Utah Woman Realized The Man She Was On A Date With Is Engaged, So She Took To Social Media To Find & Alert His Fiancé
The date was going great until she saw who was calling his phone — and she became determined to expose him.
TikTok Dating is rife with pitfalls, but for one woman on TikTok who recently met a new guy, everything seemed to be going perfectly—until, suddenly, it very much wasn't.
A woman used social media to expose a man she dated after she discovered he was engaged.
The TikToker, Katelyn, had posted about meeting the guy, whom she called Jonathan, during a recent shopping trip and was excited to go on a date with him. When one of her followers asked for an update, she exposed just exactly how the date went, and ended up exposing his infidelity in the process.
Her date got several calls from his fiancé while they were out together. In responding to a follower who asked about her date, Katelyn posted a message for V, the woman she discovered Jonathan was engaged to.
"If you're from Salt Lake City, Utah," Katelyn began her video, "and your name starts with a V and you're dating a guy or are married to a guy named Jonathan, he is cheating on you and I just went on a date with him."
She then provided more identifying details, like how Jonathan's phone screen saver was a picture of his fiancé and her name in his phone contained two heart emojis. Her video quickly went viral on TikTok as people shared her story to expose Jonathan's dishonesty. And once she posted how she and Jonathan met, he began to sound even shadier.
The TikToker was excited to go out with the man, as she hadn't been on a date in a long time.
They met while she was shopping at Walmart, "and just instantly started connecting," she said. He never mentioned being in a relationship, but noted that "we were in the makeup aisle when we met," which she now finds "a little suspicious." After all, what is the average straight guy doing in the makeup aisle in the first place unless he's trying to pick up women?
She said that there wasn't "a single red flag" at the time, until they got on their date and his phone kept ringing. After he went to the bathroom and left his phone behind, Katelyn took a look, and that's when she discovered what was obviously a wife or significant other named V's missed calls on the screen.
When he got back from the bathroom, she told him, "V called you," and that's when she knew he was cheating. "He turned white," she said, and immediately began claiming it was just a friend who called him. She didn't buy it, and neither did anyone else on social media who immediately began helping Katelyn track V down.
The TikToker is part of a growing trend of women exposing cheaters on social media and using it to warn other women about toxic men.
People have long used social media to cheat on their partners, but now many women are turning the tables.
"There's a Facebook group called are we dating the same guy Utah," one woman on TikTok commented on Katelyn's video, urging her to "post this there!"
Indeed, there is a Facebook group for just that—and it's not just the one group, either. There's also a group for Northern Utah and a group for the Salt Lake City metro area, in case you want to get more granular in your research. And there are "Are we dating the same guy" Facebook groups for scores of other areas too, many of them focusing on large cities like Los Angeles, Toronto and Chicago.
But the problem of two-timing, toxic men in the dating pool is apparently such a problem that even sparsely populated geographical swathes have their own groups, such as the "Are we dating the same guy Northern Lower Peninsula, Michigan?" Facebook group, which covers a huge area with a population of just a half-million people.
Many of the groups started after the infamous "West Elm Caleb" incident on TikTok, in which multiple women discovered they'd all dated the same New York City West Elm employee, and all had the same deeply toxic experience with him.
In the end, the TikToker did end up finding her date's partner on social media—and this isn't the first time he's cheated.
It didn't even take that long for Katelyn and her fellow TikTok sleuths to expose Jonathan's infidelity on social media—only about 24 hrs. In a follow-up video, Katelyn revealed part of her conversation with V.
V reported that Jonathan has cheated on her in the past and that she had suspected he was cheating again when the incident with Katelyn was brought to light. And she was grateful to Katelyn and everyone else on TikTok who worked to expose her cheating boyfriend—whom she was on the verge of marrying.
"She asked me to thank you guys for helping spread this video," Katelyn reported, and that she is "so grateful she can finally get out of this relationship and we saved her from a horrible marriage." Exposing cheaters on social media may be messy—and maybe a little inappropriate, depending on your sensibilities. But in this case it seems to have saved the day.
For her part, Katelyn chalked up her efforts to help other women through an all-too-common experience. "We've all been through a breakup and we've all been cheated on," she said, "so we know exactly how it feels."
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.