Sarah* met Max* for their first date at a cocktail bar on a cool spring evening. They had matched online, talked about TV shows and movies, and he picked the place and time.
He was tall, smart, good looking in an understated way. Sarah thought a second date might be on the cards.
Then she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“There’s a tall, striking looking blond woman standing there. My first thought is she’s front of house coming to tell me the kitchen was closing,” Sarah says.
She was not.
“She basically said something like: ‘Look, sorry to interrupt your event, but the guy opposite you … I was dating him until recently … and while I was dating him he was also in a relationship with somebody else.’”
Sarah says she was almost in shock, going from the strange intimacy of a date to this heightened, dramatic confrontation.
“Then she said: ‘Hi Max, and good luck,’” Sarah says.
“And she turned around and vanished.”
Let’s call that striking blond woman Annabel.
Annabel had been seeing Max for about three months but broke it off. She’d had suspicions about one of his Facebook friends, and messaged the friend.
“I’d been right on the money. She was devastated. She was six months in,” Annabel says.
Fast forward to that cool spring evening. Annabel had met a friend for a drink nearby.
“I saw [the bar] and inwardly cringed, remembering that’s where Max had taken me on a first date,” she says. “Then, as if conjured from my mind, there sat Max, at the same table where we’d sat. And he wasn’t alone.”
Annabel says she felt a “sense of civic duty” along with “a touch of righteousness” as she approached Sarah and Max, and turned the date on its head.
Thorny questions raised
She is far from alone in wanting to do the right thing for the sisterhood, to save another woman from pain, to share her dating horror story.
But a “real life” outing that happened by chance is rare – such exposure is increasingly done more purposefully, and online.
Facebook and other social media sites are awash with accounts dedicated to exposing cheaters.
And not just cheaters. Women post pictures of guys, usually with their first names, sometimes with their place of work. They’re trying to find out if they’re at risk of violence, of coercive control, of any other type of abuse. Often they will find opinions on whether that guy is just a dud date, prone to ghosting or gaslighting, or if his personal hygiene leaves something to be desired. Catfishing profiles are regularly called out.
Women use the pages to post pictures of the person they have matched with online, sometimes with a name or an initial, and ask if anyone has any “tea” (gossip) about them.
“Anyone know Daniel? Any tea?” they ask.
“Anyone know anything about Ben?”
“Anyone know Tim’s wife?”
The responses range from reassuring the woman that he’s a good guy, to accusations of domestic violence, of controlling behaviour, of child neglect, of lies and of cheating.
Others pipe up with claims of narcissism, or psychopathy.
In one case seen by Guardian Australia, a woman posted a man’s full name and details of civil charges against him, “in case he is back on Tinder”.
Women use such sites to feel safe, to check whether the guy they’re thinking about dating has raised red flags with others. But these sites – and there are dozens in Australia, with tens of thousands of members – raise thorny questions about privacy, ethics, defamation and redemption.
Sarah – who doesn’t plan on seeing Max again – asks: “Are people allowed to make a mistake and rebuild their life? Once they’ve cheated on one person once, are they never allowed love again?”
The men shamed, if they ever find out about it, struggle to defend themselves, as they are not allowed on the Facebook sites. Some take to Reddit to say women have invented stories about their behaviour, that they are making up vindictive claims in revenge for relationships that went sour or never took off.
Women ‘needed to do this’
There is no doubt that the 3 million Australians who use online dating are copping abuse.
The Australian Institute of Criminology found three in four online daters had experienced some form of sexual violence facilitated by a dating app. This included sexual harassment, abusive or threatening language, image-based sexual abuse and stalking.
Carla Wilshire, chief executive officer of the Social Policy Group and director of the Centre for Digital Wellbeing, says women are driven to use the sites to protect themselves.
“Women feel they needed to do this because the platforms have effectively failed them on safety,” she says.
But she warns that semi-public shaming has inherent problems.
“You can never really determine the intent of the user,” she says. “That could be wanting to protect other women from someone who has perpetrated significant abuse, through to … a private relationship that’s broken down because the other party hasn’t behaved in a way that met expectations.”
She says people posting in or running the sites are opening themselves up to legal action for defamation or breaching privacy laws. The pictures or the comments responding to them often have identifying information about the man.
Wilshire says dating apps should be using artificial intelligence to spot repeat offenders and better protect vulnerable users.
The federal government has told dating apps to develop a code of practice to address sexual assault and abuse on their platforms. The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, wrote to 10 of the most popular dating sites in September, warning that if they didn’t improve their safety outcomes by the middle of next year, the government would develop legislation to force them to take action.
But that won’t help with catching the cheaters.
After Annabel disappeared, Sarah asked Max about her accusation.
“I said something like: ‘I guess there’s two possibilities: A, she’s telling the truth; B, she’s a psycho,’” she says.
“He said to me: ‘A and B are both true.’ And that took me a second to process.”
(Sarah says now she regrets using the word psycho in the shock of the moment, because of how that trope is used by men to dismiss and demean women.)
She left, a little bemused and amused at the surreal evening, and a little jaded.
For her part, Annabel accuses the apps of only caring about money, not people’s wellbeing. “They are nothing at all to do with helping people find love,” she says.
But the silver lining of the adventure? She became friends with Max’s other girlfriend. “Now she feels like a sister to me,” she says.
“We’re very similar, and it’s been nice to have someone to share the journey – and the horror stories of dating – with.”
* Names have been changed
