A colleague of mine has been hearing rave reviews of the wonderful new men in two of her friends’ lives. Bright, charming, funny, with all their own teeth. Unfortunately, it turns out these wonderful new men are actually just the one wonderful, rather busy man.
But dating two women is nothing compared to some.“Are we dating the same guy?” is a women-only Facebook group (male equivalents exist) where women share notes on men they’re dating and their bad behaviour, outing cheaters, frauds, misogynists and creeps to other women who might otherwise have dated them.
In Los Angeles, scores of women agreed that Stewart Lucas Murrey was a bad date — and we know this because he is suing more than 50 of them for $2.1 million, over damage to his romantic life, working life and reputation. The first suit was dismissed by a judge on Monday.
Did Murrey deserve to be so publicly blacklisted? Many of the comments just painted him as rude or arrogant — not dangerous to date, just unpleasant. That this was shared with thousands of others online, as opposed to with a few close friends over a glass of wine, does mean that it has a digital footprint that might follow Murrey around. But if it’s true, then — well, tough.
Online dating has allowed people to date far outside their social circles, but it also provided an opportunity to behave terribly with little or no accountability. Many of the horrors of modern dating are thanks to the extra degrees of separation, the online shroud of anonymity, and knowing that your friends and peers won’t hear that you’re behaving like a rotter.
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Yet, as we waive our privacy for digital ease, it’s increasingly possible to join the digital dots, for which I’m not alone in feeling grateful. Modern dating is like a part-time job, so anything that can streamline the process is appealing. If one woman’s wasted evening and half of the bill can help the rest of us to rule out a few duds, what’s the harm?
A few years ago, I was comparing battle stories from life on the dating apps with a friend. She began to tell me about a man she was texting who asked her to send photos almost daily, because she wasn’t sure whether this was a red flag or not.
• Man sues more than 50 women for calling him a bad date
He wasn’t asking for nudes — that wouldn’t have been worth mentioning, since its so commonplace — and he was otherwise interesting and funnyish, and handsome. But he wanted candid selfies as she bought her morning coffee or sat at her desk, and he sent her his own, though she never asked for them.
I told her I’d had the same experience — we agreed that maybe more people were being catfished online, and perhaps it was wise to be wary. But he seemed particularly paranoid, she went on. Maybe it was because he was an actor, though she didn’t recognise him from anything …
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The penny finally dropped. We were messaging the same man, at the same time; we had received the same unsolicited selfies of him sitting on the top deck of a bus in his sweaty gym vests. Better than an unsolicited dick pic, we agreed, and mostly harmless, though he did sort of act as if we were crazed superfans stalking him, rather than women he’d approached online. But definitely odd behaviour.
Odd enough that I recognised it at once a few years later when a different friend, living on the opposite side of London, started describing a handsome app match who she thought was behaving strangely (which, for handsome men on dating apps, is saying something) and sure enough, in a city of nine million, it was the same guy.
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I didn’t warn her off him — we’d only been on one date, and it wasn’t bad, or in any way sketchy — but it gave her context, and stopped her from feeling that maybe she’d done something wrong to make him so suspicious. In the end he asked for her Instagram handle — more proof of who she was — and when she mentioned she’d actually seen him in a show, he ghosted her.
Over the dinner table last week, I polled the group about a dishy man that my Hinge algorithm had been showing me daily, but who used to date our mutual acquaintance — and was glad to hear of his love for cocaine and threesomes before I wasted any of my time. (Both are no-thank-yous for me, though I’m only judgmental about the first one.)
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An extract from Chimene Suleyman’s new book, The Chain: The Relationships That Break Us, The Women Who Rebuild Us, appeared in these pages last month. While her partner texted her — apparently from the waiting room outside — as she had an abortion, he was actually recorded by security cameras removing all traces of himself from her New York apartment.
Searching for news of him on social media, she found a drawing posted by another woman living in another country, captioned: “Unfortunately, the guy in the picture turned out to be a psychopath.”
The woman who posted it lived in Australia, but connected Chimene to another woman who had responded to it and also lived in New York. Zoe had even been pregnant with the same man’s child at the same time as Chimene.
The Instagram post gained traction, until his pattern emerged. “He told us he was in hospital or a suicide clinic, asked us for money to pay for his meds or the admission fee, or one treatment or another that would save his life.
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“All these relationships overlapped with other women. Most wrote of giving him money, of losing items from their homes, pregnancies, lies and his mother who was, as it turns out, coming back to life again and again, but unfortunately dying of cancer on a regular basis.”
The money came to at least $100,000, while he pretended to have a job. One of his friends, who met so many of these women, told Chimene they “guessed he was probably homeless and staying between women’s houses”.
Last month New York Magazine published an article about Andrew Huberman, an associate professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and podcast host who teaches “bro science” to five million YouTube subscribers.
The extent to which his relationships with five different women — including his ex-partner Sarah, who tested positive for an STI for the first time three years into their relationship, which she says they agreed was exclusive — overlapped was something that they investigated together, by comparing screenshots of their conversations with Huberman in a group chat.
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According to the magazine, he had told Sarah that the women that she was suspicious of were “stalkers, alcoholics, and compulsive liars”, before she caught him in one affair and began to speak directly to the “other women”.
If data-pooling group chats had existed when I was younger, I might have realised that my first great love was lots of people’s first great love, consecutively, and was also lying about his age.
I might have realised that a boyfriend’s crazy exes weren’t actually crazy, just cheated on, before I became one of them. It’s only the real red flags that would actually put me off if I liked someone, not reading on a Facebook group that they were boring or ten minutes late or rubbish at texting (he’d be a kindred spirit, actually).
Then there are the actually criminal red flags, true conmen like the “Tinder Swindler” who take thousands of pounds from their victims, and who deserve more than just outing in a group chat.
In Keanu Reeves Is Not in Love with You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud, Becky Holmes shares her solution. Targeted by romance scammers on Twitter, she began to mete out her own vigilante justice. She replied to their auto-generated declarations of love with unintelligible nonsense, not that it put them off; she faked travel plans to meet a “pilot” on his busy flightpath; she sent fake gift card codes when they asked for money.
• I had a lucky escape from the ‘lounge lizard’ romance fraudster
Thankfully, most people are who they say they are, at least when it comes to the vital statistics. Dating profiles show rose-tinted versions of ourselves; so does our behaviour on those first few dates. And for anyone who rose-tints a little too aggressively, there’s the risk of the group chat.
There’s a reason some famous bachelors ask their romantic partners to sign NDAs — so that the heart-throb persona remains intact. Suing your detractors is one option — if only for the very fragile and/or angry — but my hope is that the possibility of being named and shamed might stop some men from digitally flashing, or Andrew Tate-esque value appraising, or simply ghosting the women that they meet.
We’ve all had bad dates, but if a man thinks that a few women sharing notes about him is something to be afraid of, that’s probably because he knows he’s been a prick.
