TikTok infidelity
Is your partner cheating?
These TikTokers think you should know! Garnering millions of views, cheating content is taking over TikTok. But is our obsession with infidelity warping our reality?
‘I’m not usually the type to DM someone out of the blue, but you’re sooo hot,’ Madeline taps out. She’s fully scoped out this guy’s profile: photos of him out with the boys? Check. Selfies in the gym mirror? Check. A potential other half splashed across his page? Nowhere to be seen – the only girl in photos with him is his sister. On the face of it, it looks like her target is single. Instagram DM slides are a common occurrence in dating nowadays, so she goes for it, wondering if he’ll take the bait…
Fast-forward a few hours (and flirty exchanges) later, and Madeline has exactly what she came for. The man has invited her out for drinks, even suggesting to ‘see where the night takes us’. But the truth is she has no intention of going on a date with him. Instead, she screenshots the entire conversation – and the unsolicited photos he sent over – and sends them to his wife, who she’s been talking to for days. She promptly blocks him and, with his wife’s permission, exposes him to her 159k TikTok followers.
The sun is out, and the girl that’s popped up on your feed is loving it. With her cat-eye sunglasses on and her plastic glass of wine in hand, she’s dancing in a crowd, smiling into her front-facing camera as dance music blares in the background. It seems like this is a standard ‘look how much fun I’m having at a festival!’-style post, but then you read the words plastered on top of it. ‘If this is ur boyfriend at tomorrowland vip he was making out with my gf for 20 minutes & then when she asked for his instagram he said no bc he has a gf but its okay bc its “tomorrowland”.’ It turns out we’re not meant to be looking at the girl (the creator of the video), we’re supposed to be looking at the man behind her, sunglasses planted firmly on his head, sipping on a drink.
In the caption is a call to action – help to find his girlfriend and expose him. You click on the comments and discover that the video has reached Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Sweden; 3.7 million people around the world have seen it. We reached out to the creator of the video to see what happened next, but she never responded.
Videos like this, where people are filmed in crowds seemingly cheating (usually at festivals, or on holiday), are now common on TikTok. There are other iterations, too – take the filming of an (if you’re lucky) unrecognisable bathroom, captioned, ‘If this is your bathroom, I just slept with your boyfriend.’ Or the women leaving unused sanitary towels in bins, or false nails on bathroom floors, all claiming to be supporting the ‘sisterhood’ by exposing cheating boyfriends. Then there are the profes
