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Who's Dating Who?


Subliminal Messaging in the World of Online Dating After Grey Divorce

 

I am in the grey divorce dating world, and it sucks. Not that there aren’t great men out there. There are. They are just really hard to find and connect. In the internet world where a lot of social interaction happens these days, the algorithms are designed to keep us apart.

 

I have spent some time in the online dating scene off and on for a couple of years now and have dated a few men from it. I have also met numerous “men.” I put the second category of men in quotations because the majority of them are in fact bots which are some sort of automated social programming that surfs the web for human interactions it can essentially mess with. Dating sites are filled with bots with stolen photos or AI generated photos, that used to be run out of third world countries but now originate from all over the world and are intent in creating havoc in peoples’ everyday lives. And we fall for them all the time. The tell-tale signs of a bot interaction are getting harder to distinguish as they get better programming and self-teaching.

 

In my last round on a dating site, I discovered a prompt that had me downright disgusted. I was sorting through the suggested men when I noticed a prompt happening now and then for me to send a private message to a man at a distance to let them know I had a crush on them. It said it would be sent anonymously and that the person was NOT on the dating site itself. This was a dating site specifically tied to a widely used social media platform that these suggested individuals do have accounts, just not on the dating side.

 

At first, I just swiped past these suggestions – until one looked familiar. It was an individual married to someone I have known throughout my childhood, but I don’t recall ever having met this spouse directly in my life. Here is this dating site trying to get me to entice a married person to turn away from their spouse by me, a stranger, sending them a “crush” message. I felt sick, especially as I am a betrayed spouse myself, which is how I ended up divorced.

 

What kind of sick behavior is this? AI prompts making suggestions to single people to try and garner the attention of married people? Have we broken so far away from a basic sense of decency in the face of AI?

 

This made me rethink everything about social media dating sites and beyond. It made me think about AI reprogramming us and our basic social framework. This isn’t about ring wing versus left wing, conservative versus liberal moral compasses. This is about reprogramming our own individual moral and value systems. For what? That was my big question when I went to bed last night, and I awoke with an answer. One answer. There are probably others, but this one hit me over the head: greed.

 

Archaeologically speaking, we can’t really say when the concept of marriage initially happened. It was early, and it was likely the basis of social structure for reasons of stability and basic survival for both the family and the society of time whether hunter/gatherer, tribal agricultural, villages, city/states, etc. As times changed, so did the construct of marriage. Doweries, religious ceremonies, the need to feed numerous witnesses to the event. In the past few decades, the extravagance of the ceremony has increased radically.

 

Marriage has become a rite of passage with an elaborate ceremony, over the top costumes, fantasy settings in either destination weddings or elaborate setups with special effects, twisted traditions such as the new couple feeding each other cake which used to be gentle and now seems an opportunity for humiliation, etc. What was first for security and structure became sacred and revered, and now has become status and ostentation.

 

Thing is, in the midst of it, we don’t see it that way. I certainly didn’t when I first fell in love and got married back in 1990. I was too much in limerent love. However, I will say, I didn’t want the big wedding. He did. I wanted to have a very small ceremony. His reason for a large wedding was, and I quote, “I want to do this once, and I want to do this right.”

 

If a couple wants the big flashy wedding, go for it. I’m not saying no one should have it. People should be able to have what they want if they have the means. My concern is the programming that I recognized with that AI prompt on the dating website.

 

Hollywood and Disney started programming us when movies first began. We went from marriages that, yes, had love, but were also based on compatibility, involved family and community, and had social standards of behavior. Yes, without question, marriages were also problematic in the subservience and abuse of women and children, physical and financial.

 

Before anyone says, “My Grandma was miserable. My mother was taken advantage of. My great grandmother was abused.” Absolutely. These tragedies happened in my family too. There were also happy marriages. Marriages that lasted for decades that had their ups and downs, but, in the end, the couples were happy in them. There is no such thing as a conflict free marriage. Marriage is hard. It’s designed to be hard. It’s designed to challenge and strengthen each other when done right. And should be ended when things go wrong. I know lots of bad marriages that endured when they should not have, and lots of good marriages that did endure. A solid marriage benefits many people beyond the couple, and even beyond the children that come from the marriage. Traditional marriage, same-sex marriage, marriages from various religious backgrounds, or civil marriages – I’m talking about the life-long commitment two people make to each other to be there for each other come thick or thin.  That commitment is being actively programmed out of us by AI. Deliberately. That is what I am talking about.

 

I heard a millennial guy on a round table discussion, and I wish I could find it, I did a quick search, talk about the male loneliness epidemic. If someone does, share the link, please. He pointed out that the programming for these dating websites are deliberate to create incompatible matches. Why? So that people return to the dating sites and spend more money being members. We can argue feminism and patriarchy all we want, but with money involved, and it is, all these conditions are pawns in the long game. Bottom line, we are social creatures by nature, and that gets played, too.

 

As I started to say previously, we started getting programmed when motion pictures began with messages of limerent love, follow your heart instead of your head, and love is the answer. These are good starting points, but not a solid basis for life-long commitment. We have strayed dramatically from the originally reasons for marriage. Whether or not those reasons still exist are debatable for sure. What is also debatable are people’s separate definitions of commitment and infidelity, and AI is playing with those differences as well.

 

And now, we have a whole new wave of silently programming us with AI generated suggestions that fly under the radar, unnoticed, until we, without thinking of the ramifications, act them out.

 

I once had a conversation with my then husband, a close friend of ours, and that friend’s younger sister back in the mid 1990s about movie theaters attempting to use subliminal messages in movie reels to get people to buy more concession food. There was debate whether the subliminal messaging worked, and they were shortly after banned. But subliminal messaging has not gone away. It is alive and well, and it is out to use us to get our money.

 

Our money? How? What are the two biggest money makers around romantic relationships? Marriage ceremonies and divorce. Dating sites, and the conglomerates that own them, want us to circulate through their system multiple times; have expensive, elaborate weddings; and, have expensive, contentious divorces. They want us to have affairs, to get angry and take that anger home to our families, to create emotional highs and lows that lead to profits for them. I don’t know about you but I am not thrilled to have my heart used for someone else’s profits.

 

How is AI using subliminal messaging today? It’s sneaky. I asked Google. It calls it “subliminal learning” by means of hidden signals, bypassing filters, inherited behaviors, visual illusions, and personalized persuasion. All of them through algorithms based on how it predicts and manipulates our thoughts and behavior.

 

That dating site wanted me to tempt a man I did not know because the monetary rewards ramp up with every temptation it attempts to subliminally program into my brain. Our brains are organic computers that either we program ourselves or we allow others to program for us.

 

I asked AI, ironically, if marital infidelity is on the rise since the rise of social media. Surprisingly, it said the rates of infidelity have remained about the same, but that the way it is happening across the cloud has changed infidelity dramatically. Not only has social media made emotional affairs easier, but it has also made it easier to discover them early on. And, the AI pointed out, people are marrying later in life, if at all, which also may skew the statistics.

 

Ultimately, the spouse who makes the decision to stray is the one who holds most of the blame. However, are we failing to hold social media creators and their AI programmers accountable for the environment they not only create but continue to program our own brains to make infidelity easier and acceptable? How many of those who have had affairs believed they would never do such a thing before and found themselves caught wondering how?

 

AI is changing how romantic relationships work without a doubt. My question is, are we okay with this? Are we losing our autonomy in how relationships are forming and dissolving? Are we giving away our free will to algorithms?

 

Things to ponder as we turn to our phones and computers for human connections.


Thanks for reading!


Sarah

Humor In Chaos



 
 
 

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