Last week, a woman took to the internet to try and locate her runaway husband, whom she accused of ghosting her while she was pregnant with their second child. “I’m really about to test the power of Facebook with this one,” Ashley McGuire wrote. “Last year, when I was pregnant with our youngest baby, he decided being a husband and a dad wasn’t the lifestyle he wanted any more and he ghosted — like gone without a trace.”
But McGuire wasn’t just posting directly to Facebook, hoping for the plea to go viral. She was posting to “Are We Dating The Same Guy?”, a Facebook group filled with tens of thousands of women, who use the group every day to assess the men they’re dating. This was the Texas arm of the group, but there are multiple, localised iterations, including a London version. The husband, a British chef named Charles Withers, was tracked down in less than a day.
