Welcome to my abundant wellspring of emotional wisdom snacks navigating our complex relationship world with strangers, friends, family, lovers, partners. I’ll be starting with a light approach introducing or (for the savvier ones of you) recapping often used expressions coined in soul-stirring digital research labs: Online Dating.
Investigating online dating etiquette is a good analytical start before diving deeper into that inner abyss of ours. Now that more and more people are attempting to escape the typical “relationship escalator”, it is no longer: “Meet. Date. Get exclusive. Move in together. Get engaged. Marry. Have kids.” No, Despair not, O heart, in thy sorrow. Rest assured that there are far wilder and more toxic opportunities I will be helping you to get familiar with.
Read on and you’ll find explanations, tips and tricks to get inspired and to refine your embryonic antisocial madwo*man skills! We will also be touching the clinical realm of things which won’t be a calming read for the faint-hearted. Having said this, if you want to evolve to the next level and add serious psychopathic skills to your relationship management toolkit, then devour this article to the end as you won’t be disappointed!
Let’s start with a very simple antisocial situation everyone who has ever tried online dating is most likely familiar with, namely “Ghosting”. From there, we’ll move on into more sophisticated sociopath territory.
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Most of us have done it when online dating and have dipped a toe in this situational casualness, rather unaware of its quality as powerful rejection tool. GHOSTING in online dating or other relationship matters means: At a certain point of time in your communication flow, you didn’t pursue further contact with the person you have dealt with on a more or less familiar term. Best strategy is to completely ignore their contact attempts and not to answer any more at all. Even when their messages show they are upset as they thought you “clicked” during your online chats, felt the “connection” when you met in a bar, even considered you a “soulmate” after your deep conversation at that party.
Most people accept ghosting anyway as standard nowadays, it’s like you are browsing in a shop. No one can force you to buy, right? After all, it was not your fault they thought that there was a connection somehow. In fact, thinking about it, clearly the people you have ghosted are the insensitive ones! THEY didn’t understand that you were just so bored out of your mind that you grabbed that needy message thread on Tinder. THEY didn’t realise you were completely und utterly wasted when talking to them at this bar. THEY at that party positioned themselves right next to this delicious hottie whose attention you really wanted to grab.
But that’s baby stuff. Now that we have established the baseline of modern-day liaisons, let’s move on to more polished interpersonal twists you can add to your behavioural repertoire.
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THE ASPIRING SOCIOPATH
Making someone experience your careless indifference or casual rejection is the name of the game. Please don’t have anyone make you believe that your delivery performance needs to be as unglamorously and unimaginatively presented as in ghosting someone. No, there are far slicker tactics you will pick up over the next paragraphs.
Let’s take a look at MERMAIDING. Imagine you are in the midst of a conversation with someone. And you are bored to tears. And you cannot wait to get this over with. Well, don’t! Just do it as the mermaids do. Like those aquatic creatures, go into the ocean and disappear immediately without any warning. Don’t even bother to say goodbye or get somehow out of the conversation, just leave. That’s it.
You can also combine your immediate disappearing act with SUBMARINING where you disappear off the face of the earth, only to re-surface later on in this person’s life again. You know they like you, so they will react to this new (still indifferent, but they don’t know that) lifeline you are throwing them. I’ll be talking especially about impacting reappearing strategies later on, so hold your horses for a moment.
There is a lot of blabber about more honesty and transparency when dealing with other people’s time and feelings. So much that, as pathetically as it might sound, there’s even a term for it: CASPERING. This behavioural concept owes its name to the pleasant and naïve protagonist of the cartoon series “Casper, the friendly ghost”. So instead of ghosting someone and disappearing from their lives without any warning, you are rather candid about your feelings saying something like, “I really had a good time and I gave myself time to explore the idea but I just didn’t feel that certain something between us.”
Boring! This friendly “caspering” approach is not recommendable as you leave no remarkable impact on that person’s life. There is too much detail and explanation depriving your target of their own negative imagination world they could have otherwise chewed on for the foreseeable future.
CURVING is here the superior course of action: Don’t just ghost someone. It’s not only rude, it’s also uncultured. No, you keep responding to those messages. It is not that much of an effort after all, you can easily squeeze in a quick reply between your first and second latte macchiato. But it doesn’t mean anything. You still don’t give a fuck. You string them along. You don’t care if they think there is more to this communication. As, what they don’t realise, it is not about them, it’s about YOU, of course. And you feel wanted and popular if there’s someone or more of them knocking on your door. Not your problem that the other side doesn’t get it that you are no longer interested. And that you have no intention of doing anything more than replying.
There are some other expressions for “Curving”. Sometimes fellow aspiring sociopaths might refer to BENCHING where they keep someone “on the bench” as a remote option of company, just in case their other personal projects go south. Interchangeable with “Benching”, there’s also BREAD-CRUMBING meaning you are keeping someone in the dark that you are not really interested. Instead, you are leaving them “breadcrumbs”. Tiny tokens of interest any attention hungry counterpart will swallow for real: Sometimes you like their Instagram posts. So what? Meeting up is not the way this encounter is going anyway.
If you have someone you really like but want to protect yourself from getting hurt, just follow the CUSHIONING strategy: To soften the blow of rejection someone else could deliver to you, always, and I mean always, keep a second option at hand. Thinking of it, make it three! Or four, if your timetable allows so.
A special place in my heart in this beginner’s section has the approach of HOUSEPLANTING. “Houseplanting” is straightforward. Treat someone you’re dating like a houseplant. Water them every now and then, but please refrain from treating them like a person with feelings and needs. Stupid to begin with!
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RELATIONSHIP JARGON
Essential to get familiar with is how the new-fangled heedless relations are described in the jargon of the modern dating trade.
If you feel like having casual sex, NETFLIXING and chilling is the suggestion to put forward. The attentive reader has noted that no video streaming subscription whatsoever is required. Others who prefer the strictly virtual text-based environment, choose rather a TEXTLATIONSHIP where you haven’t met, haven’t even heard the other person’s voice on the phone, but your chosen tool of intense communication is simply and plainly texting. A word of advice would encompass to use as many acronyms and abbreviations as possible, it’s just the best use of one’s precious time. U ok? C u. Ttyl.
A somewhat more time-consuming combination would be a SITUATIONSHIP which feels for your target like a standard relationship. You have sex on a regular basis, have some common denominators and interests through which you can connect emotionally, you often text. But it’s a pseudo-arrangement from your side. You apply no commitment and the door is open for other opportunities.
A great tool to make those sorts of alliances efficiently one-sided is STASHING. You have met the friends, the dog, the neighbours and the parents of your Situationship-Date-slash-Partner. But of course, you haven’t introduced a single person from your walk of life. Ha! Doesn’t only increase the mystery of your persona but comes in handy when you decide to move on. In particular when the ridiculously committed counterpart asks you to DTR. This is your clue to immediately seek the exit as your situationship is asking to Define The Relationship. S*he is cornering you to talk about where your relationship (that’s what it is in their eyes) is heading. To be avoided at all times, just run.
By now, you have learnt how to construct your basic toolkit of expressing indifference and negligence of someone else’s feelings and how to talk knowingly using professional language.
Messing with someone’s mind repeatedly is the next step ascending to the more advanced realm of antisocial conduct.
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THE MATURING SOCIOPATH
Imagine this situation: You have ghosted one of your romantic interests or even someone who thought the two of you are in a relationship. Relax, nothing is written in stone. An excellent mindfuck is to just reappear after you have dropped off the grid and see how you get on again. Until something else comes up for you, that is. Our information sources have revealed that the duration of the submarining phase has been successfully tested on diverse timings and when skilfully executed can be extended to years. Hear, hear! Let’s now take a look at the pertinent terms the pros are using.
HAUNTING, sometimes referred to as ZOMBIEING, are the non-amateur cousins of ghosting. First you exit someone’s life without any explanation, only to pop up again out of the blue at a later stage. But you avoid direct contact. You just follow or like their social media posts haunting them with mysteriously ciphered comments in cyberspace. You leave things open to their imagination and remind them that a presumed dead emotion, your malnourished flame of desire, could be flaring up again. Haha, good one.
MARLEYING on the other hand focuses on the point of time when you get back in touch with your former love object, and that’s at Christmas. This particular season promotes church-ordered forgiveness and sentiments are cheerfully vulnerable. “Marleying” is a pun on the ghost of Jacob Marley in the Charles Dickens’ novella “A Christmas Carol” where Marley’s spirit is haunting cheapskate Scrooge on the festive time of the year. For your purposes, fake hope and a chance of touchy-feely redemption is the game here.
Another virtual but literately less astute character is the name giver for a similar tactic: PAPERCLIPPING was inspired by “Clippy”, the admittedly useless Microsoft Word avatar in the shape of a big-eyed animated paperclip. Clippy would ask you things like “It looks like you’re writing a letter”. Doh! Obviously. So what’s next? Clippy wasn’t really up to speed to answer that. Just like Clippy, you can “paperclip” an ex. You pop up back in their life for no particular reason, you have no targeted intention like dating or meeting up again, you just hang on the side of the screen reminding your former beau*belle that you can. Voilà, ego boosting job done!
There are voices advocating to nurture your self-esteem from within yourself. Don’t even go there. What a sad waste of time and energy. Why spending your valuable presence on this planet with Self-Help lecture? To gain confidence by dragging someone else down and to make your spirits soar by executing such a power over someone’s life, now, that is much easier and far more rewarding.
We are nearing the last chapter of my antisocial behaviour guide which will be elevating us firmly into sociopathic playground. Let’s climb this steep mountain awarding you with a view of highly impactful techniques.
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THE DISCERNING SOCIOPATH
Deceit and manipulation, the others call it. Yet your inner sociopath tells you, it’s rather the celebration of your own will and straightforward facilitation of making you feel good. And to be clear, you didn’t ask those attention junkies and validation addicts out there for a job. They came to you!
The entry move on this skill level is known as MOSTING. When you meet someone, you pretend to be bowled over. Make them believe you are infatuated and bewitched by their looks, charm, personality, lisp, etc. This is where you can go wild and train those theatrical skills of yours.
Shower the other person with disproportionate attention. You exaggerate like there is no tomorrow. It sucks but you have to do it in order to create a craving for those “thirsty” (read: attention-hungry) people. Then you disappear. And boom! You have designed a strong needy dependency as they want more. They want your attention. They want you. A powerful base for the real deal.
A nice touch is to combine “mosting” with CATFISHING where you reinvent yourself. Some would say you create a fake identity on social media to lure someone into a “Thirst Trap”. An instructive how-to guide is to watch the US documentary “Catfish”. The film’s producer Nev Schulman experienced “Catfishing” himself. He thought he was in a long-term remote relationship with a 19-year-old girl, yet in reality he was communicating with a married not-so-young housewife. Public interest in the movie was so swell that Schulman now hosts an MTV reality show working with people to identify their catfishers. Delicate detail to mention is that apparently this housewife’s husband inspired the name of the show. When being interviewed, the husband applauded the efforts of his catfishing wife. He pulled an example from the fishing industry and argued that the catfish (hunting and racy) keeps the cod (hunted and lazy) in movement, when both are kept together in a tank after the fish are caught. Goal is that, during the shipping process, the cod stays agile hence fresh for later consumption at one’s dinner table. The catfishing housewife’s husband says “.. And there are those people who are catfish in life .. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank god for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin.” Look at this man. Nailed it.
Before discussing the last two techniques any discerning sociopath should be familiar with, let’s remember again: The preparative base is “Mosting” where you provide an incredible amount of attention shortly after you have met a suitable target. The question you need to address is what to do next. Wasting all your efforts when disappearing after you have “mosted” someone? How foolish!
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LOVE BOMBING is an excellent next-step outlet for a crème-de-la-crème manipulator. Your opening “Mosting” spiel is designed to put the other person on a pedestal: You provide undivided attention, you pay endless compliments, you lavish the other person with gifts and invest in over-the-top communication with calls, texts and social media messaging.
Don’t listen to some people saying that “Love Bombing” is done by narcissists trying to gain control over someone by exploiting a human desire of feeling secure and needed. Wrong! You just want them to think they owe you something, that’s all. The call for duty to repay this debt is a vital counter mechanism when they might ask you to slow down after those hot-blooded two weeks or even demand you respect their boundaries. Now you have every right to get upset after all you have done for them!
This artificial sentiment climax is where you throw in your next dramatic move. Even though you have only known each other for a very short while, you insist on rapid and serious commitment: An exclusive partnership, moving in together, marriage, or else!
You can increase pressure by saying things like “I am so over the moon I met you. It’s the universe telling us we were born to be together”. Even if you know each other only for some days, you can still confess your unconditional love by uttering “I love you more than anything in the world, you are my soulmate”. If you have selected your target well enough, and don’t worry this comes with experience, they will give in to you. You, the apparently relentless feeder of their self-esteem.
Once the other side has fully committed and you have hooked them on your emotional reward strategy, the first phase of “Idealisation” is complete. This is your sign to change gear and go cold turkey. To keep things under control and stimulate withdrawal symptoms, it is now time to deflate their ego. The stages of “Love Bombing” psychologist Dale Archer says are “Idealisation, Devaluation, Discard. Repeat.”
Devaluation is a nasty word. Let’s rather say you are choosing not to be that attentive anymore and to point out the not so advantageous characteristics of your lovesick puppet. Why do they keep dressing inappropriately? Why do they talk so agonisingly boring about even lamer topics? Why is their face as wide as it is long but with a more unflattering polygonal shape than a round face?
The sacred trinity cycle of Idealisation, Devaluation, Discard is designed to control someone’s self-worth for your own benefit. How, you will learn in the following last paragraph of our sociopath mini-bible.
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GASLIGHTING is the pro term describing the systematic deconstruction of someone’s reality in order to gain control, and to ultimately execute a hidden agenda. To hijack another person’s “truth” is the sport of the skilful manipulator, a puppet master par excellence.
Your secret “Gaslighting” purpose can range from satisfying your own insecure need of feeling superior to exploiting someone sexually, mentally or financially. The playing field of ulterior motives for gaslighting is wide but all have one important factor in common: Bending someone’s perception of the world is a sophisticated manipulation technique. True. Yet gaslighting requires more than that. A gaslighter makes someone agree on fulfilling her*his demands to the gaslighted side’s detriment. The beauty of this arrangement is that, from the outsider’s perspective, things between the gaslighter and the gaslighted seem cooperative and consensual. Or in other words: A gaslighter is the overlord*lady of under-the-radar brainwash.
“Gaslighting” was coined through the 1940s American classic movie “Gaslight” which features gas lamps as supporting imagery. Just as the flickering light of those gas lamps cast doubt on what you have really seen in the twilight, so does the protagonist when preying on the leading lady’s mind. In the motion picture, Paula meets Gregory and they marry shortly after meeting. They move back into the house of Paula’s aunt, a famous opera singer, who was murdered years ago in that mansion. Sounds a bit creepy but nothing out of the ordinary, many people move into a bigger house once they decide to marry and found a family. Yet, soon after moving in together, the abusive relationship starts: Gregory manipulates Paula into thinking she is losing her marbles.
Gregory is a gaslighter on a financial gain mission: It was him who once murdered Paula’s aunt in exactly that house during a botched burglary when Gregory was about to steal the aunt’s valuable jewels. Getting his hands on the precious stones is the secret plan behind the whole spiel of marriage, moving house and gaslighting Paula.
Successful gaslighting doesn’t mean you are simply lying, it’s bigger than profane deceit. Gaslighting means you have undermined someone’s trust in themselves and you have infiltrated their view of themselves. Now they question their sense of identity. Once you are at this stage, you have opened the flood gate for dominance and manipulation, and you can reach for your real goal.
Let’s move on to the practical side of things and explore suitable gaslighting phrases. Feel free to utilise those for your own dry run exercises.
Straight forward comments are for example “Stop overreacting. There is NOTHING.” Or “That’s not at all how this has happened. What is WRONG with you? Your memory seems to be slipping.”
Some lovebug blurb to deflect blame or isolate the other person could sound like “No one will ever love you but me.” “I only did it because I deeply care about you.” “I am not cheating, you are paranoid.”
Depending on the personality of the gaslighted, comments can be subtly nuanced. You could label manipulation as caregiving: “Hon, let me take care of things”. Or constantly sow the seed of doubt effectively denying the other side’s ability to cope: “Babe, are you really sure, you can handle this?”
Remember, gaslighting is a process, not a single event, persistence is required. Gaslighting is often built on an imbalance in a relationship. Hence if you want to excel as gaslighter, equality in any sort of relationship is a no-go. As dominating gaslighter you need to look for disparity so you can tilt the balance towards your advantage.
Should things not go your way, the technique of gaslighting offers a most powerful escalation weapon to force the gaslighted to concur: The menace of abandonment. That the prospect of leaving is mostly an empty threat, the gaslighted cannot distinguish any more. The isolation, the feelings of alienation and the precarious mental state that the gaslighted targets are usually experiencing at that stage of indoctrination is already so convoluted that this DEFCON 1 tactic of relationship warfare should do the trick.
If you now think that gaslighting is restricted to intimate relationships, I have to say I’d be disappointed by your lack of creativity.
Think companies promoting their super safe, never failing and therefore rather expensive products.
Think cults taking sexual and financial advantage of their potentially vulnerable members.
Think women believing for centuries to be second-class human beings inferior to men.
Think country leaders deciding their legitimacy without bothering their citizens to take a stand.
Think ultra-high-net-worth individuals colonising the orbit for your benefit.
Think big, people. Gaslighting opportunities are endless.
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I have shared all my knowledge with you. Now it is upon you, dear reader, to decide what to do next.
Embrace your antisocial toolkit. Mix & Match your newly gained sociopathic behaviour traits. Go out there and test it on the clueless world around you!
Or do the exact opposite.