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Dear women of Are We Dating the Same Guy groups,
Please try to understand how these groups are affecting men — often innocent men who are no danger to anyone. Learning of what was posted about me was a huge strain on my mental health. I couldn’t stop thinking about how many people had seen it. I could not sleep well, and lost my appetite for months. I had to cry myself to sleep many nights. I was no longer present with my son, and couldn’t focus at work. I just couldn’t get over the fact that forty-thousand women in my community had a front row seat to it all. People I work with, my neighbors… would think those things she said about me were true. Every time a woman looked at me for more than a second I would turn my head in shame, thinking she probably read the post and recognized me. I left dating apps because any time I would match and have a good conversation going I would suddenly get ghosted, and would assume they read those things and believed them.
Imagine if the last toxic guy you dumped had slut-shamed and body-shamed you on a billboard in your city, which 30,000 people drive by on their way to work. Right there in front of everyone, just under your name and photo, he published humiliating and reputation-destroying things about you.
And there’s nothing you can do to get it taken down. When you complain about it, people say you must have done something to deserve it. That is how it feels for thousands of men who get posted in these groups.
I’m still paranoid that all the women at my work have seen it, and they’ll never look at me the same. The posts never go away unless by some miracle you get them taken down. They sit there as thousands more women join the groups every month. The chronic strain of not knowing who has seen it, and the chronic humiliation and shame wears you down after awhile. Worst of all is the helplessness. It put me in a dark place.
If not for being a father, I might have stayed there longer. Instead, I decided to make this website because I had to give myself some sort of agency. I needed some control in a situation over which I had no control, and no way to defend myself. I was being victimized by an abuser in a group that claims to protect victims from abusers. It made me feel bitter and angry.
I broke up with the woman who posted me because she was verbally and emotionally abusive, and because after awhile I allowed myself to respond angrily when it happened.
I tried hard to make it work because there were many things that I did like about her. I even found us a therapist, but she refused to go. On paper, it was a great match. In reality, I was constantly walking on egg shells, and would get berated and given the cold shoulder for days if I ever had the audacity to decline sex – even when I had Covid. Her rejection rage was intense. Despite the fact that we had (great) sex almost every time we were together, on the rare occasions when I wasn’t in the mood she’d say things like “I could literally go to any bar in town and find a guy who wants to have sex with me within ten minutes, and here I am with a boyfriend who doesn’t even want to fuck me!“
Imagine not being allowed to say no to sex. I’m sure you can. I started getting angry about it toward the end. It also made me distrustful. The relationship was not conducive to the man I wanted to be, so I ended it.
A year and a half later she was still trying to get me to come over to her house. After I declined several times that rejection rage, which ruined our relationship in the first place, caused her to post pages worth of the most horrific, humiliating and reputation destroying lies, half-truths-twisted facts, exaggerations and insinuations about me, along with a lot of very personal things that she had no right to publish on the internet.
The irony is that a good man is now removed from the dating pool, while all I hear from women are how there aren’t any decent guys out there. I have never physically harmed a woman in my life. I have never so much as coerced a woman, let alone something worse. I don’t cheat. It is about the lowest thing you can do to someone you claim to care about. No matter how you look at it, I did not deserve to be posted. And yet I was, and in a very damaging way. Yet I hear, over and over again, that if you didn’t do anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about. Riiiiight.
What is an acceptable ratio of innocent men having their reputations, mental health, romantic lives and even livelihoods ruined by vindictive exes – compared to posts about men who really are cheaters or abusers? The only morally acceptable answer is NONE.
It’s easy to say the end justifies the means when you aren’t the means. Men are human beings too, and we deserve the right to know what we’re being accused of, and to defend ourselves.
These aren’t just text message groups between friends. These are reputation killing mass broadcast platforms ripe for abuse with next to zero oversight.
Please consider leaving all of these groups. Think about what they’ve brought into your life, and what they’ve brought into innocent men’s lives. Think about wether they’re actually helping, or hurting our already difficult dating experiences. If you find there is just too much collateral damage, I hope you will make the right decision. Then maybe we can talk about what comes next.
End AWDTSG 