It was always going to be love, wasn’t it, that would get us in the end? A sharp swipe from the right, the final boss. I read on Refinery29 about Sarah, 23, who met Tom on a gaming app in the summer of 2020 and started, she says, to “like him a lot”. This was in the early months of lockdown, during those hot, grim days when police patrolled the parks. A few months into their online relationship, Tom admitted he was struggling to buy food and Sarah started sending him money, because she liked him and she didn’t want him to starve. Jobs had dissolved overnight, people were reselling dumbbells for five times the price – everybody was trying to survive.
When Sarah told her friends she’d been giving him cash – about £400 – they decided to investigate and discovered there was no Tom. Instead, the person attached to his email address was a young woman, the same age as Sarah. She was devastated; Sarah was not the only one. This is romance fraud or, rather snappily, “rom-con”, a crime that’s rising due to the cost-of-living crisis. Official figures show almost £90m was lost to romance scams last year, but it’s believed to be much higher – . The Refinery29 piece describes how scam attempts have increased by 60% in the past six months. This kind of fraud has traditionally been associated with older women, but now everybody’s at risk: 51% of people aged 21 to 30 say they have seen a rise in the number of suspicious messages received on dating sites. ITV reported that Santander has launched a specialist division to combat rom-cons: the Break the Spell team works to “interrupt” customers who have been identified as being at high risk, stepping in when the person could be about to send large amounts of cash. To stop, in the name of love. Sorry.
There are some scams that make me think, well, fair enough. Like the other day when I went online to buy a book and a bookshop I’d never heard of was advertising it for half the price of everywhere else. It wasn’t until I’d input two different credit cards and my phone number that it started to dawn on me, perhaps my stinginess had stung me. I deserved that. But other scams, like elder fraud, or this, a con that relies on a person’s emotional goodwill, feel horribly wrong. Losing money seems almost the least of it – it’s the betrayal that does the deepest damage. A small death happens, the loss of someone the conned person loved, shared secrets with, intimacies, who she sat up late with and talked about her childhood and dreams. That experience – discovering the person you loved does not exist, was created in fact, to manipulate you – must leave a person feeling shamed and terribly alone.
I was reminded, reading about rom-cons, of a recent study into why women freeze their eggs. Anthropologist Marcia C Inhorn spent 10 years on her research, concluding that the biggest driving factor was a shortage of suitable educated men, a problem she calls the “mating gap”. The women she spoke to were after, understandably, “an egalitarian relationship”, which became a problem when the men they wanted to have children with were intimidated by their success. “Some women resorted to toning down their educational achievements on their dating app profiles to avoid putting men off,” reported the Observer in April. “Sometimes men would joke or insult them about their jobs or say, ‘You’re smarter than I am, I can’t go out with you,’” said Inhorn. “Really blatant kinds of misogyny and discrimination.” As a woman with single friends of reproductive age, this rang some fairly irritating bells.
The bells continued, as the more I thought about the rise of rom-cons within the revelation of a mating gap, the more starkly I became aware of the various emotional manipulations still deemed culturally acceptable when dating. Pretending to your online girlfriend that you need £400 for food? Shocking. Pretending to your less-educated boyfriend that you don’t understand economic policy? Attractive. Pretending to your 35-year-old girlfriend that you think you’ll probably be ready for a baby in two, maybe three years’ time? Standard. It’s not the same as lying for cash in an online relationship, of course it’s not, but lying for time, or intimacy, or lying out of shame in a relationship is such an unexceptional aspect of dating that it’s useful to pinpoint the reasons the lie of a rom-con remains so upsetting, then work back from there to identify the differences and similarities between that and more commonplace manipulations of trust.
It’s no wonder perhaps, that “intentional celibacy” has become a trend. How does anybody manage to invest in a relationship at all today, when you have to keep your guard up to avoid being scammed while also opening yourself up to let somebody get to know you? When you have to seduce and impress a person, while also blurring the edges of your success to avoid being intimidating, a Twister-like contortion, backwards in heels. How are we expected to survive in a cost-of-living crisis, when a cost-of-loving crisis has been raging for years?
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
