TikTok Has a Problem

When a person joins an online-dating app, and then starts texting some of the people they've met on that app, and then makes plans to hang out with some of those people in the hopes of making out, they have a reasonable, limited expectation of privacy. Hardly anyone expects what happened to the mythological figure of "West Elm Caleb," a bumbling villain of the New York dating scene and hapless victim of the internet. In January, after a couple of New York women with substantial TikTok followings discovered that they had been dating Caleb simultaneously, it quickly came out that he was guilty of other crimes--sending the same Spotify playlist to multiple people, for instance, and not returning text messages. One woman recalled how he had told her that he found it harder to go on dates in the winter, because of the cold. Pretty soon brands were getting in on the West Elm Caleb conversation, as finding any excuse to talk about this pretty average dater in New York City became engagement-metric gold.