If you have spent time with me recently- you will know my suspicion of what is a real good man vs what is a phoney, has made me very, very cautious, if not entirely mistrustful.
Here is some advice I wish I had taken on board earlier- “when it comes to men, watch what they do, not what they say”.
Sure, someone can TELL you they love you, yet act in a way completely incongruent with that.
When someone show who they really are- pay attention.
We all try to put our best foot forward and fail in that sometimes, but that’s entirely different to dealing with a complete faker.
A little preamble about Love-
Love is a chemical reaction that occurs in the brain. Therefore we want to fall in love and continue that dreamlike, floaty state. That feeling is pleasant and addictive. In pursuit of this happy-ever-after, we can ignore a lot of red flags.
This biochemical state, involving lots of different stages and neurochemicals, goes on for around about five years (which is how long it roughly takes for a child to reach a stage where they are less dependent).
When we are in a state that naturally allows us to sort of suspends logic and reason (probably in order to procreate) we explain away their flaws and aggrandise their virtues...
Therefore, the best advice is to trust those around you that you are close to- people you know have your interests at heart, who are not drunk on your love drugs. I don’t mean trust that donut who says “I just want you to be happy”. Ignore that guy (unfriend and delete them actually, they are not your friend, they are another phoney who couldn’t care less if you are happy)…
Here are two answers I read on Quora (in answer to the question "How can you tell if someone is a good person, or just faking it?"). Of all the answers two resonated as true with me, I will offer my own experience as to why.
So much of what you see of a person is only what (and who) they want you to see, therefore it’s very tricky to spot real giveaway signs. A skilful manipulator will never let you see the real them- they may not even believe that part of them exists. They will usually act perfectly in public.
“One way to get an insight into traits a person may be hiding otherwise is to observe them watch TV. This gives you a chance to hear their comments in a somewhat unguarded moment, see what kinds of people they don’t even want to listen to, etc.
I know, this doesn’t answer your question very directly, but it’s one way to gain some insights into their behaviour.
This doesn’t mean that good people never get angry, frustrated, or disappointed. The salient point is that they choose to express their anger and disappointment in healthy ways, that don’t hurt the people around them.”
By Deepthi Amarasuriya, works at Northwest College
I could never bear to watch my children’s father watch his team play football. He got angry, he bashed the furniture, he screamed, yelped, swore, said horrible things about the players and everyone involved. He was out of control, he woke the children with his outbursts.
I have seen people get passionate and excited about football games yet this was something else and to me it was terrifying, not nice, not healthy. It was a complete personality transformation- it was a person I never otherwise knew existed- passionate, aggressive. He had seemed such a calm, collected and “in control” individual always, that was what had attracted me, so seeing this side unsettled me.
He always drank alcohol when watching football or smoked drugs, as a compulsion. He never really seemed to need to otherwise (until later, when he was losing control of himself entirely).
It was like football gave him an “excuse” to unleash that denied part of his personality. He preferred to watch the games at home, alone and got very stressed about this plan being interrupted, it was something that owned him, rather than a pass-time.
Oh, and guess what? The first time I saw him properly drunk, when our twins were 9 months old (I had known him for about 9 years by this point and we had been together for 5), guess what happened? He came home and smashed up our flat without warning. He became aggressive towards me- it was the single most destabilising moment of my life. Everything I thought was real was suddenly not. He was not at all who I had thought he was and I was terrified.
His life had been very easy to stage up until that point, he could control and manage his portrayal, but the mask slipped under the pressure of baby twins. That didn’t excuse his violence. I believe very few people would have acted in the way he did that night.
Stress does bring out the worst in us, but this was a taste of things to come, and how they would worsen. There was something very dark, disordered and dysfunctional lurking beneath that cool exterior, that I never knew about until it was too late.
A second Quora answer-
There’s this quote from a Jenny Holzer work that goes something like this: “spit on someone with a mouth full of milk if you want to find out something about their personality fast”.
Now, I’m not telling you to literally spit milk on someone (I’m pretty sure that’s assault in a lot of places). The point is that people show their true character when their patience is being tested. Most people seem pretty well adjusted when everything around them is going smoothly. But if you really want to find out something useful about someone, observe them when things around them aren’t going smoothly. For example, how do they behave when they’ve been waiting a long time to be served at a restaurant, or when the waiter gets their order wrong?
This doesn’t mean that good people never get angry, frustrated, or disappointed. The salient point is that they choose to express their anger and disappointment in healthy ways, that don’t hurt the people around them.
To go back to the waiter example: it’s fine to feel annoyed if the waiter gets your order wrong. You can feel annoyed and politely explain your problem at the same time. It’s not okay to yell at the waiter or insult them.
It’s also useful to observe all these things in private (as in just you and them), or at least to have a situation where the person in question thinks no one is watching. People are a lot more honest when they think no one’s watching than they are when they have an audience.
So the short version is, just observe people’s actions. They’ll tell you about themselves sooner or later.
Amber Hynes, former Mentor at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University (2016-2017)
When we were at a restaurant last year, the food came and I could see by my children’s father’s face that his order was wrong. “What’s the matter? I said, “if it’s wrong, lets just say?” I had a gentle tone, I was calm, I wasn’t making a big noise. I knew how easily he got upset. I almost never talk loudly, I felt maybe it was a mistake and he had been given someone else's food and it would help the staff to know.
“NO, spat out my ex through gritted teeth. “You will make a sccccene”. He hissed. “It’s FINE”. It made the children uncomfortable, it made me uncomfortable. When a man and woman passed our table smiling at each other affectionately I thought, wow, this IS total sh*t.
Fact is, he made us suffer through his lack of assertiveness with others, this pattern played out in our family life at home- we were made to suffer consistently due to the “easy going nature” he liked to present in front of others, which did a 180 the minute we were alone. It entirely messed with my head and understanding of reality. He had incredibly low patience, lost his temper very frequently, aggressively and willingly (as shown time and again in his poor parenting skills) yet acted as though he was patient as could be and did not have a temper. He never seemed to regret losing his temper. He was unwilling to accept that he ever did. We all have our demons. None of us are always perfect, but this chap was in complete denial.
It is only in the last year that I have been able to see what I dealt with for 10+ years of a relationship, and who I knew for 14 years, was a fake.
I’m not stupid. I’m highly intuitive, yet I ignored sign after sign in the face of what I was told was the case. I let myself be tricked as I wanted to believe that he was who he purported to be. I wanted to believe that everything I wanted could be possible. Nah, the whole situation was built entirely on a fake person, pretending to be a good one.
TL;DR: two ways to tell the real person you are dealing with- 1) observe them watching TV 2) watch how they react when their order is wrong in a restaurant.