A few weeks ago, after the movie Tinder Swindler broke the internet, a friend accused me of victim blaming and said I would never understand why those women acted the way they did until I was in their shoes (many ladies held this view). Well, I thought they were greedy and gullible, and it served them right to be scammed.
Yesterday I saw a very similar movie (also on Netflix), Bad Vegan, and I must now admit my friend may be right, I might never understand why women get easily and repeatedly scammed. In Bad Vegan, a young lady builds a restaurant business in New York from the scratch to a multi-million dollar outfit, in fact the most successful vegan/vegetarian restaurant in the world. You could hardly mention any A-list celebrity who hadn’t visited her restaurant. There were pictures of herself and Bill Clinton. Alec Baldwin was a regular attender and at some point even asked her out. She was on top of the world.
Things changed swiftly for her after she met a man who claimed to love her to the moon and back. He said he had spent his entire life searching for her and was lucky to have found her. She believed him. He also said he was supra-human and promised to make her dog and herself immortal. She believed.
He asked for all her passwords and bank details. She quickly provided them. He proposed to her. The got married the next day. Not even her family was aware. He asked her to wire him an average of 30-50 thousand dollars every other day, she obediently obliged. Sometimes she complained about his requests and inquired what the money was for. She always got the same reply, ‘be calm, ‘everything will be alright’. And the money kept coming. After pillaging her business, she faced her savings. When that ran dry, she went aborrowing.
Surprise, surprise! She didn’t know his real name, what he did for a living, or anything about his background. But they were married and she had already given him about 1.5 million dollars. To cut the story short, she ran her business aground. He later absconded with her and they went gallivanting around the world till they got arrested by the police (her investors and staff had sued her by then).
So what would make a top-of-the-class economics graduate from a prestigious American university, who was the CEO of the most successful vegan restaurant in the world, run off with a man she met on twitter and end up in a 6 million dollar-debt? Well, in her own words, she said no one could ever understand (perhaps except her mum who the guy also scammed of over 400 thousand dollars). She claimed she was ‘psychologically manipulated’. She admitted she was never forced or coerced.
After seeing the movie, I had a jumble of reactions. At first I was mad at her, then I scorned her for being plain silly. But at the end I pitied her. It’s not normal for someone to dupe you of 6 million dollars and still live in the same house with you while asking you to go loan more money from your friends. It’s not normal for someone to turn your 600 000 dollars-a-month profit business to one that couldn’t pay its workers wages. She ended up in jail because of this guy.
I have met a couple of people who have confessed to having been in abusive relationships and when asked why they remained in it, the answer was always the same, ‘you would never understand’. Indeed I have now accepted the fact that I will never understand. I have also come to the realization that men and women are wired differently, psychologically, emotionally and mentally, and I think the impact of this is underestimated and most times taken for granted. A man’s reaction to ‘you look handsome’ is different from a lady’s reaction to ‘you look beautiful’. More dopamine is released in the latter.
Females tend to trust more easily and more wholly. I also think the concept of love means different things (however slightly) for men and for women. I think there is a clouding of judgement when women find themselves in these situations (Naija will call it jazz). When they eventually come out of the affair (if they do), they always admit that indeed something was wrong with their mental capacity at the time.
This is not enough explanation for why women make absurd choices in their relationships such as choosing to remain in an abusive relationship or giving all their money away to someone who offers nothing in return (except promising to immortalize you and your dog), but it helps me accept that a psychological difference exits between both sexes, a reality I must henceforth live with.