It's not just you. I'll tell you what I think and you can take it for what it's worth.

I do believe these people exist. They're Narcissists. All the world is a stage and everyone else is just a prop or supporting character in their play. There are men like this. There are women like this.

It seems to me that people who make an issue of these people as though they are the norm instead of less than 1% of the population are either people who only date off dating apps, becauase the design of dating apps caters to Narcissists or they spend more time in the digital world than they do the real world.

I would guess that more Narcissists spend lots of time on the internet because they can't maintain real relationships with real people so again, we have a concentration affect because of the parasocial nature of social media and the internet in general.

The rest of us have to keep these thinfs in mind because you will run into more of this bullshit online and you need to both protect yourself and not let it make you jaded. There are scores of people of all age groups who live whole, healthy, thriving lives rather than immersinf themselves in Internet drama.

And that, in my opinion, is where the author missed the mark. She's conflating the issue and normalizing a double standard.

That said, it's also true that narcissism (observe the lower case) is a spectrum and all of can and do behave in a narcissistic fashion from time to time. Every. One. That doesn't make you a Narcissist who meets the exteme criteria on the manual of personality disorders. It means you've got your head up your ass and and have allowed yourself to become overly self absorbed. You're being selfish. Right?

It makes sense to me that if the design nature of dating apps is attractive enough to Narcissists to concentrate them the way it does, then they would also tend to drive and escalate weak minded people toward being overly self absorbed or narcissists.

I'll reiterate again. This is not an issue unique in women. We've seen for decades now the same thing coming from men and we all know who slipped first. We all know how it was excused and justified and how women were told to pick better men when we complained. We all see how now that it's been normalized as "okay" and men are getting their fair share who all is falling all over themselves to cry foul. We all see the double standard. It's practically a flashing neon sign.

This article could have been a whole lot different. It could have been helpful. Instead, by choosing to bash women all it's going to do is stoke resentment and ill will in both men and women.

That's why it's a huge fail for me.