23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Cosmopolitan
What TikTok's Date With Me Trend Really Says About Modern Dating
It has come to my attention that there's a new TikTok dating trend afoot. It has also come to my attention that everybody hates it. Just kidding—considering the platform's 'Date With Me' trend currently boasts millions of views, it's tough to say it's anything but popular. But while it may have inspired countless daters to broadcast the ups and downs of their dating lives before the internet, elsewhere, the response to the trend has been what we might call skeptical.
Explainers from Well + Good and Essence question the ethics of dating for content vs. dating for love, inviting experts to weigh in on whether dating with a virtual audience in mind is the best way to foster meaningful connections with the real-life people you're actually on a date with. Taking a less subtle approach, a recent Dear Media headline simply insists that the Date With Me trend 'Needs to Go. Immediately.'
It's not exactly shocking that people have grievances to air re: something they saw online—that's what the internet is for. But what is it about this genre of TikTok dating content, specifically, that seems to be rubbing people the wrong way? Here's what the experts have to say.
Like 'Get Ready With Me' videos or any other 'Come With Me' content that invites viewers to follow along as a creator, well, does a thing, Date With Me videos feature TikTokers taking their followers along with them on a date. These posts may include pre-date GRWM-style prep, actual clips from the date itself, mid-date bathroom updates, and post-date debriefs. While less common, some creators even livestream their dates in real time.
Not unlike the 'Loud Breakup' trend that has creators hard-launching heartbreak and giving viewers a first-person POV into their post-breakup grief and recovery, 'Date With Me' is meant to provide an intimate look into the ups and downs of someone else's love life—but instead of the end of a relationship, this trend chronicles the (potential) beginning of one.
For both viewers and creators of 'Date With Me' content, a big part of the appeal seems to be in feeling less alone, says dating coach Grace Lee, founder of A Good First Date. 'On the surface, dating may seem fun and lighthearted, but for many people it's scary. Sharing these experiences, especially the bad ones, can soften the blow.'
Essentially, dating is hard, and creating and consuming this kind of content 'can provide a level of connection and solidarity around how difficult it can be to navigate the dating playing field,' says psychologist and relationship coach Sarah Hensley, PhD, founder of The Love Doc. Not to mention, going on a date with content creation in mind can make even bad dates feel worth one's while. Sure, maybe you're not leaving with a boyfriend or even a second date, but at least you're leaving with new material. And in the age of dating burnout, it certainly doesn't hurt to have some extra incentive to not bail on that Tinder date.
Of course, that's where much of the skepticism this trend has aroused stems from—the idea that people are taking an intimate, personal, vulnerable experience and exploiting it for content. As dating coach Blaine Anderson, founder of Dating By Blaine notes, 'when a date becomes content, it risks shifting the focus from chemistry to clicks, and when views are a top priority, what we're seeing no longer depicts a genuine, organic experience.' This dynamic can also 'create a power imbalance' if your date isn't a content creator themselves and 'doesn't want to be treated as content currency,' Anderson adds.
I think it's fair to say it's pretty obvious that creating content from a date—particularly while on said date—is probably not going to yield the most intimate of romantic connections in most cases. I think it's also fair to suggest that Date With Me's detractors are less concerned with the trend's efficacy as a successful relationship-forging strategy than they are irked by the ways in which it reflects and reinforces some of the top-line ills thought to be plaguing the state of modern dating.
In an age of dating app burnout and loneliness epidemics, the idea that people are craving authentic, real-life connections—particularly in their love lives—has become an increasingly common refrain. It's only natural that trends like Date With Me, which take a real, in-person experience and put it back behind a screen, would be met with frustration at a time when unfiltered, unedited, actually lived experiences may feel harder to come by.
This frustration is only further compounded by the somewhat paradoxical nature of this content, in which creators offer a supposedly vulnerable, authentic look inside their dating lives that is, ultimately and inevitably, still a performance they are putting on for their followers.
'It's vulnerability meeting performance, authentic connection meeting curated content,' says Anderson. 'This trend makes dating feel both more exposed and more performative than ever, and it shows how blurred the lines have become between our personal lives and public personas.'
Of course, this is nothing artists of all mediums haven't grappled with for centuries—the inability to ever capture the essential truth of a lived experience in a creative representation of it, the question of what it means to live authentically when one is creating from that life, the possibility that art may always involve some degree of artifice. With TikTok, the veil between the lived and the represented has simply become thinner and the time it takes to turn reality into content continues to rapidly condense. And the fear, I suppose—one that ultimately has relatively little to do with dating—is that eventually there will cease to be a difference between them at all.
For now though, there is still a real world we are free to experience and date in without the filter of the internet. So if you want to have an authentic experience with another human being in real life, you can do that! And if you don't want to see other people who are doing the opposite of that, all you have to do is not look at TikTok. Easy, right? (JK—that's obviously impossible.)
