Inside the secret network of women naming and shaming their bad exes

App dating is hell. It’s an admin-heavy, low-reward process that feels like it sets you up to fail. Sure, some people get exactly what they want from it, be that a long-term romantic relationship, quickies in bar toilets or ethically non-monogamous situationships that satisfy both parties. But what started as an egalitarian approach to actually meeting those elusive hot singles in your area often becomes a lonely, pothole-laden road to pain.

For women, in particular, dating apps come with a good deal of risk. No one enters into a relationship, no matter how casual, thinking that the person sweeping them off their feet will turn out to be physically or sexually abusive at some point. But this is the outcome for almost a third of women aged 15-49 worldwide – and that’s not including emotional abuse, which is a lot harder to quantify. No wonder we want to sense-check every little detail when we connect with a stranger who is little more than a photo on a screen. Wouldn’t it be great to have a heads-up that this could be the time it all goes horribly and possibly violently wrong?

Luckily, there is a global movement aiming to offer just that. It is a loose network of Facebook groups in major cities and areas around the world named “Are We Dating the Same Guy?”.

What began as a way for New York’s single women to check their dating partners’ availability has transformed into something huge and sprawling, an international whisper network shining a glaring interrogation lamp on the state of dating in 2023.

As its name suggests, the original purpose of these groups was to check if the person you’re excited about (usually a straight, cisgender man) is already attached to someone – a fair question to ask when, in 2018, researchers found that between 18 and 25 per cent of Tinder users were already in committed relationships while using the app. But as the networks grew, their uses morphed: some women still use it to ask for what are essentially user reviews of the men they are considering dating (“any tea?”, they will post alongside a screengrab of a dating app profile), but others have darker stories of men they have met via apps, and warnings that they pass along.

One recent success, if you can call it that: a woman posted on behalf of her mum, concerned that the man she had been talking to was a catfish (a catfish is someone who uses other people’s pictures to create a fake identity). Other group members began chiming in. Some had run his picture through a reverse image search to see if it came up. Others were simply Portuguese, which came in handy when it turned out that the man in the photo was actually a famous Portuguese actor who almost certainly wasn’t chatting to a woman on a dating app since he’s gay. Without activating the hive mind of the group, who knows what damage this fake relationship could have caused?

I spoke to a number of women who discovered that they were being cheated on thanks to these groups, but they did not wish to be named or directly quoted. One found out that her boyfriend of three years was dating around when his photo was posted; another told me that the man she had been on a few dates with was lying about his circumstances. Women have been warned that the man they are about to meet has previously engaged in coercive behaviour. Others have said they’ve been lied to by specific men, who’ve love-bombed them with promises of eternal, undying devotion before discarding them once they’d had sex.

Women share experiences of abusive relationships too, sexual assault and unwanted sexual advances; they tell stories of catfishers, conmen, serial ghosters. They ask if their own behaviour is unhinged because a man has made them feel as if they’re acting “crazy” for trying to extricate themselves from uncomfortable situations.

Cyberpsychologist Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton, whose work has centred on communication through technology, particularly in online dating, thinks these Facebook groups can be very valuable for anyone trying to date in the opaque spaces created by dating apps. “If you’re on a social network platform, a lot of what happens is public so it’s easy to see what the social norms of behaviour are,” she tells me. “Whereas with something like online dating, pretty much everything that happens [outside of] the profile is behind closed doors, and you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know if your experience is normal, or weird, or if everybody else is having the same experience.” Moderated by volunteers, and under strict rules about what can and can’t be posted, the groups see women question their judgements, their decisions, their own actions – and tens of thousands of other women are standing by to give their two cents.

It may not come as a huge surprise that a lot of men find the existence of these groups problematic. Men’s rights activists have got several of the North American groups shut down through targeted campaigns and reporting them to Facebook; there are whole communities on Reddit that exist solely to unpick the networks. Men who have been posted on the groups have felt violated. Even if you’ve been given positive reviews by the groups, it cannot feel great to know you’ve been discussed by potentially thousands of strangers, tarred slightly even by the association. Some men seem convinced that women are using the groups to either spread lies or to make fun of them. It seems, in some corners of the internet, to have fostered an “us versus them” culture – heterosexual dating has become a battleground.

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It is particularly hard to get any users of the Are We Dating the Same Guy? groups to speak publicly. The rule, for women’s safety, is that whatever happens in the group, stays in the group. Every post has to be approved before it makes it onto the page – no addresses, no identifying information beyond a photo and a first name – and every person who applies to join the group has to be vetted to stop fake profiles or nefarious entities from gaining access. This takes up the bulk of the moderators’ time. Sarah, who moderates one of the Canadian groups, tells me that there are sometimes Columbo-levels of investigation that occur before an application is accepted or rejected. You will also be ejected for sharing screenshots or passing information onto men who have been written about – for good reason. “A lady had posted someone in a group and the guy found out, and showed up at her house and broke in,” Sarah says, shuddering at the memory.

Horror stories like that get a good deal of attention, but what about those somewhere between the amicable breakup and the midnight bolt to a safehouse? People’s experiences – including my own – come laced with shame at being duped and hoodwinked by someone who was at best careless and at worst callous with your heart. “Some of it is silly,” Sarah says. “Just like, ‘boys being boys’, which is a horrible expression but the only way I could put it. And then some of it is [down to] actual horrible people. And I think it’s good to be aware of some of that.”

But even as Sarah spends between five and ten hours a week on the groups, she is careful not to let it colour her own personal approach. “I’ve always gone into dating without expectations,” she says. “But it has made me realise how disappointing dating is for a lot of women [and] that there’s more bad people out there than we tend to realise, because we all live in our little bubbles. You see constantly [in the group] that there’s everyday bad people who treat others wrong.”

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I can see why she is cautious about letting it affect her own dating life. The more I looked at the group, the more I noticed myself feeling less and less inclined to even try to meet someone. These strangers’ experiences compounded my own history and left me feeling as if the whole concept of sharing the most vulnerable parts of myself with another human was, quite simply, doomed. Sharing knowledge is powerful and important and yes, Are We Dating the Same Guy? lays bare many of the problems with dating in the age of technology – but it offers little in the way of actual solutions.

It is addictive, though, peering into other people’s lives like this. People like me lurk in the groups, keeping an eye on the stories without offering our own, reading through hundreds of comments of advice without anything to add. Whenever I open Facebook, which is maybe twice a week now, there are hundreds of new posts to scroll through, each with a story of something gone wrong. It can begin to feel as though dating in 2023 is in a state of complete disrepair; among the genuinely distressing stories there are also women posting to say, is there something wrong with me? Why can’t I even get a date?

The problem is much bigger than the mere existence of these informal, self-governed networks, though. The advent of app-dating has made sport – and big business – out of the people who offer our hearts up to strangers, strangers who sometimes turn out to be looking for a mark, a crutch, a parent or a punching bag. These groups can be uncomfortable, often they descend into bickering and in-fighting as conflicting opinions emerge, but that doesn’t negate the need for their existence. Women have always used their social networks as a way to send warnings and attempt to stay safe – from folk tales, to gossip, to private Google documents about bad men. The sheer number of women in these groups (London alone has 72,000 members at the time of writing) points to a continuing need for them today.

Are We Dating the Same Guy? doesn’t solve the issues with dating in the technological age and it certainly doesn’t make me feel great about it, but women talking to each other is not the problem: the culture that makes it easy to behave badly is. For now, I find them a net positive, arming us with knowledge, advice and caution as we advance through the world of dating. They mean that your heart can be open, and that you can trust more than just your gut.