The Designers of Emotion: Psychological Manipulation and Power Structures in Romance Scams - Part 1
- heesuk3
- Dec 21, 2025
- 12 min read
Updated: Dec 21, 2025
I am the kind of person who wants to analyze any incident to the very end. I want to know why it happened, what is hidden inside it, and how to solve it. I do not know whether I became like this because of the way I was educated, or whether I was born this way, but this scam incident made me think and analyze a great deal.
“Why did so many intelligent victims fall for a romance scam?”
I do not believe it was merely because the scammers used carefully constructed scripts. I think this scam was possible because multiple mechanisms worked together. That is why I believe that thoroughly analyzing the mechanisms that enabled this scam and exposing exactly who these scam lures are are the most important tasks in dismantling romance scams.
“The Designers of Emotion” will be a fairly long series of posts. First, I will examine in depth how this device, called a romance scam, designs and controls people’s emotions, from the perspectives of both victims and scam lures. Then I will look at who these scam lures actually are from various angles.
If we have been scammed, we must clearly understand why and how it happened. We must identify the mechanisms that made the scam possible and clearly define the scammers who pulled us into this romance scam device. Clear definitions of who they are become the basis for determining the level of punishment they should receive. Through this series, I intend to unpack these issues step by step.
1. The Confusion: Romance versus Love
Why is this scam called a “romance scam”? I first heard this term in December 2024, when I realized I had been scammed and went to meet a lawyer. The lawyer explained to me that “all forms of fraud that begin by building trust are called romance scams.”
Afterwards, as I spoke with many victims, I came to understand that this crime is, in fact, a scam that is carried out by designing a romantic illusion. The countless unrealistic stories about love that my scammer repeated to me obsessively for months finally began to make sense.
2024. 10. 11. 10:20 PM, Ken: Loving someone can make a dream come true together. This is more meaningful. When you accomplish something together, you will have a sense of accomplishment. Most people have conditions and expectations for love. It takes great emotional strength and spiritual cultivation to love unconditionally. But I think so. Healthy love allows for talking about money. But there can’t be anything unclean.
2024. 10. 11. 10:22 PM, HS: I got your point
2024. 10. 11. 10:23 PM, HS: Healthy love == talking about money
2024. 10. 11. 10:24 PM, HS: You really seem consistent
2024. 10. 11. 10:24 PM, HS: I respect you
2024. 10. 12. 5:21 PM, Ken: Russian books perfectly explain love and society
2024. 10. 12. 5:22 PM, HS: I am interested in society. but not love
2024. 10. 12. 5:23 PM, Ken: Love is the fruit of two people
2024. 10. 12. 5:24 PM, HS: Love shouldn’t be limited to two people
2024. 10. 12. 5:25 PM, HS: It is a sort of interaction between people and society. much broader
2024. 10. 12. 5:25 PM, Ken: The novel "The Captain's Daughter" describes the serf uprising in Tsarist Russia through the experience of love. I remember that there was a poem at the beginning of each chapter, which was very philosophical. Peter Grinyov was willing to sacrifice everything for Masha Mironova!
2024. 10. 12. 5:26 PM, Ken: Yes. You have a point.
2024. 10. 12. 5:29 PM, HS : Why did he sacrifice all for a woman? There are so many women in the world.
2024. 10. 12. 5:30 PM, HS: Not realistic at all
2024. 10. 12. 5:30 PM, Ken: The book says because of love
2024. 10. 12. 5:31 PM, Ken: This was a real existence in the society at that time. In that war-torn era. Everyone wants a little bit of love
2024. 10. 19. 7:53 PM, Ken: Me too. I like your personality. Your sincerity is what attracts me the most. If we weren't attracted to each other. We won't get to this point.
2024. 10. 19. 7:53 PM, Ken: I never find you troublesome
2024. 10. 19. 7:54 PM, Ken: Yeah. But I understand your character very well. I can never give up.
2024. 10. 19. 7:54 PM, Ken: I'm serious. As long as I don't give up, fate will never give up on us.
2024. 10. 19. 7:55 PM, Ken: Yeah. This is the 100th time I have said it! As long as you want, I will tell you every day. Let you confirm repeatedly that I really like you!
My scam lure, despite my sarcasm, relentlessly poured out almost every kind of cheap lecture about love you can imagine. At the time, I did feel that something was strange, but it was difficult to pinpoint exactly what the problem was. Now, however, it is painfully clear what these conversations meant.
These conversations are not real love.
They are manufactured romance scripts.
Therefore, in order for us to escape from romance scams, the first thing we must do is clearly define the concept of “romance,” separate from love. Fundamentally, romance and love are completely different concepts, yet we repeatedly make the fatal mistake of treating them as the same.
The British sociologist Anthony Giddens clearly distinguishes love and romance in The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love & Eroticism in Modern Societies (1992). Love is a relational, mutual, negotiated emotion. In other words, love is a relational experience that takes time and is jointly constructed by two people. Romance, by contrast, is a product of nineteenth-century Romanticism. It is an emotional structure composed of destiny, idealization, intensity, a narrative about finding the one person who will fill one’s lack, the desire to find oneself within another person, and images, signs, and fantasies. Romance is, in short, a cultural narrative device that designs emotion [1].
Romance was born at the historical moment when the personalization of emotion began. Nineteenth-century Romanticism was a new current of thought that placed human inner life, emotion, and individuality above social institutions. According to Giddens, from this period onward, traditional marriage weakened, individual emotion and desire became the standard for love, and the idea of love as a path to discovering one’s true self emerged [1].
In other words, the very idea that “love must be emotionally justified” was first created at this time. Before this period, love was not a condition for marriage. Romanticism in the nineteenth century was the first to institutionalize the concept that love is the reason for marriage.
Giddens explains that the core elements of romantic love came from the clichés of nineteenth-century literature. The characteristics of romance created by Romantic literature are as follows.
Destiny
The idea that “we were born to meet” or “there is only one special person” is not a social or economic concept, but a literary invention.
Intense Idealization of the Other
Romanticism elevated love to a heroic, moral, spiritual, and salvific meaning. As a result, romance becomes, in essence, an idealized emotional structure.
Pursuit of Inner Authenticity
Love is depicted as a path that reveals the “real self” and enables the discovery of a complete identity.
According to Giddens, the components of romance were created in the novels, poetry, and plays of that era. Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Goethe, Byron, and others repeatedly circulated the following narrative messages [1].
Love is an adventure.
Love is a process of finding the self.
Love goes against fate.
Love overcomes social barriers.
Love saves the individual.
This story structure is entirely a literary device, and Giddens’s main point is that it has come to define modern people’s concept of love.
Romantic love has been especially powerfully internalized by women.
Giddens argues that Romanticism reorganized the emotional structure of women. Women were socially defined as “emotional beings,” were the primary consumers of Romantic literature, and romance fantasy became the framework that defined their self-worth and identity. For women, romance ultimately became both a social role and a model of identity.
One of Giddens’s key critiques is that romance does not reflect reality. On the contrary, romance distorts reality in order to fit it into the structure of an emotional narrative. Complete understanding, absolute devotion, dramatic emotion, eternal passion, all of these are fictional images created by Romanticism [1].
In reality, love is the result of negotiation, conflict, and interaction, but romance forces emotion into a single fixed story structure. In short, romance is not human nature, but an emotional story device created by nineteenth-century culture, and today we confuse it with love. Love is a mutual and spontaneous flow of emotion. It is a relationship in which two people freely reveal their inner selves and, through understanding and empathy, form a bond in an unpredictable way. Love cannot be planned, and it cannot be staged or led unilaterally by one side.
Romance, on the other hand, is a narrative that can be designed at its core. Romance is a device for inducing emotion and includes staged experiences that make someone “feel as if they have fallen in love” through particular atmospheres, language, and actions.
For example, sending messages at the same time every day, sharing emotionally stimulating photos, and repeatedly using words like “fate” or “special connection.” Such continuous signals stimulate the brain’s reward circuits and cause the secretion of dopamine and oxytocin, leading to a state of emotional immersion.
In this sense, unlike love, which respects the other person’s free emotional flow, romance is an attempt to design and control emotion.
2. The Lure of Romance Films: How Scammers Exploit Romantic Ideals
“So then, what are romance films?”
Even my scammer, Ken, said he liked romance films. If you have been reading my posts, you probably know that I would answer, “I do not like romance films.” The reason is simple. I already know the emotional manipulation mechanisms of romance films. Of course, knowing these mechanisms does not mean one cannot become a victim of a romance scam.
Romance films use close-up shots, control of shot length, and emotion-amplifying music to design the audience’s feelings. Even just placing two contrasting shots, filmed on different days, side by side, makes viewers mistake them for one naturally connected story.
We watch these films, are moved by them, and grow up dreaming of a kind of fantastical love that is almost impossible in reality. What romance films depict is not the essence of love, but an idealized image of love.
3. The Intersection: Romance Films X Romance Scam Psychology
What is striking is that the emotional design devices used in romance films are reproduced verbatim in romance scams.
Repeated Signals
Just as romance films repeatedly use close-ups to intensify emotions, romance scams send “good morning” messages at the same time every day, brainwash intimacy, and endlessly inject the discourse that “this is what love is” in order to amplify specific feelings.
Illusion of Fate and Coincidence
In films, the two protagonists seem to meet by chance, but in reality, every encounter is a carefully staged setup. Likewise, in scams, messages like “We are like destiny” are repeated to lead the victim to misinterpret the relationship as a “special connection.”
Formation of Unrealistic Characters
Romance films often feature protagonists who overcome painful experiences in past relationships. Romance scam perpetrators tell victims tragic stories about their own past relationships. They claim that an ex-girlfriend betrayed them or that an ex-wife passed away, spinning absurd tales to construct a character of a “wounded yet deep person” and draw victims into emotional immersion.
The Cinderella story
Stories in which a successful man rescues an ordinary woman in films are structurally identical to the scammer’s strategy of pretending to be a “successful businessman” and promising the victim wealth and a stable future.
4. The Romance Scam Trap: The Verisimilitude of Love
The emotional immersion devices used in romance films are not mere stylistic tricks. We have spent our entire lives learning, through romance films and countless novels, as well as music, how emotion can be designed and stimulated. Films employ a psychological structure that leads viewers, even when they know the film is fictional, to want to feel it as if it were real. This is called verisimilitude [2].
When we watch romance films, we are not simply “watching” a love story; we are “experiencing” it.
Ed S. Tan explains this phenomenon in Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine (1996), where he addresses the classic question of why audiences cry at films or feel intense emotions. According to Tan, film is not merely a medium that delivers visual information, but a device that is carefully constructed to generate emotional experience, an emotion machine [3].
The core mechanisms that, in Tan’s view, make film into an emotion-generating device [3].
1) Narrative Structure
The narrative structure itself creates emotion. As viewers anticipate, evaluate, and interpret the development of the story, they feel emotions. Narrative provides a cognitive scenario that invites emotional responses.
2) Character Involvement
Viewers internally simulate the character’s goals, emotions, and desires. As a result, the emotions in the film feel like the viewers’ own emotions. When the protagonist goes through something heartbreaking, the audience feels pain together. This is not simply “watching” but “experiencing.”
3) Emotion Elicitation Mechanisms
Tan sees emotion as the result of a cognitive appraisal process. While watching a film, viewers are constantly evaluating. “Is this character right or wrong?” “Is this situation dangerous?” “Will this love be fulfilled now?” At every moment of interpretation and evaluation, emotions are generated.
4) Suspense, Expectation, and Goal Structure
Tan regards suspense as the most powerful device for generating emotion. While watching a film, viewers predict what will happen next, wait for the outcome, build up emotions into a state of tension, and then feel intense emotion at the moment of resolution. Suspense simultaneously stimulates anxiety, excitement, hope, uncertainty, and desire, thereby heightening emotional arousal.
To this, I would add a more concrete explanation of how films create suspense. They severely limit the use of long shots that show all the information, instead showing only restricted information to the audience through close-ups. They also make the lengths of consecutive shots extremely short to gradually ramp up the viewer’s emotional tension. These classic suspense techniques were used by directors like Hitchcock in older films.
Tan’s mechanisms of emotional generation in film and his concept of “genuine emotion” are directly connected to the psychological structures exploited by romance scam organizations. First, romance scams are designed to follow the same emotional structure found in romance films. By repeating a fixed story pattern, scammers trap the victim’s emotions inside a “manipulable narrative.”
Scam lures use their personal backstory, emotional confessions, and displays of vulnerability (claims such as an ex-wife who died, an ex who betrayed them, and so on) to make the victim become emotionally aligned with them. As a result, the victim comes to feel genuine emotions toward a person who does not exist.
Romance scams force the victim into constant evaluation. “Does he really love me?” “Is this person emotionally dependent on me?” “Is this man different from the one who hurt me before?” This continuous evaluation deepens emotional immersion.
Romance scams also place waiting and uncertainty strategically throughout the interaction. “Why is his message late today?” “He suddenly disappeared. Did something happen?” “Why did he say this now?” This emotional suspense draws the victim deeper into immersion and strengthens the addictive nature of the relationship.
5. The Fraud: Illusion of Real Emotion
According to Tan, the emotions we feel while watching films are not fake but genuine, with the same psychological and physiological structure as real-world emotions. Even when the stimulus is fictional, the viewer’s emotional response occurs in the same way as emotion toward real events [3]. In other words, the stimulus is artificial, but the emotion is not artificial. Emotion actually arises within the brain and cognitive system.
Tan takes a firm stance in favor of real emotion in the long-standing debate in film emotion theory between “make-believe emotion” and “real emotion.” His point can be summarized as follows [3]. Viewers know that films are fictional, but the emotional system does not distinguish between fiction and reality. Emotion operates according to structures such as narrative, goals, danger, conflict, and meaning.
The brain does not generate emotion based on whether the stimulus is “factually real” or not.
If we go a step further, if the structure of film emotion is identical to that of real emotion, then film can be regarded as an emotion-generating device that can be analyzed scientifically. Film generates emotions, emotional responses can be measured, the structure of emotion can be theorized, and the principles of emotion generation can be explained within a scientific framework.
Tan’s account of how film generates emotion and his insistence on “genuine emotion” connect clearly to romance scams. Our emotions can be created easily whenever a structure similar to that of a film is present. They can be measured and manipulated. Romance scams are not the only ones that exploit this point.
We already exist inside a social structure in which emotion is pre-designed. Our emotions are in a state where they can be measured at any time and manipulated at will. Through my investigation and analysis, I have realized how frightening this really is.
We have already, through countless romance films, systematized in our minds the idea that “this is what love is,” and we remain in a state where our emotions can always be manipulated. This is why we fall so easily into the emotional devices of romance scams, even though their story structures are third-rate and cheap. The romance emotion manipulation devices designed by these scammers can look more real and more beautiful than real, painful love in real life.
In conclusion, both romance films and romance scams are devices that design images of love so that viewers or victims immerse themselves in them. There is, however, a crucial difference. Films lead us only to consume emotion and then stop there. Scams exploit that emotion as a weapon to seize power and carry out economic exploitation.
Do we truly want to turn ourselves into the protagonists of these romance films? Or have these scammers turned us into the protagonists of their romance films?
I think both are true.
Written by: Heesuk Paik
References
[1] Giddens, A. (1992). The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love, and eroticism in modern societies. Stanford University Press.
[2] Barthes, R. (1989). The reality effect. In R. Barthes, The rustle of language (pp. 141–148). University of California Press.
[3] Tan, E. S. (1996). Emotion and the structure of narrative film: Film as an emotion machine. Erlbaum.
