I had a glass of wine in hand and Facebook on my screen when my world collapsed and truth fled. One photograph showed them on a boat: she was in a sarong; he hugged her close. In another, they were at a restaurant table: they held hands. And the one that inflicted the greatest wound: a pic she'd obviously taken of him in which he sat on a country resort's veranda, relaxed, reading a book I'd given him for his birthday

He was the boyfriend I'd met online 15 months earlier but just dumped, the man who had spurred me to hope that together we might grow decrepit and grey, but who had let me down so many times and led me into such a state of distress and anxiety that I realised continuing the relationship was madness. But I thought I was still in love with him. And there he was, scattered through another woman's social media pages, a woman whose existence I'd only just discovered thanks to information a mutual acquaintance had shared.

When we first met, he told me he had a small sheep farm a couple of hours' drive south of Sydney. From fairly early in our relationship, he – I'll call him Joe – started to stand me up when things went pear-shaped. A bore was pumping out mud and he needed to fix it. A fence had come down that he needed to repair. He'd poisoned himself with sheep drench. One day during our relationship, he texted to say his dog had been bitten by a snake on the farm and he was at a country vet's, cradling the fading kelpie. He wouldn't be able to make it to my place for dinner as planned, he said. Over the next two days, he sent me a barrage of texts updating me on the dog's condition. Multiple times he said he was just about ready to drive to the city to see me; multiple times he delayed his departure. When finally he arrived at my apartment and I comforted him, he had tears in his eyes.

And there he was, in December 2015, popping up in photographs on another woman's Facebook feed, having a lovely, loved-up time at a country resort – the same weekend he'd told me he was in the midst of a veterinary emergency. No sign of his dog. No snake.

The head-spinning horror was endless … evidence of the scale of Joe's manipulation and deceit from the very first day of our relationship.

That night, the head-spinning horror was endless: chugging wine after wine, discovering photograph after photograph, evidence of the scale of Joe's manipulation and deceit from the very first day of our relationship, evidence I had been utterly fooled. But the discovery of his romantic fraud was just the beginning. I had tugged on a thread. His extraordinary quilt of lies started to unravel.

As I first recounted in a 2017 Good Weekend story, in the weeks after that awful night, as I tried to keep myself upright, my inquiries started to uncover the extent of Joe's fake life: the man I had believed to be an affluent former architect who lived in a house on Sydney Harbour with his children, spent time at the farm when they were with their mother, and was also a highly successful property developer, was a fantasist, a great pretender. He was, in fact, bankrupt, had a criminal record for a fraud-related offence, had nearly ruined his former business partner, and seemed to have no fixed address.

But in a sense, the story, my story, really started after that article. Squadrons of messages flew into my inbox. Some people wrote to express their incredulity that such a person even existed in the world. Others said they thought the story should be made into a movie, that there was something Hitchcock-ian about it. A few men contacted me to say it made them ashamed of their sex. Not all men, they said. Missives landed from a number of people who recognised the man I had described in my story. Some who knew him agreed to meet with me and allowed me to record our conversations. I drank negronis and shared battle scars with the other woman. As it became clear that Joe had wreaked havoc on many others in both his personal and business lives, and the number of hair-raising stories piled up, I was filled with a rush of inarticulate emotion, a sense I had stumbled into some deranged parallel world.

And something astonishing became clear: the behaviour of my ex-boyfriend was not so unusual. Dozens of women, and a few men, wrote long, intelligent and candid notes to me outlining their relationship experiences with similar characters. Oh yes, I know someone that happened to, was what I heard from countless others. From the sheer volume of anecdotes I received, it seemed there was in the world a silent epidemic: emotional abuse perpetrated by an army of liars, cheats, grifters, charlatans, con artists, impostors, narcissists, fantasists and flim-flam men. A disproportionate number lurk on dating websites and apps. It is clear to me that the disordered behaviour of people like this is a far more common cause of relationship breakdown and trauma than anyone could imagine.

As for my own trauma, I was not done with it. I might have discovered my ex-boyfriend was nothing more than a small, hollow man with a con artist's suite of tricks and, most likely, a personality disorder. But even a small man can leave a big mark. The damage Joe inflicted was far greater than the sum of its devastating parts. I had not only lost him (well, the man I had thought he was) and the future I'd hoped we might share; he stole things from me, too. Not money. I like to think that, if he'd asked me for money, I would have seen him immediately. No, he stole more important things: my belief in myself, my belief in truth and decency, my trust.

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To haul myself back to life, I realised there were questions for which I needed answers. I had to understand what had happened to me, why I had let myself stay in such a relationship, why I had turned my back on red flags that were evident from the start. And I needed to attempt to understand Joe and his psychology: why do some people behave in such wicked ways?

Both the research I gathered for my book about my experience, Fake, and the process of writing itself, led me to the answers and understanding I needed. And during the course of that work, something else became clear: there is a wider sociocultural framework, a confluence of contextual factors, which makes my relationship with this man totally and grievously on-trend.

Consider the dismal context in which we find ourselves, a sliding scale of horror: a woman is murdered in Australia by a current or former partner every nine days. One in six women reports having experienced physical or sexual violence by a current or previous partner; one in four women has suffered emotional abuse.

Fifty per cent of Australian women have been sexually harassed. Women are three times as likely as men to be stalked. Those statistics are recorded in the recently released Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's 2019 report, Family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia. According to the UN, globally more than one third of women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. No wonder a little Twitter hashtag, #MeToo, became a big deal.

Meanwhile, the leader of the free world is a man sometimes described as the "con artist in chief", a man who boasted about grabbing women by the pussy. One of our own leaders, the former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, publicly threw doubt on the paternity of the unborn child that his girlfriend, a woman for whom he abandoned his wife, was carrying. (She stuck by him and is now the mother of his two sons.)

And everywhere I go now, I encounter one degree or other of toxic masculinity: the driver who shakes his fist at me when I'm out on my bicycle and he's forced to slow his Ferrari. A small man in an expensive suit in an elegant city bar I overhear giving a hissing commentary about a woman to his chuckling buddies ("f…ing big tits" and "f…ing that"). The most pleasant, gentle man at a dinner party who, the hosts later tell me, talks in the crudest of terms about women when his wife or other women are absent. All men do it, says the male host, shrugging.

There is another contextual factor: the rivers of badly behaved men are flowing into a cultural moment – our general fascination with impostors, both male and female, both business and romantic. In the past couple of years, the media and entertainment industries have presented for our consideration a conga line of conners. We find them enthralling. We listen to the 2017 LA Times's podcast Dirty John, then rush to watch the Netflix series of the story starring Eric Bana as manipulative sociopath John Meehan.

We read Vanity Fair's 2018 exposé of Anna "Delvey" Sorokin, the fake German heiress, and later follow the breathless reporting of her fashion-conscious court appearances. According to The Washington Post, Lena Dunham is adapting the story of Sorokin's con artistry for HBO, while Netflix is working on another related project. And now we have our own vile phony, Hamish McLaren, who dressed like James Bond and swindled more than $7 million from victims including fashion designer Lisa Ho, and whose story is told in this year's popular podcast Who the Hell Is Hamish?, produced by The Australian. We are, collectively, as much in the grip of these epic tales of duplicity as I was in Joe's grip.

Such fodder is, I suppose, ideal entertainment for the "post-truth" era in which we live, an era of fake news, the proliferation of misleading Facebook messages, social media insanity and selfie obsession (all filters and falsity). If someone can't pretend to be someone they're not in the second decade of the 21st century, when can they? But if I could bring you back to the truth for a moment: it's not entertainment when you're in the middle of one of these stories, nor afterwards, when you are left with a deep sense of shame and, worse still, the conviction that love can't be trusted.

"Do you sometimes feel silly?" That's the question a woman asked me at a party recently. I was telling her about my forthcoming book and the relationship that led to it. I had never met this woman before and it was the first question she thought to ask me about the story.

I felt like I'd been slapped across the cheek with a wet fish, such was the weight of the judgment in her question. But to be fair, even when people's curiosity is less clumsy, I feel their silent assessment. I'd never fall for a con artist, I hear them thinking, What's wrong with her? I fear their thoughts are much the same as the thoughtless words left on social media: "How stupid can some women be?" was one comment left under an online post about the women who fell for Hamish McLaren. "She had no excuse for being this clueless," someone said on an online forum about Debra Newell, the woman who fell prey to "Dirty John" Meehan.

Troll-ish commentary online is to be expected, but it is barely a tickle compared to the self-flagellation to which people who have fallen for these characters subject themselves. "It took me way longer than it should have to see through his complex web of lies. I was left feeling just so stupid and humiliated when I worked it out and broke up with him," one woman told me in an email. And another: "I've had to do much soul-searching to understand how I, an intelligent, successful and attractive woman, managed to come under his spell." It was by far the most common sentiment women who contacted me expressed: How could I, an intelligent woman, have fallen for that?

The woman who talked about falling under a spell – I'll call her Leah – is a Melbourne executive with serious university qualifications. She met the man who would later turn her life into a living hell at a business conference. She was 36. She wanted to have children and, in hindsight, she can see how that was a significant factor in what unfolded. She was also hugely attracted to him physically – he was younger than she was, tall and dark, and buff from his gym workouts. Over coffee, Leah tells me she can see now how the relationship that unfolded over years was crazy. A friend kept telling her the man had sprinkled "fairy dust" over her.

"Being the people-pleaser I am, I didn't insist on certain things," says Leah, whose petite, fair prettiness is wreathed in an air of sensitivity and framed by a tumble of auburn hair. Like spending time together. Her bloke would tell her he had to work on the weekends, or had commitments with his friends. He'd come and go: they lived together for a while, then they didn't, he wanted some "time apart", then he rekindled things. She came to accept the constantly shifting ground and clung to the crumbs of affection he scattered. At one point, she found out he'd actually been living with another woman during their relationship – even now she can barely talk about it, such was the trauma of the discovery.

Then he told her he'd ended things with the other woman. "He was just so incredibly persuasive and I just wanted to believe what he said was true." When he asked her to marry him, she accepted. "I thought, 'No man would propose unless he really does love me. It must really be me that he's chosen.'"

But her new husband was constantly absent. He told her that long hours and nights away were essential to keep his business afloat. When she challenged him, he became aggressive, he would call her "paranoid" and "crazy". "How dare you f…ing accuse me of things – this is my work," he would rage. He was so adamant. There was no way, she thought, that he could be lying. "He was very good at getting the heat off himself by turning it back onto me and making me feel like I was a fool," she tells me. Gaslighting 101.

At the beginning, he had showered Leah with flattery. As time went on, he spent more time belittling her. He told her she wasn't thin enough; he mocked her work. After the birth of their first child, Leah was sleep-deprived and she started to feel like she was going crazy. She was increasingly frightened of him. "He was a big man, so he would be menacing. He would stand over me and yell at me." On one occasion he whacked her cat and, when she rushed to protect it, he repeatedly kicked her.

At the beginning, he had showered 'Leah' with flattery. As time went on, he spent more time belittling her.

Leah had another baby. Amid her increasing mental turmoil, the baby wouldn't settle. Leah wasn't producing enough milk. "I became terrified of having to settle her." Crippling anxiety descended. She couldn't sleep, she wasn't eating, she couldn't feed her baby, she paced the house maniacally. Eventually, she was admitted to a maternal health clinic. There, finally, she was able to sleep.

On the day she returned home a month later, her husband announced they had to sell their house. His business was in trouble. They had a big, lovely house. They had a pool man, a gardener and a cleaner. But that life was over now. She tried to find a modest rental property but nothing suited her husband. "Listen," he said, "I'm not going to compromise my lifestyle." She realised he was never going to change.

"One day I woke up and it literally felt like a clouds-parting experience. My head said, 'You don't have to stay with this man because of your children. You actually have to leave him because of your children'."

In the dismantling of the relationship, the discoveries were shocking. Her husband had never ended things with the other woman and had effectively led a double life since they started dating. "She stood outside during our wedding reception. He went missing for a period of time. He was with her. On my wedding day." Now she believes her husband had convinced the other woman that his relationship with her was all part of some "big plan". "I mean, fancy that: she's found out that her boyfriend's marrying someone else and he's managed to give her a convincing story to explain why."

But as with Joe, my ex-boyfriend, Leah's husband did not confine his duplicity to romantic endeavours. She learnt that his LinkedIn profile was largely a list of fabricated roles. Ultimately, she became enmeshed in a complex legal case related to her ex-husband's fraudulent loan applications. He had forged her signature and also claimed to own properties he didn't. He had concealed official documents from her that would have revealed the extent of the trouble he was in. Now she estimates that the relationship cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her ex-husband still owes her parents nearly half a million dollars.

"He was a man with very little substance, but who made himself look big, and he needed material things for that, so he'd have a flashy car and he would always park right at the front of wherever he was going. He'd get a ticket and he'd just disregard it."

I tell Leah about an interview I conducted with Professor Brin F.S. Grenyer, a clinical psychologist and the director of the University of Wollongong-based Project Air Strategy for Personality Disorders. I had gone to him searching for understanding about why some humans behave as Joe did. The professor explained to me that, at a fundamental level, among other characteristics, someone with a personality disorder has a vulnerable sense of self and, often, a palpable sense of emptiness. "If the person feels empty inside and they feel like they're a tiny person, [they might be] trying to create a false image of themselves to feel bigger, stronger and more important."

So when a woman at a party asked me if I "sometimes feel silly?" I said, "Yes, of course." But as I hastened to explain the multiple and complex factors that make someone fall for an impostor's tricks, including the scientifically proven addictive qualities of love, a waiter interrupted us with canapés and the woman's interest moved elsewhere. It would have taken hours, anyway, for me to unfurl for her what I learnt over two years of research.

Yes, I would like to defend my intelligence: it's not about smart people versus stupid people, and to reinforce my view on that, I'll offer you a quote from the French philosopher René Descartes: "It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well." In the case of my relationship with Joe, certainly I could have put my mind to better use.

The red flags were there: there were too many cancellations, plan changes and missed flights, and his explanations for them were bizarre.

The red flags were there: there were too many cancellations, plan changes and missed flights, and his explanations for them were frequently bizarre or contradictory. I became a detective in the relationship. But I was a sloppy detective. I checked the weather reports when he said rain had held him up on his farm. I Googled for flight delays and incidents of sheep-drench poisoning and the names of the men he'd said were his business associates. And yet I set aside avenues of investigation I knew were available – land title and bankruptcy register searches – which would immediately have revealed the deceitful foundations of his stories.

In her excellent 2017 book, The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for it Every Time, American author Maria Konnikova suggests a reason for our susceptibility to impostors. "It's the oldest story ever told. The story of belief – of the basic, irresistible, universal human need to believe in something that gives life meaning," she says. "We want to believe in what they're telling us."

It’s the 'irresistible, universal human need to believe in something that gives life meaning'.

Maria Konnikova on why people fall for impostors.

I wanted to believe in a prince, in the idea I might have met the one, the fairy tale. I wanted to believe in love. After several years on my own in a world in which there is a dearth of single men of any description, never mind eligible single men, I chose not to investigate Joe more thoroughly because I couldn't bear to face the possibility that I might have been kissing a toad. But I'm not alone: too many women's approach to relationships is coloured by their ongoing belief in knights on white horses and happily-ever-after, while few men deliver the fairy tale and too many are badly behaved, variously self-interested, self-involved, sexist, opportunistic, misogynistic, mendacious, malicious, malevolent, abusive, dangerous. (Don't start: no, not all men, but too many. Yes, women are guilty of this behaviour, too.)

And among them are the con artists, and they are something else. In the collision of elements that has led us down these black holes, we must give credit where credit is due: these people have an innate, instinctive ability to deceive. Lying is as automatic a response to them as breathing. They are emotionally crippled and conscienceless, but fiendishly clever. They are audacious risk-takers who will say anything and, if that doesn't work, they will say something else that will. They extract our dreams, then sell them back to us, with bombardments of seduction and flattery, with promises of glorious futures. They are little more than walking sales pitches.

But there are other factors I have discovered that can distort our thinking. One day while researching, I stumbled upon an article in The Conversation, written by American cognitive scientist Vera Tobin about how scriptwriters mess with our brains. Tobin referred to The Sixth Sense, that terrifying 1999 film in which Haley Joel Osment's character confides in psychologist Malcolm Crowe, played by Bruce Willis. "I see dead people," the little boy says. Then comes the twist at the end – Crowe is one of the dead people, too, and it's all so obvious, you kick yourself that you didn't see it at the start. "Remember that once we know the answer to a puzzle, its clues can seem more transparent than they really were," Tobin wrote.

In a Skype interview with Tobin, who is based in Cleveland, Ohio, I learnt about a raft of cognitive biases that can lead us astray. "The curse of knowledge" and "hindsight bias", for example, in which the more information you have about something, say, the outcome of my relationship with Joe and the details of his behaviour, the harder it will be for you to understand how it would have been for me not to have that information, meaning you might overestimate how easy it should have been for me to see that he was a bankrupt liar with a criminal record and a fantasy life.

After my conversation with Tobin, my mind kept returning to another thought: how could I have watched out for something I was unaware was even a thing? Of course I'd seen Catch Me If You Can, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays the famous (former) conman, Frank William Abagnale jnr. I'd read about Victor Lustig, the Eiffel Tower "salesman", and Charles Ponzi. But I'd not encountered stories of people who engage in such complex con-artistry in the romantic sphere. The worst I had imagined about Joe was that he was seeing someone else or he just wasn't that into me.

The interviews I conducted with other women and men about their experiences with characters like this revealed something else interesting: as I did, most had a sense of uncertainty about relationships. Most felt their upbringing, their childhood, had laid the foundations, to one degree or another, for their adult relationship patterns.

One woman I interviewed – I'll call her Sophia – fell in love with a man who was wild and exotic and romanced her like she was in some Hollywood movie. She moved interstate to be with him. She stayed with him despite his erratic, narcissistic behaviour until the night she was at the wheel, driving at 100 kilometres per hour on the highway and, from the passenger seat, he punched her. Now she looks back to her years growing up with parents who had an on-again, off-again relationship and some transience, and puts the pieces together.

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Sophia desperately wanted to feel needed and special. And she can see now how her childhood belief that, one day, a man would come along who would be everything she had been waiting for, coupled with her longing to be needed, led her to let men into her life too quickly, and to let them mistreat her.

Now when I think of Sophia, a picture comes to me of a pretty little dark-haired girl, her head buried in a book, her parents hurling verbal grenades around her. And I think of Jeanette Winterson's stunning Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, in which she writes of the tragedy of her childhood, her devastating relationship with her adoptive mother, her lifelong hunger for love and belonging, the patterns of rejection. "When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable," Winterson writes. "In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets."

When I ask Leah, the Melbourne executive, why she thinks she might have been vulnerable to her ex-husband's manipulations, she can barely speak. When she does, her voice quavers. "I believe it is a deep-down lack of self-love and self-worth." Since she was a child, Leah has known that her mother dislikes her. She is not self-pitying; she does not want to apportion blame. It is merely something she realises now has had a profound effect on her relationship choices.

"My mother's dislike has been there since I can remember. She was jealous of my father's attention towards his first-born daughter. That jealousy followed me through my life, really."

I seemed to look for relationships that confirmed my low self-esteem; I accepted that I should expect to be treated badly.

"Leah", on why she might have been vulnerable to her ex-husband's manipulations.

Her mother's behaviour completely eroded Leah's confidence. She came to believe that she was "essentially unlovable". "I seemed to look for relationships that confirmed my low self-esteem; I accepted that I should expect to be treated badly. That's what I felt I deserved."

Another woman I interviewed, Naomi, had just left a difficult and unhappy marriage when she got together with a man she now believes has a narcissistic personality disorder. She was in a vulnerable place, but she recognises now that she still believed in white-picket-fence perfection. "That was part of what was behind my gullibility, my ridiculous hopefulness and my preparedness to listen to illogical shit and accept it," she says. But in her own soul-searching, Naomi has identified another factor. "I don't have the best self-esteem in the world. I've grown up to not think of myself as a particularly hot commodity."

Me too. Self-esteem has never been my strong suit. In my relationship with Joe, with every letdown and cancellation, the feeling registered: "This is all I deserve." And something else: every time the idea crept in that perhaps he was vanishing to another woman, the feeling came to me that no one else would be interested in such an odd man. But me? He was all I deserved.

These are not easy words to share, but the truth is, I don't believe them anymore, anyway. I like now instead to think of the words Naomi shared with me over coffee: "I've spent the past four years not sure whether he broke me or fixed me. Now I think what happened is he broke me and I fixed myself."

Fake, by Stephanie Wood (Vintage, $35), is out on July 2.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.