakes you made before. 

The only thing you need to do is to not close your heart entirely, or not let the callus grow on your soul. You can close the door for a while, so that the wounds can heal. You take yourself out of the game so that you can rehabilitate yourself, recover from your injuries. But you have to resist that urge to completely shut yourself off, because all that does is ensure that he wins. Cutting yourself off from the possibility of love isn’t the protection you think it is. It’s just keeping the wound open, allowing it to fester, holding it close because it hurts but at least it’s a familiar hurt. 

The one thing I will say though that will be the hardest: you shouldn’t hate him. He doesn’t deserve your hate, because hate isn’t the opposite of love. Hate can’t exist without love first, and you never loved him, you loved his lies. 

The opposite of love is indifference. As you heal, you let him leave you entirely – a non-entity, someone who isn’t worth even an iota of your time or a scintilla of thought. Let him be resigned to oblivion, to fade into obscurity until you can’t remember the color of his eyes or the timbre of his voice. 

The man you loved, died. The man who dressed in his skin will never have existed for you, and that’s where he should remain.

Good luck.

Hi Doc,

I’m a 31 year old cishet male, good physique, avid Latin dancer/weightlifter, good cook, fulfilling job, never had sex or been in a relationship. Last year I went on at least 25 dates, more dates than I ever had before by way of speed dating and Hinge. I go for and date women I consider conventionally attractive. However, by the end of my most recent run on Hinge, I realized how unhappy I was becoming. I became overly concerned with my appearance and diet (restriction and overexercising) and where/how I spent my spare time. I was obsessing with being as marketable as possible and when I was on dates, I felt the need to be perfect and impressive or else I’d be written off. The last women I met off Hinge turned out to be the best two dates I’d ever been on, but that ended due to children being a goal of hers but not of mine. I decided to delete the app after that and give myself a break.

Fast forward about a month later and I organically met a very nice woman at salsa night and we ended up having a long conversation and exchanged numbers. After several days of texting I invited her to a bachata class the following week and just asked “Do you want to go on a date?” when I saw her and she said yes! We ended up spending a whole day together throwing axes, exploring downtown, getting dinner and coffee, and shared a kiss at the end. Unfortunately she’s only going to be living in the US for the remainder of the year so she didn’t want to get invested in a short term relationship. We’ve maintained a platonic connection since then which has been a confidence boost for me.

Even though I only got a single date out of it, it felt SO much better to meet someone in person and to have things progress organically and not through my phone screen. I felt like I could just be me and make an impression via more than just a handful of pictures and some prompts. It wasn’t exhausting or anxiety provoking. It felt like I was enough. I wasn’t worrying about if I’m the best guy in her inbox.

Is it viable to approach dating without using apps? I don’t want to go back to itemizing myself and feeling like any match/date I got could be my last (no matter how many I continued to get). How should I go about it? Right now I’m mainly meeting new people via social dancing and lessons. I have been talking to another woman who I plan on asking out the next time I see her. I know I will have a lot less opportunities without an app, but is the lower quantity of chances worth the possible increase in quality? What would you do?

Thanks,
Tired of Technology

The obvious answer is that of course it’s possible to approach dating without using the apps. That’s what the human race has been doing since we crawled out of the primordial sea, after all. 

But that’s just me being flippant, not actually answering the real question you’re asking, which is “am I allowed to not use the apps?” That, I think, is what you’re actually asking here. And while I realize this sounds like an equally absurd question – it’s not as though The High Council of Dating is going to sanction you for talking to strangers in person – it’s more about what’s going on in your head, rather than on the ground.

See, one of the more annoying quirks of the human psyche is that we get invested in… pretty much anything, really, and to let go of that feels like we’re committing a crime or a sin of some sort. After all, we’re told many times that giving up is weakness, that winners never quit and quitters never win. Our egos get involved and then we lose our heads because so much of our psyche is dedicated to protecting our ego from injury. And there’re few things that’re more injurious to our egos than to recognize that we’re in a situation where we’ll never recoup our initial investment. It’s really, really hard to admit that something is a bad scene and that we’re almost never going to get back what we put into it.

We will throw good money after bad, metaphorically and literally, because we feel that we have to. Because the alternative would be to accept that this money – metaphorical or otherwise – is gone and not coming back and that stings us worse and deeper than just failing would be. 

I suspect that’s where your head’s at right now; to you, giving up on Hinge feels like admitting defeat. Which I suspect you recognize is absurd. I mean, objectively, you’re doing pretty damn good on there – 25 dates is a little less than 1 date every two weeks after all, which is a fine record to have under your belt. But that record isn’t worth it if the process of getting it means applying sandpaper to your nerves and dripping caustic acid on your soul. When the results you get come with injuries and pain, the answer isn’t to toughen the fuck up, it’s to stop doing the thing that hurts you, because the injuries are never going to be equal to the reward. The idea of suffering monomaniacally to accomplish something is the sort of romantic idea that only pays off for the people telling the story later; the person who broke themselves to pieces to get there usually doesn’t have much to say, afterwards. 

It’s very much the old saw of the man who goes to see the doctor and says “Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this.”
“Well, stop doing that, then.” 

Now, there’s a lot to be said for dating apps and the uses they have. But there’s also a lot to be said about the drawbacks to them, especially in a post-Tinder era when the mechanics and negative patterns of the apps make it more about collecting matches and less about actually going on dates. And while, yes, dating apps mean you get more opportunities, it also means that you’re choosing to expose yourself to rejection more often. You’re going to experience rejection more on dating apps than you would by meeting women in person, simply because you can’t put yourself in that position as often in person as you can on an app. You can approach and ask out dozens of women in the span of a day on Tinder or Hinge without  even thinking about it. You would be hard-pressed to accomplish that in a week off of them; certainly not without making that your primary priority, over work, seeing friends and everything else that makes life worth living.

(Source: Me. I did that. It wasn’t worth it and it made me a worse person.)

And there’re distinct benefits to meeting in person, rather than on the app anyway. The most important, of course, is that we’re sacks of meat and chemicals, an organic robot being piloted by a sack of electrified tapioca; we’re creatures of flesh and bone and we’re built to respond like flesh does. There are so many factors tell if we have chemistry with another person – including literal chemistry – that we simply cannot experience over silicon and copper and rare-earth metals. Meeting someone on an app often goes nowhere because what seems perfect on paper can do absolutely nothing for us in person; we never would’ve tried to date them if we’d met them in person, simply because those little organic signals would’ve said “nah.” 

Meeting someone organically, in person, however, means you not only get to know them and pick up on those signals, but it gives you time to build a connection. It’s a lot easier for two people to decide if they’re interested in each other if they have time and space to consider the question, instead of trying to get an answer within 20 minutes to an hour. A couple weeks of talking, getting to know each other and appreciating one another’s uniqueness can produce better results. 

So, of course you can give up the apps. It certainly sounds like you should, if only for your own health. 

But that doesn’t mean you need to give them up forever, if you don’t want to. I know that I just spent several hundred words shitting on Hinge and Tinder and everything, but dating apps do have their place. It just shouldn’t be the place of honor, the primary method by which you socialize. Dating apps, in my opinion, should be a supplement to meeting people in person, not a replacement for them. They add convenience, especially if you’re in an area where it’s hard to find opportunities to meet people, and they allow you to widen your net if the demographics in your area aren’t favorable to you. But when they become the end-all/be-all of how you meet people? Well, that’s when you start getting into the space where you start hurting yourself in the name of not taking the lesser hurt of saying “this isn’t working for me”. 

So when the pain is less and you feel better about yourself, you can come back to them if you really want to. It’s not as though Hinge is Brigadoon, where once you leave, you can never return. You can always reactivate your old account or, better still, delete it when you leave and start over fresh if you decide to go back.

But if you put more time into living a life you love and letting that bring people into it in a more natural and organic fashion? You may not want to.

Or… you may not need to. 

Good luck.