What if the person you’ve trusted for years turns out to be a complete illusion?
That’s the emotional earthquake Justin describes in his conversation with Walt and Jodie Lynn - a collapse so profound it didn’t just end a relationship; it rewired his life’s purpose.
Justin shares how his partner of eight years suddenly “ruptured the marriage” in a way that, as he puts it, “was not consistent with the values that she had set throughout the relationship for eight years”. While he was reeling, she quietly transferred tens of thousands of dollars to herself and her mother. Looking back, he calls it a “horrific Gone Girl type experience, similar to being, you know, paralyzed on an operating table and the surgeon’s carving away at you, having fun”.
The obvious question Walt raises is: how does something like this happen to intelligent, caring people? And why don’t we see the red flags?
Justin admits, “Apparently I’m really bad at finding red flags, or I used to be”. That painful admission became the seed of his dating safety app, Cray. Instead of letting the trauma destroy him, he asked a different question: How can I make sure this doesn’t happen to someone else?
Drawing on his background in app development, he helped launch the first concussion app in 2011. Justin spent 18 months turning his landmines into guardrails for others. Every trick he encountered online - catfishing, blackmail attempts, and financial manipulation became another safety feature. As he puts it, “Over 18 months, as I stepped on these landmines, I built in safety protocols in the app to try and help people to avoid them too”.
A central theme of the conversation is love bombing - a tactic many people feel but don’t have language for. When Walt asks, “What exactly is love bombing?”, Justin explains it as the overwhelming, movie-level affection that feels like a dream but is engineered to hook you: “You feel like you have your best cheerleader sitting next to you while they’re strangling you to death, and you not knowing”.
Jodie Lynn adds her own lived experience of missing glaring warning signs - being told she wasn’t “allowed” to see her own brother, ignoring violent outbursts, shrinking from a confident woman into “a little mouse” who just did her work in the corner. Later, she realized, “I am the common denominator in all of this, and I need to take responsibility for the way that I’m living”. That decision led her to hire a relationship coach long before getting into her next relationship.
Both Justin and Jodie Lynn return to one crucial takeaway: healing starts with self-love and boundaries. Justin says, “If you love yourself, then boundaries are a natural, secondary consequence”. Walt reinforces that the way we talk to ourselves - through journaling, affirmations, and mirror work can be the turning point that stops the cycle of abusive partners and manipulative dynamics.
Justin’s app, Cray Dating Safety, is his way of standing guard beside people who are young, newly divorced, or healing from trauma - those least likely to recognize danger early. “If it could happen to me, I had to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else,” he says.
In a dating world full of masks, illusions, and expertly staged performances, this conversation leaves us with a hard but hopeful truth: the red flags are there.
The real work and the real freedom are learning to see them, trust ourselves, and walk away.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/justin-smith
Justin Smith's Website: http://cray.app/
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