Imagine the time, heartache, and cute date night outfits single women could save if they could read the reviews on men before going out with them? Well, there’s now an app for that…but can we trust it? For weeks, social media has been ablaze about the Tea Dating Advice app: a forum that helps women vet men by sourcing ratings from other women who have dated or know them. The app also enables you to run reverse image searches to see if you’re being catfished, complete full background checks, and verify whether or not a person is on sex offender registries. On the surface, it sounds like a great resource for women to do their homework before that first date. But according to two dating experts, the tea on the Tea app may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
To see what all the fuss was about, I downloaded the app and waited a full two weeks for my access to be granted. I immediately started swiping through the selection of men that were served up in my feed. They were of all different ages, races, and from random cities within a 100-mile radius. As a user, you can anonymously submit the photo of a possible suitor you’re interested in getting a deep dive on, or you can search their name to see if they’ve already been rated and reviewed (trust me, this part gets messy!). The app uses a red flag/green flag rating system to help women weed out toxic men or determine if a guy is a catch.
Considering that I live in a small city, I didn’t expect to find anyone I knew. Nonetheless, I typed in the names of some fairly recent exes to see if the app would yield any revealing “tea.” Since you can’t search last names, I started with exes of mine who had unique names, thinking they’d have a higher probability of being found. No luck! Before calling it quits, I typed in the name of a guy that I briefly dated last year (let’s call him John). Boom—there he was…with a rating of 19 red flags! I felt a wave of dread wash over me as I clicked to see what had been written about him, but I was anything but shocked. John and I were short-lived. In the end, I found him immature, insensitive, and someone I couldn’t trust. Our courtship fizzled out drama-free, but a user claiming to be his ex-girlfriend had a different story to tell. This user alleged that she and John were together for years, and that they bought a multi-family home together. Eventually, he cheated, got another woman pregnant, and left her high and dry with the mortgage. Yikes!
While reading this horrifying tale, I was startled by a pop-up message warning me that my allotted number of five free searches had run out, and that unlimited snooping could be had for the bargain subscription price of $14.99 per month. As it turns out, most of the app’s useful features, including the built-in background check, sex offender map, criminal record search, and reverse image search, are behind the Tea app’s pay wall. After just 30 minutes sipping on this long-awaited “tea,” I was left feeling parched. I felt unfulfilled by this idea of surveilling men from my past, but I admit, I can’t imagine how devastating the news about John would’ve been if he and I were actively pursuing a relationship. Therein lies the question: If you experience nothing but “green flags” with a man you’re dating, would a review like this from his ex stop you in your tracks? Should it?
Dating coach Anwar White acknowledges that the app’s existence indicates a larger issue with the dating pool. “If women are going to an app to understand the real deal about men, then we are in an even greater dating depression than we may think that we’re in,” says White. “It means that a lot of men are misrepresenting themselves [and] there is a lot of potential abuse and scary situations for women.”
Ultimately, though, White sees a deeper underlying issue: “A lot of women don’t know how to properly vet men.”
“I think that women are conditioned and programmed to give people the benefit of the doubt and to quell anything that comes up in their bodies,” he further explains. “You might be in an elevator and a man comes in, and your body tells you, ‘This man is dangerous,’ but then your mind will tell you, ‘He’s just a man. Why am I doing that?’ There are so many ways in which women are programmed not to trust their intuition. And I think that’s especially the case for Black women.”
Dating expert and entrepreneur Chika Uwazie shared similar sentiments, saying that the vetting process in dating should start with your discernment and not an app. “I understand the premise of why the Tea app was created, but I also feel like as women, we have to do that inner work of listening to ourselves,” she says. “I just feel like when you start to see red flags or things like that don’t add up, instead of asking the whole world, leave. There’s another man out there for you that you don’t have to do all these things with.”
In addition to using your inner compass to sleuth out the bad apples, Uwazie encourages women to take stock of how a man shows up for you. “I tell women to look for consistency, look for how he treats others. All of that will tell you what type of man this person is,” she says.
Since the uptick in the Tea app’s popularity, there have been copycat apps popping up like TeaOnHer—a rival app designed for men. White predicts there’s a world in which apps like this will devolve into platforms for mud slinging. “A lot of people get their feelings hurt while dating and want to try to regain control of the situation by talking shit,” he says bluntly. “It’s just like if I went to a bank and I didn’t like the attitude or the tone that the teller gave me. I can go on to Google reviews and give a shitty review. It’s the same. Now, am I saying that what people are putting on this app is not true? No, it’s true to them, but it might not be the full truth.” White adds that, unlike Google reviews, there’s no opportunity for the person being reviewed to respond or give their interpretation of the relationship, which creates an unfair representation.
The idea of writing Yelp-ish reviews for men is nothing new. This concept has been done before by private social media with groups like Are We Dating The Same Guy on Facebook, which has since received a slew of defamation lawsuits. The Tea app has already encountered the same fate, as it’s already been hit with several class action lawsuits following two data breaches.
“The app will be gone sooner than we know it,” says White. Uwazie, who also works in the tech space, thinks it will take a lot more violations for Apple to step in and shut the app down, but believes it’ll start to mimic the Lipstick Alleys of the world. “I don’t think it’s going to be a game-changing app.” Nevertheless, she doesn’t think we’ve seen the last of dating forums like this, and that people will ultimately make their own decisions whether the information they find about a potential bae is positive or negative. “I don’t think it’s solving anything.”
So, is the Tea app really an empowering dating tool? It depends on who you ask. While I applaud the app’s mission of rallying women together to protect one another, I don’t think compromising my personal data was worth finding out what I already knew. The app has a strict anti-bullying policy, and states that you can’t make fun of men or you could face banishment from the app. From first glance, I can see that these rules aren’t being strictly enforced. I read some cringeworthy reviews on everything from men’s baby mama issues to their penis sizes. As a first-time user, it was hard to distinguish fact from fiction. This, coupled with the never-ending privacy concerns, is one of the reasons I’d probably tell my friends to use official background checks over the platform.
As a dating coach who develops strategies to help women get their guy, White thinks women will be better off fine-tuning their inner trust. “Women have a beautiful, and I would say even stronger, intuition than men have. We have to start trusting that. Start using that instead of using [your] brains, because our brains actually will find a solution or a story that we want, not what is true.” Uwazie echoes this idea, making it clear that the right men will leave little room for second-guessing. “The best way to know if a man is actually serious about you, is that you’ll never have to call me.”