While we’re on the phone, Flossie gasps. “There’s a girl on here saying this guy owes her £26,000,” she laughs. By “on here” Flossie means the Facebook group called Are We Dating The Same Guy London/England, where women share pictures of the dating profiles for the men they’re dating and ask if anyone else is dating him, or whether he has any “red flags”.
Groups like this one have existed in the US for a while, but this is the first to properly take off in the UK — and it’s already got 20,000 members. Things can get pretty crazy in the comments, but even by the group’s usual standards, £26,000 of debt is a big claim — hence the gasp.
Flossie (not her real name) is a 25-year-old postgrad student living in North London who joined the group after her female friend sent her a screenshot of a post featuring a guy Flossie had once dated. “Any tea?” another member of the group asked, with screenshots of his Hinge profile. Flossie could have said that he ghosted her, but she chose not to. “It’s just not that deep for me,” she says. “Being ghosted isn’t very nice but it’s not the end of the world. Also what if she [the girl who posted] went back to him being like ‘this girl called Flossie says blah blah blah.’”
The intention of the group isn’t to pick apart a man’s dating flaws either. Its main purpose is to keep women safe. According to the page’s description: “This group is a place for women to protect and empower other women while warning each other of men who might be liars, cheaters, abusers, or exhibit any type of toxic or dangerous behavior.” And it succeeds in that — women have previously responded to posts asking for tea (intel) on a guy or any potential red flags he has with accusations of sexual assault and abusive behaviour. Flossie says the most “serious” one she’s seen recently cropped up yesterday, when a group member warned others away from a certain man because he had “rape fantasies” — a forceful sex fetish. “So he wanted to roleplay, basically,” Flossie says of the warning, “and they [the commenter] was just like — stay away.”
This is a serious accusation to be pairing with a guy’s first name and his face, even if it’s only his first name. Sure, the moderators have gone to great lengths to keep things legit — there is a rigorous set of group rules, they kick people out regularly, and to even gain access you have to take a survey proving you’ve read the group rules (you can’t just copy and paste them). Additionally, one of the rules is that anyone making an accusation should be ready to back it up with proof.
But as anyone who has ever used any social media platform knows — moderators can’t spot everything, and rules get broken all the time. For example, I was admitted to the group without having to answer any of its careful entry questioning, presumably because of admins rushing to approve join requests, meaning I could have gotten away without reading any of the rules.
One of the other examples of rule-breaking within the group is the frequent mocking (or “roasting”) of the men who are posted, when it’s technically prohibited by the group’s magna carta. Their appearance might get picked apart in the comments, or women just take the piss out of a man’s dating profile, even though it’s strictly forbidden. Sometimes girls are kicked out, or the group is given a mass discipline via the admins.
Flossie reads me out one of their recent chastising posts, from a few weeks ago: “Girls, negative comments based solely on a guy’s physical appearance are just cruel and unnecessary.” The post continues: “It will deter some women from posting, you’re putting them at greater risk.” A fair point — if women are too worried about what people may say about their prospective partner in the comments then they won’t post and the group loses its sole purpose.
But people can be fair, too. Flossie says that occasionally women will post pictures of men to rave reviews from commenters. “Some have been really positive,” she says, “There was one where the girl was just like, ‘Oh, I’m going on a date with this guy. Anyone got any tea?’ And literally in the comments, everyone was like, ‘He’s the nicest guy. So nice. He’s lovely. I’ve known him for like over ten years.’”
However, the group can also get a little hypocritical. The only other person Flossie has spotted on the group who she recognises is a guy who went to school near her in North London. No red flags cropped up for him — but the poster was a different story. “Funnily enough, it was a girl who was dating three different guys, and he was one of them,” Flossie laughs, “so I guess it can be a bit hypocritical. Honestly I think if men knew about this group they would probably freak out.”
Not necessarily. Wayne, a freelance social video editor, is in the group’s prime demographic for posting. He’s 34 (the age range of the group fluctuates, from 18 year olds to people in their 40s) and regularly uses dating apps, but isn’t scared by the existence of the group, in fact, he thinks it’s a wholly “good thing”.
“It reminds me a little bit of the sorority in the US where a group of girls started making lists of all the boys at fraternities at their university who were dodgy,” Wayne says, referencing the policy Yale University brought in in 2019 where female students could “flag” the names of male students who made them uncomfortable. “Once people found out about it they got accused of ‘making pariahs’ out of the boys,” he continues, “when in fact it’s just accountability.”
“I think a lot of men in particular feel terrified at the idea of women talking to each other about their experiences with men, which is where I imagine any backlash to this would come from. And it might be an unregulated resource but also being a single woman dating men who you don’t know is unregulated as well.”
Ultimately, Wayne believes the group’s pros outweigh its cons. “I think that the possibility of a man being laughed at offhand in a facebook group like that is a lot better than the possibility of a woman coming to harm on a date with a guy,” he says, “which happens quite a lot.”
So if the men can be empathetic, and the women can agree to play nice, this may well be the future of safe dating.
