The Carrie Bradshaws of TikTok

The first time Molly Rutter’s followers accused her of being “rage bait” (that is, someone who posts something online exclusively to make people angry), she was about to go on a date with a finance bro. He was younger — 23 to her 32 — but offered to help with her taxes. Then, in a familiar twist to anyone who has ever used a dating app, he ghosted. Yet Rutter’s audience decided she was the one at fault: In comments sections, in the tabloid media, and in other TikToks, she was called desperate, unhinged, and even, bizarrely, a “pedophile” for dating someone younger and for being willing to trust an internet stranger with her financial information. “It’s just so funny to me,” she says now, months later. “People have latched onto this caricature of me: someone who doesn’t give a shit about what anyone thinks to the point that she’s self-destructive, doesn’t care about other people, is emotionally unstable.” This, however, is precisely the caricature that has made Rutter, a former teacher and now full-time content creator in Buffalo, New York, so fascinating to a growing and devoted following of 85,000 people who obsessively watch her videos. Like a modern-day Carrie Bradshaw — if scene-y nightclubs were replaced with Hinge and the glittering lights of Manhattan with snowy upstate — Rutter has built a budding career off juicy, detailed posts about what it’s like to be on the dating market in 2024. And much like viewers of Sex and the City, the fans aren’t always on her side. [Media: https://www.tiktok.com/@mollyerutter/video/7394138389206912286?] TikTok is full of Bradshaw protégés right now: women — mostly in their 20s and 30s, and mostly those who date men — who have used the platform as their personal dating diary, captivating millions of viewers in multi-part sagas about men with their own nicknames, like “dangly earrings,” “five date guy,” or “Mr. America.” Their content feels like FaceTiming with your most endearingly chaotic single friend, the one you root for even when they miss the glaring red flags. They also provide a refreshingly hopeful perspective on an otherwise bleak subject. The media is currently awash in heterosexual dating horror stories: The major dating apps are, we’re told, in their flop era, prioritizing the money they can gouge from users by paywalling their most attractive users over the business of actual matchmaking. Women are weeping on TikTok, exhausted after years of trying and failing to find a decent partner; others are going “boysober” and taking extended breaks from sex and dating. There’s a sense that dating these days is worse in every possible way than it was in the golden age of yore, even though nobody can quite put their finger on when, exactly, that was. Yet all of the dating diaries TikTokers I spoke to believed the opposite. “I’m kind of, like, delusionally optimistic about things, so I would say that dating is better than ever,” says Anne Marie Hagerty, a 28-year-old founder of a production company in New York City. “We have so many more options. You can go out and about and meet people, you can be on dating apps. We have social media. You have so much more education about how to be emotionally healthy, therapy, and [how to] be a good partner. That’s one reframe on the dating conversation that I think is pretty important.” Hagerty’s videos gained traction in early 2023 when she recounted the story of meeting a guy at a wedding and immediately feeling as though she’d found her perfect match, despite the fact that, at the time, he had a girlfriend. Months later, she posted a video titled, “POV: getting ready for a first date(?!) w person you think is your soulmate,” since she wasn’t sure if he was single yet. The date — and it was, in fact, a date — was “the best first date of my life,” she wrote on a video immediately afterward, adding that it felt like she was falling in love. The man, nicknamed in her content as “soulmate first date,” soon became her boyfriend. Her commenters didn’t necessarily see it that way. “Honestly the whole thing sounds like a red flag,” wrote one. Said another: “Run.” After their eventual breakup, Hagerty says that her viewers may have picked up on something she hadn’t. “They called our breakup months before it happened,” she says. “The comments about him were always not very nice, and they ended up being true.” [Media: https://www.tiktok.com/@annemariehagerty/video/7301316456757710126] But that kind of real-time feedback isn’t always welcome. Last fall, when Hagerty planned a surprise helicopter ride for a man who thought they were only going for coffee, people ridiculed her with sexist jokes and for “treat[ing] him like the princess he is.” “It’s the cost of doing business,” says Hagerty of the rude comments. But, she says, “I’m probably a chronic oversharer, but I’m also a storyteller at heart.” That’s part of why her content is so appealing: “It’s a lot of living vicariously as you would with a TV show, but TikTok is way more intimate,” she says. Wisdom Sinclaire, a Chicago-based 24-year-old who works in data analytics for a housing nonprofit, occasionally gets heat for dating multiple men at the same time and supposedly being a “gold digger” (sexism is often a theme in the negative reactions). Overwhelmingly, though, her comments are from either young women who feel grateful that she’s normalizing the idea of dating around, or from older women who tell her they wish they had done the same in their 20s. “I’m a girl who wants to get married eventually, I want to have kids eventually,” says Sinclaire. “But in my 20s, I think it’s really important that I learn what I like and what I don’t like, and if I just settle down for the first guy who makes me smile and laugh, I might be missing out on so much more happiness. So of course I’m going to go out and date and meet as many new people as I can, and I feel like a lot of women should do that.” [Media: https://www.tiktok.com/@wisdomsinclaire/video/7393792077894520106] Rutter’s fanbase, like most TikTokers’, includes people who watch her with some level of either schadenfreude or not-exactly-kind voyeurism. She tends to have a plucky attitude toward her haters — “I always respond to people when they think I’m insane. I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m cuckoo bananas!’” she says. But recently, someone leaked her Hinge profile on the snark subreddit devoted to making fun of her. The replies were so cruel — mostly criticizing her for supposedly “catfishing” by including older photos — that Rutter deleted her dating apps. Sometimes, the criticism comes from the suitors themselves. All of the TikTokers I talked to had dealt with dates who were staunchly against the idea of being mentioned online, even anonymously and even though the creators took care to obscure their identities and faces. “I know for certain there are probably men who have not gone on a second date with me because of my social media. And to that I say, good riddance,” says Rutter. “This is my job. I recognize that doing what I do is going to limit my options. It’s way more socially acceptable to be a teacher than it is to be an influencer on TikTok. But I’m not meant to be with those people who aren’t comfortable with it.” One of her recent dates — a British man on a trip to the US whom Rutter drove two hours to meet — was so upset that he asked her to delete the video she’d already posted of herself getting ready that morning. “I told him I wouldn’t [delete the videos] because I stand by the fact that there’s nothing revealing about you on there,” she explains. “What I didn’t tell him was that I had already gone really viral for those videos, and I looked at the amount of money I was going to make, and I was like, ‘No way are you taking away $500 from me.’” Rutter’s dating diaries are now her livelihood: She recently quit her job teaching at a private elementary school because she was earning thousands more from TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program, which allows eligible users to earn cash for views, than she was from her salaried position (parents had also complained to the school about her videos, even though she says she never violated its social media policy). She’s also found success on Cameo, the app that allows you to book personalized video messages from celebrities and influencers. In less than two weeks, Rutter says she’s booked 50 of them at $20 apiece. Michelle Knutson, a 30-year-old realtor living on a rural ranch outside Nashville, found that posting about her dating life has come with other pleasant surprises. She hasn’t made money or found a partner, but she’s met some of her best friends through the platform, women who related to her approach to dating — that is, waiting to find someone who is truly additive to her already-great life — as many of their peers were settling down with husbands and kids. [Media: https://www.tiktok.com/@michelleknutson/video/7389044040341179694] Knutson guesses that the reason so many women (and the vast majority of dating diaries’ viewers are women) find her content so compelling is that it’s a huge break from the way influencers typically post. “You know what to post when you get pregnant: It’s going to be your gender reveal, your nursery haul, the names you loved but didn’t choose — it’s this cadence people are familiar with. It’s highly consumed content, but it’s very guarded and very curated,” she says. “I think the fact that I’m saying, ‘This is the date I went on and I blew it,’ or ‘this was embarrassing,’ people see themselves in that mirror of like, ‘Oh, I do that too, but I would never share that on the internet.’” Hagerty says that when she began posting about dating, her audience shifted older to women in their 30s to 50s. “If you’re married, the dating content is interesting because it’s like, ‘What’s happening out there these days?’ Then if you’re single, you’re empathizing, and you’re like, ‘How are we navigating the scene?’” she says. For Rutter, the answer to why she shares such an intimate part of her life — and opens herself up to harsh judgment at times — is much more personal. “Because of my body composition, I think it can be really lovely and inspiring for people to see someone being so unapologetic and confident. It can also be equally as uncomfortable for someone to see someone that confident,” she says. “It’s almost as though [people think], ‘She shouldn’t be this confident because of her body. Dating should be harder for her.’” Now that content creation is her full-time job, Rutter is steeling for even more scrutiny from her commenters, Reddit, and the rest of the internet. But it hasn’t stopped her: She’s already planning a podcast, writing a children’s book, and dreaming about someday being a professional speaker or, if the stars align, a stint on a dating reality TV show. A soul mate? That’d be nice — as long as he’s cool with the camera.